This study investigates current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. The results indicate that even with the heightened state of ethical awareness that has evolved in recent years the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior remains basically the same as it was in the mid 1980s. Specifically, practitioners still rely almost totally on the utilitarian (...) ethical philosophy when making business decisions. (shrink)

The current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior are investigated. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. Overall, even with heightened ethical awareness the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior remains similar to that of the early 1990s. Generally, practitioners still rely heavily on the utilitarian ethical philosophy when making business decisions. However, more managers are now likely to select ethically appropriate (...) actions either because it is ethical to do so, or because the consequences or risk of not doing so are too great. This shift could positively impact the ethical climate of business decision-making. (shrink)

Jack Caputo’s most recent book follows Derrida in proposing a “religion without religion”, a posture that, while committed to the general structure of religion, attempts to philosophically distance itself from specific, historical exemplifications of that structure. I propose that by determining what motivates the distinction between what is termed the “messianic” and “messianisms”, a space opens that allows us to call into question this “desert religion.” I will conclude by suggesting an alternative posture, one that attempts to honor both the (...) universal structure of religion, and the particular, historical content of religion. (shrink)

Addresses a range of phenomena related to the general question of when people behave in an altruistic fashion. This book contains topics that include how empathy induced altruism can actually be a threat to the some larger collective good, and the role of egoism in the production and maintenance of social order.

The current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior are investigated in the wake of the much-publicized convictions of Enron executives. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. Since 2003, and after the successful prosecution of Enron executives, the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior has shifted somewhat dramatically. There has been a significant change in the rational basis for managerial decision making. (...) In 2003, even after the Enron scandal was publicized, practitioners still relied heavily on both act and rule utilitarian ethical philosophies when making business decisions. Currently, the majority of respondents are likely to select ethically appropriate actions based on either rule utilitarian or rights rationales. It appears that ethical behavior is now more in line with ethical rhetoric, which may positively impact the ethical climate of business decision making. Apparently, business scandals of the past did not really impact actual ethical behavior much, but the high-profile prosecutions, convictions, and jail sentences may have impressed on managers that now is the time to incorporate ethics into business decisions. (shrink)

Cheating is fairly commonplace at both Tiers 1 and 2 AACSB accredited business schools. Distinct differences exist between Tiers 1 and 2 students with regard to cheating. Tier 1 students are more likely to cheat on written assignments, they believe sanctions impact cheating, and that a stigma is attached to cheating. Tier 2 students are more likely to cheat on exams, and nearly as likely to cheat on written assignments. Tier 2 students accept the notion that moral and ethical people (...) cheat. Tier 2 students who are Business Administration majors, those who are employed 40 h or more per week, married students, and married students with children are more likely to cheat. At both Tiers 1 and 2 schools Asian students are less likely to cheat, but resident members of fraternities and sororities and those who drink frequently are more likely to cheat. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology is the seminal reference in the field of positive psychology, which in recent years has transcended academia to capture the imagination of the general public. The handbook provides a roadmap for the psychology needed by the majority of the population -- those who don't need treatment but want to achieve the lives to which they aspire. These 65 chapters summarize all of the relevant literature in the field. The content's breadth and depth provide an (...) unparalleled cross-disciplinary look at positive psychology from diverse fields and all branches of psychology, including social, clinical, personality, counseling, school, and developmental psychology. Topics include not only happiness but also hope, strengths, positive emotions, life longings, creativity, emotional creativity, courage, and more, plus guidelines for applying what has worked for people across time and cultures. (shrink)

Through staged photographs in which she herself is often the lead actor or through appropriation of historical photographs, contemporary African American artist Carrie Mae Weems deconstructs the shaming of the black female body in American visual culture and offers counter-hegemonic images of black female beauty. The mirror has been foundational in Western theories of subjectivity and discussions of beauty. In the artworks I analyze in this article, Weems tactically employs the mirror to engage the topos of shame in order to (...) reject it as a way of seeing the self and to offer a new way of lovingly seeing the self. I use the work of Kelly Oliver, Helen Block Lewis, and bell hooks to articulate the relationships among the mirror, shame, and black female subjectivity in Weems's work. Weems's subjects often reckon with what Oliver calls “social melancholy” as they experience shame while standing before the mirror. However, Weems also shows that by looking again—a critical strategy I explain using Oliver's model of “the loving eye”—her subjects can use the mirror as a corrective to the social shaming gaze and make it a stage for establishing black female subjectivity, a gaze of self-love, and beauty. (shrink)

