Aspects of the Japanese human resources management system are discussed to illustrate the underly ing significance of human values in Japanese organizational management, with a particular aspect of Japanese human resource management used as an illustrative case. Relevant literature is reviewed to introduce the relational Japanese management and human resources management (HRM) systems, and to explain the system of inter-firm employee transfer within the corporate group known as the 'shukko' system. The paper then discusses various impacts of this HRM practice (...) upon major stakehold ers and identifies otherwise redundant employees as major beneficiaries of the system, thereby demon strating that human values are critical to the conceptualization and application of Japanese human resources management practices. (shrink)

CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BRAIN SELF-REGULATION PARADOX The relationship of consciousness to biology has intrigued mankind thoroughout recorded history. However, little progress has been made not only in understanding these issues but also in raising fundamental questions central to the problem. As Davidson and Davidson note in their introduction, William James suggested, almost a century ago in his Principles of Psychology, that the brain was the organ of mind and be havior. James went so far as to suggest that the remainder (...) of the Principles was but a "footnote" to this central thesis. This volume brings together diverse biobehavioral scientists who are addressing the various aspects of the mindlbrainlbodylbehavior issue. Although some of the authors have previously published together in other volumes, by and large the particular combination of authors and topics selected by the editors makes this volume unique and timely. Unlike the Consciousness and Self-Regulation series (Schwartz & Shapiro, 1976, 1978), also published by Plenum, this volume is devoted entirely to a psychobiological approach to consciousness. Although readers will differ in their interest in specific chapters, the well-rounded investigator who is concerned with the psychobiology of consciousness will want to become intimately acquainted with all the views presented in this volume. As noted by the individual contributors, the topic of this volume stimulates fundamental questions which, on the surface, may appear trivial, yet, on further reflection, turn out to have deep significance. (shrink)

Horton and Gerrig outlined a memory-based processing model of conversational common ground that provided a description of how speakers could both strategically and automatically gain access to information about others through domain-general memory processes acting over ordinary memory traces. In this article, we revisit this account, reviewing empirical findings that address aspects of this memory-based model. In doing so, we also take the opportunity to clarify what we believe this approach implies about the cognitive psychology of common ground, and just (...) as important, what it does not imply. We also highlight related areas of research demonstrating how general cognitive processes can constrain access to relevant knowledge in ways that shape both language production and comprehension. (shrink)

Although death by neurologic criteria is legally recognized throughout the United States, state laws and clinical practice vary concerning three key issues: the medical standards used to determine death by neurologic criteria, management of family objections before determination of death by neurologic criteria, and management of religious objections to declaration of death by neurologic criteria. The American Academy of Neurology and other medical stakeholder organizations involved in the determination of death by neurologic criteria have undertaken concerted action to address variation (...) in clinical practice in order to ensure the integrity of brain death determination. To complement this effort, state policymakers must revise legislation on the use of neurologic criteria to declare death. We review the legal history and current laws regarding neurologic criteria to declare death and offer proposed revisions to the Uniform Determination of Death Act and the rationale for these recommendations. (shrink)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a deeply enigmatic psychiatric condition associated with immense suffering worldwide. Efficacious therapies for OCD, like exposure and response prevention (ERP) are sometimes poorly tolerated by patients. As many as 25 percent of patients refuse to initiate ERP mainly because they are too anxious to follow exposure procedures. Accordingly, we proposed a simple and tolerable (immersive yet indirect) low-cost technique for treating OCD that we call “multisensory stimulation therapy.” This method involves contaminating a rubber hand during the (...) so-called “rubber hand illusion” (RHI) in which tactile sensations may be perceived as arising from a fake hand. Notably, Jalal and Ramachandran (2015), showed that such fake hand contamination during the RHI provokes powerful disgust reactions in healthy volunteers. In the current study, we explored the therapeutic potential of this novel approach. OCD patients (n = 29) watched as their hidden real hand was being stroked together with a visible fake hand; either synchronously (inducing the RHI) (i.e., the experimental condition; n = 16) or asynchronously (i.e., the control condition; n = 13). After 5 minutes of tactile stimulation, the rubber hand was contaminated with fake feces, simulating conventional exposure therapy. Intriguingly, results suggested sensory assimilation of contamination sensations into the body image via the RHI: patients undergoing synchronous stimulation did not report greater contamination sensations when the fake hand was initially contaminated relative to asynchronous stroking. But contrary to expectations, they did so after the rubber hand had been contaminated for 5 minutes; as assessed via disgust facial expressions (a secondary outcome) and in vivo exposure (upon discontinuing the illusion). Further to our surprise, synchronous and asynchronous stroking induced an equally vivid and fast emerging illusion, which helps explain why both conditions initially (5 minutes after initiating tactile stimulation) provoked contamination reactions of equal magnitude. This study is the first to suggest heightened malleability of body image in OCD. Importantly, it may pave the way for a tolerable technique for the treatment of OCD—highly suitable for poorly resourced and emergency settings, including low-income and developing countries with minimal access to high-tech solutions like virtual reality. (shrink)

