As more women enter the work force and assume management positions in corporations, increasing attention is being given to employment diversity. In addition, studies suggest that females have more propensity for ethics than males. However, these results may be debatable and limited data are available to substantiate these claims or assess gender differences among employees. Ethics codes can aid in supporting policies and enhancing corporate diversity. To assist one company in the development of an ethics code, a survey of 4005 (...) employees in one U.S. corporation was conducted to ascertain their opinions of the ethical environment of the company. The survey used the Ethics Environment Questionnaire (EEQ), consisting of twenty items on a 5-point Likert-type scale; reliability on Cronbach's alpha was 0.94. Response rate was 50%, with the sample paralleling the population in proportion of males and females. Respondents reported a profile of 3.18 out of the high of 5.0, but with several significant differences between the male and female employees, including differences on education and position. Males were more in agreement than females that the firm had an ethical environment. On some items, however, males and females were in strong agreement. Comparisons to prior studies were drawn, including suggestions for ways corporations could use an ethics survey to tailor in-service training, enhance diversity in the work force, and support the development of an ethics code. (shrink)

_Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory_ takes on the claims of philosophical situationism, the ethical theory that is skeptical about the possibility of human virtue. Influenced by social psychological studies, philosophical situationists argue that human personality is too fluid and fragmented to support a stable set of virtues. They claim that virtue cannot be grounded in empirical psychology. This book argues otherwise. Drawing on the work of psychologists Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, Nancy E. Snow argues that (...) the social psychological experiments that philosophical situationists rely on look at the wrong kinds of situations to test for behavioral consistency. Rather than looking at situations that are objectively similar, researchers need to compare situations that have similar meanings _for the subject_. When this is done, subjects exhibit behavioral consistencies that warrant the attribution of enduring traits, and virtues are a subset of these traits. Virtue can therefore be empirically grounded and virtue ethics has nothing to fear from philosophical situationism. (shrink)

The import of Petrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. As a primary canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a Renaissance mode. Petrarch absorbed a complex network of descriptive strategies and then presented a single, transformed model. In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation and the internalization of woman's "image" by both men and women can scarcely be (...) overemphasized. When late-Renaissance theorists, poets, and painters represented woman's body, Petrarch's verse justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover, extended beyond scholarly consideration to courtly conversation, beyond the treatise on beauty to the after-dinner game in celebration of it. The descriptive codes of others, both ancients and contemporaries, were, of course, not ignored, but the "scattered rhymes" undeniably enjoyed a privileged status: they informed the Renaissance norm of a beautiful woman.1· 1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," see. Elizabeth Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style," Art Bulletin 58 1976): 374-94.Nancy Vickers is an assistant professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. She has published articles on Dante and Petrarch and has recently completed a book, The Anatomy of Beauty: Woman's Body and Renaissance Blazon. (shrink)

Despite recognition of the gender dimensions of climate change, there is little attention to racism in climate justice perspectives. In response, this article advocates developing an ecologically informed intersectional approach designed to disclose the ways racism contributes to the construction of illegible lives in the domain of climate policies and practices. Differential impacts of climate change, while an important dimension, is ultimately inadequate to understanding and responding to both climate justice and environmental racism. What is required is a rich understanding (...) of the histories and lineages of the deep incorporation of racism and environmental exploitation. To catalyze such an approach to climate justice, this article develops an analysis of three instances of the intermingling of racism and environmental exploitation: climate adaptation practices in Lagos, Nigeria; the enmeshment of race and coal mining in the post–Civil War United States; and the infusing of precarity and rainforest destruction in Brazil. (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement in research is valuable for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Despite existing guidance on how to ensure meaningful CE, much of what it takes to achieve this goal differs across settings. Considering the emerging trend towards mandating CE in many research studies, this study aimed at documenting how CE is conceptualized and implemented, and then providing context-specific guidance on how researchers and research regulators in Uganda could think about and manage CE in research.MethodsWe conducted qualitative interviews and focus group (...) discussions involving forty-one respondents who were experienced in HIV/aids biomedical research involving CE. Thirty-eight of these were directly or indirectly associated with Uganda’s leading research institution in the field of HIV/aids. They included Principal Investigators, Community Liaisons Officers, Research Ethics Committee members and Community Advisory Board Members. Three respondents were from Uganda National Council for Science and Technology. Data were collected between August 2019 and August 2020, using audio-taped focus group discussions and key informant interviews, transcribed and analyzed manually to generate themes and subthemes.ResultsThree major themes emerged: goals or value of CE; the means of CE, and, the evaluation of CE. Goals or value of CE generated four subthemes representing the overarching goals of CE: Promote communities’ agency; Generate and sustain trust; Protect and promote communities’ rights and interests; and, Help studies optimize participation in the form of enrolment and retention of participants. What usually comes under the nomenclatures of methods, strategies, and approaches of CE, such as town-hall meetings, sports events, drama, and the like, should simply be understood as the means of CE, and it is not desirable to hold pre-conceived and fixed ideas about the best means to conduct CE in research since a lot depend on the context. Finally, the study found that despite CE’s critical importance, which suggests the need to track and evaluate it, CE is currently intermittently evaluated, and for inadequate motivations.ConclusionsExisting guidance on how to conduct robust CE in research is no substitute for creativity, flexibility, and reflexivity on the part of both researchers and research regulators. (shrink)