Ethics courses are most commonly evaluated using reaction measures. However, little is known about the specific types of reaction data being collected and how these reaction data relate to improvements in trainee performance. Using a sample of 381 ethics training sessions, major reaction data categories were identified. Content and course satisfaction were the most frequently collected types of reaction criteria. Furthermore, content relevance and course satisfaction showed strong, positive relationships with performance criteria, whereas content satisfaction demonstrated a moderate, negative relationship. (...) These results and future directions for ethics training evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Despite the growing body of literature on training in the responsible conduct of research, few studies have examined the effectiveness of delivery formats used in ethics courses. The present effort sought to address this gap in the literature through a meta-analytic review of 66 empirical studies, representing 106 ethics courses and 10,069 participants. The frequency and effectiveness of 67 instructional and process-based content areas were also assessed for each delivery format. Process-based contents were best delivered face-to-face, whereas contents delivered online (...) were most effective when restricted to compliance-based instructional contents. Overall, hybrid courses were found to be most effective, suggesting that ethics courses are best delivered using a blend of formats and content areas. Implications and recommendations for future development of ethics education courses in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

It is often suggested that during development the brain barriers are immature. This argument stems from teleological interpretations and experimental observations of the high protein concentrations in fetal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and decreases in apparent permeability of passive markers during development. We argue that the developmental blood–CSF barrier restricts the passage of lipid‐insoluble molecules by the same mechanism as in the adult (tight junctions) rendering the paracellular pathway an unlikely route of entry. Instead, we suggest that both protein and passive (...) markers are transferred across the epithelium through a transcellular route. We propose that changes in volume of distribution can largely explain the decrease in apparent permeability for passive markers and that developmentally regulated cellular transfer explains changes in CSF protein concentrations. The blood–CSF tight junctions are functionally mature from very early in development, and it appears that transfer from blood into embryonic brain occurs predominately via CSF rather than the vasculature. BioEssays 30:237–248, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

As a result of recent legislative developments and greater ease of accessibility, the Human Resources Manager (HRM) faces the challenge of not only maintaining records but also that of protecting employees from misuse of personal information contained in their individual personnel files. The widespread use of computers for maintaining employee records has resulted in new ethical dimensions and/or challenges for the HRM. Serious questions regarding accessibility to and dissemination of such personal information now confront the HRM. Unless policies are developed (...) by organizations for dealing with such questions, eventually government will mandate such policies in order to protect employee rights. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Research examining ethical decision-making has focused on how people engage in EDM, leading many researchers to focus on sensemaking models of EDM. Although the merits of a sensemaking approach with respect to EDM are evident in the literature, less is known about the specific cognitive processes by which sensemaking impacts EDM. This study examines the impact of three late-cycle cognitive processes – idea generation, evaluation, and revision – as well as the timing of these processes on EDM. Results indicate (...) that information gathering early on is critical to EDM; a finding which supports an active sensemaking model over an intuitive one. (shrink)

Previous studies suggest that psychopathic traits commonly present as comorbid with substance use disorders. Moreover, neuroimaging and psychometric findings suggest that psychopathic traits may predispose individuals to a sensitized reward response to drugs. Given that substance use disorders are characterized by a neurocognitive bias toward drug-reward relative to non-drug reward, it is possible that heightened psychopathic characteristics may further predispose to this processing bias. To evaluate this possibility, we assessed psychopathic traits (measured using the PCL-R; Hare, 2003 ) in 105 (...) probationers/parolees and evaluated the relationship between PCL-R scores, lifetime duration of drug use, and biases in neural response to drug- compared to food-related videos. Psychopathic traits (potentially driven by interpersonal/affective traits) were positively correlated with drug > food reactivity within the right insula and left amygdala. In addition, psychopathic traits modulated the relationship between drug use and drug > food reactivity within the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, right insula, and left caudate nucleus. Specifically, lifetime duration of drug use correlated positively with drug > food reactivity in participants with lower levels of psychopathic traits and correlated negatively with drug > food reactivity in individuals with higher levels of psychopathic traits. These results help reconcile prior studies on psychopathy and drug-stimulus processing and provide neurocognitive support for the notion that psychopathic traits serve as an underlying risk factor for substance use disorders. These results suggest that different treatment regimens for substance abuse for individuals with higher or lower levels of psychopathy may be beneficial and suggest that reduction of neurocognitive biases to drug-related stimuli may offer useful targets for future treatment protocols. (shrink)

R T Allen; The Meaning of Life and Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 47–58, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9.