This research describes and empirically evaluates the application of a business ethics pedagogy informed by neuroscience and evolutionary biology that suggest ethical decisions are made unconsciously and emotionally. Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) provides a framework that considers a range of values individuals rely on for decision-making. This relates to Virtue ethics (VE) that develops intellectual and character virtues, requires emotional development and is thus suitable for guiding business ethics pedagogy. This study focuses on a business ethics course integrating intellectual virtue (...) and character virtue pedagogies, including contemplative and emotional intelligence skills practices. The aim of the course is to develop character, providing future managers the means to enact ethical decision-making through self-awareness of emotions, intrinsic values and translate these into ethical behavior. Pre-Post Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Moral Foundation Questionnaires (MFQ) are used to evaluate the development of students’ character virtues, i.e., increased emotional awareness, emotional regulation and intrinsic values. This paper mainly seeks to understand how to develop ethical behavior, beyond learning didactic definitions of what is ethically right and what is wrong, i.e. focusing on the learning process that can lead to personal ethical judgment and conduct. The related pedagogy integrates transdisciplinary theories and practices, and as such suggests a holistic approach to ethical behavior transformation. The results indicate limited, significant changes in all measures except emotional awareness. This developing field requires more research to identify the contributions of MFT and related pedagogy to students’ ethical development. (shrink)

This compact collection of philosophical texts from the _Summa Theologica_--on God, creation, the soul, human acts, moral good and evil, love, habits, virtue, and law--is presented newly translated in abridged form and cast in a modified version of the medieval _quaestio_. Included are only the most important objections and Aquinas’ replies; appeals to scriptural, theological, and philosophical authorities have been omitted. Unlike the ordering of the originals, questions and answers are here presented prior to objections and replies; the result is (...) a sharp, rich, topically organized question-answer presentation of Aquinas' major philosophical arguments within a brief compass. A general Introduction, headnotes, a glossary, an index, and a select bibliography offer expert guidance to the work of this major philosopher. (shrink)

Several studies have reported impairment in the recognition of facial expressions of disgust in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and preclinical carriers of the HD gene. The aim of this study was to establish whether impairment for disgust in HD patients extended to include the ability to express the emotion on their own faces. Eleven patients with HD, and 11 age and education matched healthy controls participated in three tasks concerned with the expression of emotions. One task assessed the spontaneous (...) production of disgust-like facial expressions during the smelling of offensive odorants. A second assessed the production of posed facial expressions during deliberate attempts to communicate emotion. The third task evaluated HD patients’ ability to imitate the specific facial configurations associated with each emotion. Foul odours induced fewer disgust-like facial reactions in HD patients than in controls, and patients’ posed facial expressions of disgust were less accurate than the posed disgust expressions of controls. The effect was selective to disgust; patients had no difficulty posing expressions of other emotions. These impairments were not explained by compromised muscle control: HD patients had no difficulty imitating the facial movements required to display disgust. Viewed together with evidence of difficulty in other aspects of disgust in HD, the findings suggest that a common substrate might participate in both the processing and the expression of this emotion. (shrink)