Genetic testing raises concerns that individuals will be denied health insurance (and thus, effectively, access to health care), or that employers will screen to eliminate potentially costly workers. Although we as a society do not yet concur on the degree to which private businesses have a responsibility to promote social justice, several different policy alternatives might allow us to weigh the interests of insurers, as businesses, against the interests of citizens in a responsible manner.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 802-808, September 2022.

Knowledge of causal laws is expensive and hard to come by. But we work hard to get it because we believe that it will reduce contingency in planning policies and in building new technologies: knowledge of causal laws allows us to predict reliably what the outcomes will be when we manipulate the factors cited as causes in those laws. Or do they? This paper will argue that causal laws have no special role here. As economists from JS Mill to Robert (...) Lucas and David Hendry stress, along recently with philosophers like James Woodward and Sandra Mitchell, they can do the job only if they are invariant under the manipulations proposed. But then, I shall argue, anything that is invariant under the proposed manipulations will do this job equally well. There seems to be nothing special about causal-law knowledge in and of itself that makes it particularly valuable for policy and technology prediction. What seems to matter is invariance alone, not causality. But what guarantees invariance and how do we know when it will obtain? Here certain kinds of causal laws do have a special place – those underwritten either by what I have called ‘nomological machines’ or by what I have called ‘capacities’. Capacities and nomological machines have a double virtue that makes them invaluable for policy planning. First, the causal laws they give rise to will be invariant so long as they obtain; and second, they typically have visible markers we can come to recognize that tell us when they obtain. The markers for nomological machines are shakier than those for capacities, though, since capacities are often tied to markers by well-established empirical laws. Capacities have their own drawback however, which is the final topic of this paper: the causal laws that are guaranteed by a capacity connect the obtaining (or triggering) of a capacity with its exercise. But Hume argued (mistakenly I suggest) that no distinction can be made between the obtaining of a power and its exercise. (shrink)

"Textual Reasoning" is the name a family of contemporary Jewish thinkers has given to its overlapping practices of Jewish philosophy and theology. This collection represents the most public expression to date of the shared work, over a period of 12 years, of this society of "textual reasoners." Although the movement of textual reasoning is diverse and pluriform, it is characterized at bottom by the pursuit of the claim that there are significant affinities between Jewish forms of reading and reasoning and (...) postmodern thought. These affinities are presently being pursued by scholars throughout Jewish studies, in fields such as Bible, Talmud, Midrash, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah and the Jewish penomenology of Rosenzweig and Levinas among others. As the essays here convey, the work of these scholars has stimulated a lively and creative re-engagement with the philosophical dimensions of Jewish texts and, even more, the textual dimensions of Jewish reasoning. In large part this new energy has come from a conception of the postmodern as a place where some of the most distinctive features of Jewish reasoning can be elucidated as well as challenged. Nancy Levene is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Williams College. Peter Ochs is Edgar M Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. (shrink)

Charlemagne's monogram -- Introduction -- The problem of consciousness -- The earliest vision -- Truth, being, and mind -- The Kehre -- The essence of truth -- The later Heidegger -- Reading Heidegger after Heidegger -- Being not a soul but the unmediated discovery of being.