In this essay I wish to raise the question of whether it is meaningful to say that a certain sort of robot is in pain. This is, of course, not an empirical question. There exists no robot of the sort I shall describe. But, I shall argue, if such a robot did in fact exist, it would be meaningful to say it is in pain.

Among Plato's later dialogues, the _Parmenides_ is one of the most significant. Not only a document of profound philosophical importance in its own right, it also contributes to the understanding of Platonic dialogues that followed it, and it exhibits the foundations of the physics and ontology that Aristotle offered in his _Physics_ and _Metaphysics _VII. In this book, R.E. Allen provides a superb translation of the _Parmenides_ along with a structural analysis that procedes on the assumption that formal elements, logical (...) and dramatic, are important to its interpretation and that the argument of the _Parmenides_ is aporetic, a statement of metaphysical perplexities. Allen's original translation of and commentary on the _Parmenides_ were published in 1983 to great acclaim and have now been revised by the author. (shrink)

In his article ‘A Cavalry Unit in the Army of Antigonus Monophthalmus: Asthippoi’, N. G. L. Hammond argues that the reading of the manuscript R at Diodorus 19. 29. 2 should be retained and that we should read ⋯π⋯ π⋯σι δ⋯ το⋯ς τε ⋯σθ⋯ππους ⋯νομαζομ⋯νους κα⋯ τοὺς ⋯κ τ⋯ν ἄνω κατοικο⋯ντων ⋯κτακοσιο⋯ς. The readings of F and its copy X, ⋯νθ⋯ππους, and the commonly accepted conjecture of Wesseling ⋯μɸ⋯ππους, should both be abandoned. Hammond's arguments for retaining this reading are that (...) between the variant readings of R and F, R ‘is the more often correct’ ; ⋯σθ⋯ππους, the reading of R, is preferable to F's ⋯νθ⋯ππους on the principle of ‘lectio difficilior’; the ‘difficulty’ of his lectio difficilior is made less by the arguments presented by A. B. Bosworth, 245 ff.), for the restoration at several places in the text of Arrian's Anabasis the word ⋯σθ⋯ταιροι, in place of the editorial emendation of πεζ⋯ταιροι. ‘For just as asthetairoi meant an élite group of Macedonian infantrymen,’ says Hammond, ‘so asthippoi should mean an élite group of Macedonian cavalrymen.’ He then proceeds to examine the passage and its context in an attempt to find confirmation of this proposition and comes to the conclusion that Diodorus' text says that there were 800 cavalrymen, broken into two groups, the asthippoi and ‘the men from the up-country settlers’; these, though having different names, had a close relationship to each other, as is shown by their being brigaded together. Following his derivation of asthetairoi as meaning ‘townsmen-companions’, i.e. companions recruited from the towns of Upper Macedonia, he argues that asthippoi were cavalry recruited from the towns of Upper Macedonia and that τοὺς ⋯κ τ⋯ν ἄνω κατοικο⋯ντων means ‘the sons of settlers in up-country Macedonia’. These 800, says Hammond, were both among Antigonus' best troops and ‘were Macedonians from Europe’. We thus appear, on Hammond's interpretation, to have here a group of 800 Macedonian élite cavalrymen, all of whom were recruited in Upper Macedonia's townships, but of whom some were chosen to be the cavalry-equivalent of the élite ‘townsmen-companions’ by their title of ‘townsmen-cavalry’, whilst the others, similarly recruited – but perhaps of a younger generation? – had no particular distinguishing title beyond ‘sons of settlers in up-country Macedonia’.Now, while it would be exciting to be able to add another one, possibly two Macedonian cavalry units to the Macedonian army of Philip, Alexander and the Successors, there are several aspects of Hammond's arguments that, it seems to me, are less than convincing. Thus, whilst it seems beyond reasonable doubt that ⋯σθ⋯ταιροι should be retained in the text of Arrian, appearing, as it does, six times, this is not an argument that ⋯σθ⋯ππους should be read in Diodorus' text. Both it and F's reading of ⋯νθ⋯ππους are hapax legomena and it is possible that both readings are wrong. But even if we retain ⋯σθ⋯ππους as the correct reading, Hammond's explanation of its meaning is open to objection on several counts. (shrink)