Emergency services personnel are a high stress occupation, being frequently confronted with highly consequential stressors and expected to perform: without fault; under high pressure; and in unpredictable circumstances. Research often invokes similarities between the experiences of emergency services personnel and elite athletes, opening up the possibility of transferring learnings between these contexts. Both roles involve genuine risks to emotional wellbeing because their occupations involve significant stress. Similarly, both roles face obstacles and injury, and their “success” is dependent on high-quality execution (...) of their skills under pressure. As such, both occupations are required to have resilience and effective coping abilities to ensure psychological well-being. Researchers suggest emotional awareness may be a key variable in the management and maintenance of resilience. This study: explored the experiences of emergency services personnel; characterised connections between emotional awareness and resilience; and reflected on the ways these findings can be extrapolated to elite athletes. We analysed 11 interviews with emergency services personnel. Participants identified resilience as crucial when coping with stress, however, many defined resilience as remaining unaffected by stress rather than, for example, managing and responding to it. Participants defined emotional awareness as understanding their emotions, and they recognised associated benefits for coping, resilience, and burnout. Nevertheless, most participants did not engage in practices to improve their emotional awareness. Barriers, such as maladaptive beliefs and help-seeking stigma, interfered with participants’ ability to cultivate emotional awareness, to promote resilience. In contrast, some participants described profound improvements in resilience and coping following the cultivation of emotional awareness. This finding illustrates that systemic change must target the individual, team, and organisation to correct misperceptions about resilience, emotional awareness, and psychological help-seeking. Developing emotional awareness may help emergency services personnel and other high stress occupations like elite athletes process difficult experiences and enhance their resilience, promoting well-being, and career longevity. (shrink)

Drawing freely and expertly from Continental and analytic traditions, Richard Bernstein examines a number of debates and controversies exemplified in the works of Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt. He argues that a "new conversation" is emerging about human rationality—a new understanding that emphasizes its practical character and has important ramifications both for thought and action.

Empathy plays a fundamental role in successful social interactions. However, most tasks currently available for measuring empathy have limited ecological validity and therefore may not elicit true emotional responses in observers. To address this gap, we developed the Empathic Measure of True Emotion (EMOTE), the first emotion stimuli set to include footage of genuine positive and negative emotions unfolding in naturalistic contexts. We validated the EMOTE in a sample of 216 participants. The EMOTE demonstrated acceptable internal consistency, construct validity, and (...) alternate forms reliability for both cognitive and affective empathy. We also found that, relative to conventional empathy measures, the EMOTE elicited stronger affective empathy ratings in observers, and the stimuli were rated higher in both genuineness and emotional intensity. Together, these findings demonstrate that the EMOTE is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive and affective empathy with enhanced ecological validity, providing a valuable new tool for measuring empathy in both clinical and research settings. (shrink)

Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the important themes in philosophy during the past 150 years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty, and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character (...) of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they - especially James, Dewey, and Mead - emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation. Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were central to the work of major twentieth-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic/Continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He explains why the discussion of pragmatism is alive, varied, and widespread"--Jacket. (shrink)

In her recent, provocative essay “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Elizabeth Anderson argues against a common ideal of egalitarian justice that she calls “ luck egalitarianism” and in favor of an approach she calls “democratic equality.”1 According to the luck egalitarian, the aim of justice as equality is to eliminate so far as is possible the impact on people’s lives of bad luck that falls on them through no fault or choice of their own. In the ideal luck egalitarian (...) society, there are no inequalities in people’s life prospects except those that arise through processes of voluntary choice or faulty conduct, for which the agents involved can reasonably be held responsible. Anderson asserts that the adherents of luck egalitarianism, which can be elaborated in many different ways, include John Roemer, Erik Rakowski, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Gerald Cohen, Richard Arneson, and Philippe Van Parijs.2 In contrast, according to the democratic equality conception, justice as equality requires an end to oppressive social relationships. In the ideal society of democratic equality, the social conditions of everyone’s freedom are secured, each stands to every other in a relationship of fundamental equality, including equal respect, and all have real freedom to participate in democratic self-government. (shrink)

All of these essays focus on the concept of modernity in the philosophical work of Jurgen Habermas - an ambitious and carefully argued intellectual project that invites, indeed demands, rigorous scrutiny. Following an introductory overview of Habermas's work by Richard Bernstein, Albrecht Wellmer's essay places the philosopher within the tradition of Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Critical Theory. Martin Jay discusses Habermas's views on art and aesthetics, and Joel Whitebook examines his interpretations of Freud and psychoanalysis, Anthony Giddens offers a (...) critical reading of Habermas's major work, "The Theory of Communicative Action. Richard Rorty criticizes the whole thrust of his program by way of a comparison with the work of the French philosopher of postmodernity, Jean-Francois Lyotard. And Thomas McCarthy concentrates on the question of the selectivity of rationalization processes in the modern age. Habermas himself has three contributions - on Marcuse, on neoconservativism, and a reply to the other essayists. Richard J. Bernstein is T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College. He was editor of the journal "Praxis International, in which these essays recently appeared. "Habermas and Modernity "is included in the series Studies in contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent (...) person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it? (shrink)