In its examination of the intersection of ethics and ontology, Roman Ingarden’s philosophy bears a striking resemblance to the thought of the contemporaryFrench philosopher Alain Badiou. Though no formal influence is claimed, this paper explores several ways in which Badiou’s theory of the event and existential agency is foreshadowed in the writings of Ingarden. In so doing, the author suggests the continued importance of this unjustly neglected philosopher for contemporary thinking on questions of value.

This volume is an interdisciplinary exploration of the modalities, meanings, and practices of silence in contemporary social discourse. How is silence treated in different cultures? In a globalized world, how is silence managed between and across cultures? Co-authored by a philosopher and an economist, the text draws on interviews with scholars and practitioners in fields as diverse as marine biology and African American history. International case studies are presented in operational contexts from the Black Lives Matter movement to the creation (...) of art installations to the struggles of transgender people in Southeast Asia. The authors examine the relationship between ethics and silence, and suggest strategies to transform social praxis through greater attention to silence. (shrink)

This essay delineates the contributions of feminist critiques of science to contemporary reconstructions of empiricism. I argue that three central tenets arise from feminist attention to the dynamics of gender and oppression in the theories and methods of science: 1) a rejection of the science/politics dichotomy; 2) an acknowledgement of the epistemic import of subjective components of knowledge; and 3) a reconfiguration of the subject of knowledge. These three tenets are illustrated and supported through examples from the history of science.

This collects some of the remarks made at the 2016 Pacific APA Memorial session for Patrick Suppes and Jaakko Hintikka. The full list of speakers on behalf of these two philosophers: Dagfinn Follesdal; Dana Scott; Nancy Cartwright; Paul Humphreys; Juliet Floyd; Gabriel Sandu; John Symons.

One could not ask for two more rigorous readers than Robert Neville and Terry Godlove, both brilliant scholars in their own right. I am very honored by the attention they have given to my work, and challenged by their various proposals to relieve me of my errors. My reply to their searching questions will consider seven topics, which I will take up in the form of further questions. Each topic has proven to be fairly enduring in the modern philosophy of (...) religion. In conclusion, I will briefly consider the topic of the future of philosophy of religion. Neville thinks contingency does not go all the way down like the tortoises in the fable about what holds the world up. (There’s another version that uses.. (shrink)

_Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes _features the work of feminist scholars who are centrally engaged with Hobbes’s ideas and texts and who view Hobbes as an important touchstone in modern political thought. Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, history, political theory, and English literature who embrace diverse theoretical and philosophical approaches and a range of feminist perspectives, this interdisciplinary collection aims to appeal to an audience of Hobbes scholars and nonspecialists alike. As a theorist whose trademark is a (...) compelling argument for absolute sovereignty, Hobbes may seem initially to have little to offer twenty-first-century feminist thought. Yet, as the contributors to this collection demonstrate, Hobbesian political thought provides fertile ground for feminist inquiry. Indeed, in engaging Hobbes, feminist theory engages with what is perhaps the clearest and most influential articulation of the foundational concepts and ideas associated with modernity: freedom, equality, human nature, authority, consent, coercion, political obligation, and citizenship. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Joanne Boucher, Karen Detlefsen, Karen Green, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Jane S. Jaquette, S. A. Lloyd, Su Fang Ng, Carole Pateman, Gordon Schochet, Quentin Skinner, and Susanne Sreedhar. (shrink)

Only when students feel engaged both socially and academically can schools and teachers lay the groundwork to motivate achievement. This volume, the fifth in the _Harvard Education Letter _Spotlight series, brings together fifteen seminal articles that examine research and practice on these complex and interrelated issues. Foreword by Sam M. Intrator, associate professor of education and of the Program in Urban Studies at Smith College and codirector of Smith’s Urban Education Initiative. Contributors include: Michael Bitz, James Paul Gee, Pedro A. (...) Noguera, Laura Pappano, George Sugai, and Richard Weissbourd. (shrink)