In this paper I shall examine a variety of situations in which human agents make use of force. Section I will be concerned with the use of force in medical contexts, Section Ii with the use of force in defence of property, and Section in with the use of force in resolving international disputes. I shall argue that the boundary between what is and is not morally permissible needs to be, drawn more stringently than is commonly supposed. While agreeing that (...) in some medical contexts and in some situations where defence of property is involved the use of force may be necessary and even morally required, I shall suggest that in the absence of any suitably constituted world court the use of force in attempting to resolve international disputes creates a morally different situation. (shrink)

Before talking about the vision of Orikhov's essence of the relationship between the church and the state, one must first determine what the church is about - Catholic or Orthodox. After all, the thinker lived in Poland when there were still strong, even parity positions of both denominations. He himself was brought up in a family where his father was Catholic and his mother was Orthodox. This was reflected in his mentality: he repeatedly publicly stated the benefits of certain tenets (...) of the Orthodox faith. But most of all he settled on the problem of relations between the Catholic Church and the state. (shrink)

A longish (12 page) discussion of Richard Sorabji's excellent book, with a further discussion of what it means for a theory of emotions to be a cognitive theory.

For all the time and effort expended on empowerment and participation ‘programmes’, many fail each year. This paper argues that the cause is a faulty view of communication widespread among managers and their teachers: the conduit, transmission model. It frustrates participation and is an ideology of management control. It rests on untenable beliefs about meaning and how language relates to the world. The paper proposes a new model of communication in terms of ‘communicating other/wise’ and offers examples of how it (...) can be practised in management education and by managers aiming to bring empowered and participatory workplaces into being. (shrink)

In the coverage of the problems of war and peace in Catholicism, researchers sometimes omit the regional component of their manifestation. We are talking about local traditions in Catholicism, which have their own specific approach to solving this problem and sometimes may differ significantly from the "conventional" position. The study of this field is necessary because in the delineated field the position of those theologians who were on the "outskirts" of Catholicism in the intercultural dialogue, on the one hand, led (...) to a deviation from the humanistic orientation about Catholicism. the war. An example would be the concept of a "holy war" of the Crusades, which had the anti-Islamic rhetoric generated not only in the West but also in the East. (shrink)

Deficits in social cognition and more specifically in communication have an important impact on the real-life functioning of people with schizophrenia. In particular, patients have severe problems in communicative-pragmatics, for example, in correctly inferring the speaker’s communicative intention in everyday conversational interactions. This limit is associated with morphological and functional alteration of the left middle temporal gyrus, a cerebral area involved in various communicative processes, in particular in the distinction of ironic communicative intention from sincere and deceitful ones. We performed (...) an fMRI study on 20 patients with SZ and 20 matched healthy controls while performing a pragmatic task testing the comprehension of sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative intentions. We considered the L-MTG as the region of interest. SZ patients showed difficulties in the correct comprehension of all types of communicative intentions and, when correctly answering to the task, they exhibited a higher activation of the L-MTG, as compared to HC, under all experimental conditions. This greater involvement of the L-MTG in the group of patients could depend on different factors, such as the increasing inferential effort required in correctly understanding the speaker’s communicative intentions, and the higher integrative semantic processes involved in sentence processing. Future studies with a larger sample size and functional connectivity analysis are needed to study deeper the specific role of the L-MTG in pragmatic processes in SZ, also in relation to other brain areas. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the objection that Socrates makes against diviners, poets, and rhapsodies having knowledge is an example of what has come to be known as an opacity objection: that is, some aspect of what would be required for them to know is unrecognised by them. This chapter contends that the opacity is of a different kind than what contemporary epistemologists have considered, and claims that Socrates’ specific version should have a place in contemporary theory of knowledge.