In this major new work, Bernstein explores the ethical and political dimensions of the modernity/post-modernity debate. Bernstein argues that modernity / post-modernity should be understood as a kind of mood - one which is amorphous, shifting and protean but which exerts a powerful influence on our current thinking. Focusing on thinkers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas and Rorty, Bernstein probes the strengths and weaknesses of their work, and shows how they have contributed to the formation of a new mood, (...) a new and distinctive constellation of ideas. This new constellation has put ethical and political issues back on the philosophical agenda, forcing us to confront anew, the Socratic question 'How should I live?'. (shrink)

Most individuals realise that we have a moral obligation to avoid the evils of war. But this realization raises a host of difficult questions when we, as responsible individuals, witness harrowing injustices such as ""ethnic cleansing"" in Bosnia or starvation in Somalia. With millions of lives at stake, is war ever justified? And, if so, for what purpose? In this book, Richard J. Regan confronts these controversial questions by first considering the basic principles of just-war theory and then applying (...) those principles to historical and ongoing conflicts. Part One presents two opposing viewpoints: first, that war is not subject to moral norms and, second, that war is never morally permissible. The author rejects both perspectives, and moves to define the principles of just-war theory. He evaluates the roles of the president, Congress and, most importantly, the UN Security Council in determining when long-term US military involvement is justified. The moral limits of war conduct and the moral problem of using, or threatening to use, nuclear weapons are also discussed. On the just cause to wage war, Regan argues that defense of nations and nationals - whether in self-defense or in defense of others - remains the ""only"" classical cause that in the modern world would justify resorting to war. With respect to military intervention in secessionist and revolutionary wars, he contends that such intervention might be justified, but that prudence dictates extreme caution. In considering acceptable war conduct, Regan elaborates the specific principle of discrimination and proportionality; he maintains that civilians uninvolved in the enemy's war should not be directly targeted and that the costs of military action must be proportionate to the anticipated benefits of destroying military targets. The second part of the book presents case studies of eight historical wars - World War I, the Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the revolution and civil war in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, and the Bosnian War - and poses several provocative questions about each. It invites readers and students to apply just-war principles to complex war-related situations and to understand the factual contingencies involved in moral judgements about war decisions. The book should be of particular interest to students of the moral issues of international relations and to readers interested more generally in philosophy, theology and political science. (shrink)

From the Introduction: This inquiry is concerned with the themes of praxis and action in four philosophic movements: Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. It is rare that these four movements are considered in a single inquiry, for there are profound differences of emphasis, focus, terminology, and approach represented by these styles of thought. Many philosophers believe that similarities among these movements are superficial and that a close examination of them will reveal only hopelessly unbridgeable cleavages. While respecting the genuine (...) fundamental differences of these movements, this inquiry is undertaken in the spirit of showing that there are important common themes and motifs in what first appears to be a chaotic babble of voices. I intend to show that the concern with man as an agent has been a primary focal point of each of these movements and further that each contributes something permanent and important to our understanding of the nature and context of human activity. (shrink)

All humans have an equal basic moral status. They possess the same fundamental rights, and the comparable interests of each person should count the same in calculations that determine social policy. Neither supposed racial differences, nor skin color, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, intelligence, nor any other differences among humans negate their fundamental equal worth and dignity. These platitudes are virtually universally affirmed. A white supremacist racist or an admirer of Adolf Hitler who denies them is rightly regarded as beyond the (...) pale of civilized dialogue. However, a very simple line of argument developed by Peter Singer challenges our understanding of these platitudes and forces us to rethink the basis and nature of the moral equality of all humans. What I call the “Singer Problem” arises if one accepts that the morally significant cognitive capacities that are relevant to the determination of the fundamental moral status of a being vary from individual to individual by degree. The problem is to specify a moral principle determining fundamental moral status that assigns a superior status to humans compared to other animals on the basis of the superior cognitive capacities of humans but also assigns all human persons an equal fundamental moral status regardless of their differing cognitive capacities. More broadly posed, the problem is to specify moral principles that yield intuitively satisfactory implications for the treatment of human individuals and other individual animals given that cognitive capacities differ across species and individuals. A search for a resolution of the Singer problem leads to disappointing results. (shrink)