While stakeholder theory has traditionally considered organization’s interactions with stakeholders in terms of independent, dyadic relationships, recent scholarship has pointed to the fact that organizations exist within a complex network of intertwining relationships [e.g., Rowley, T. J.: 1997, The Academy of Management Review 22(4), 887–910]. However, further theoretical and empirical development of the interactions between stakeholders has been lacking. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding and measuring the effects upon the organization of competing, complementary and cooperative stakeholder (...) interactions, which we refer to as stakeholder multiplicity. We draw upon three forms of fit (i.e. fit as matching, fit as moderation, and fit as gestalts; Venkatraman, N.: 1989) to develop a framework for understanding stakeholder multiplicity based upon the direction, strength, and synergies of the interacting claims. Additionally, we draw upon the theory of stakeholder identification and salience of Mitchell et al. (1997), which we argue provides a more relevant and significantly more illustrative explanation of the nature and effects of stakeholder interactions upon the organization than the network approach of Rowley (1997). Furthermore, we ground our framework through reference to three stakeholder groups (i.e. governments, customers, and employees) and the stakeholder issue of concern for the natural environment. We propose a hierarchy of the multiplicity strength of influence of these three stakeholder groups. Potential measurement and implications are discussed. (shrink)

Despite their ethical intentions, ethically minded consumers rarely purchase ethical products (Auger and Devinney: 2007, Journal of Business Ethics76, 361–383). This intentions–behaviour gap is important to researchers and industry, yet poorly understood (Belk et al.: 2005, Consumption, Markets and Culture8(3), 275–289). In order to push the understanding of ethical consumption forward, we draw on what is known about the intention–behaviour gap from the social psychology and consumer behaviour literatures and apply these insights to ethical consumerism. We bring together three separate (...) insights – implementation intentions (Gollwitzer: 1999, American Psychologist54(7), 493–503), actual behavioural control (ABC) (Ajzen and Madden: 1986, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology22, 453–474; Sheeran et al.: 2003, Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 393–410) and situational context (SC) (Belk: 1975, Journal of Consumer Research2, 157–164) – to construct an integrated, holistic conceptual model of the intention–behaviour gap of ethically minded consumers. This holistic conceptual model addresses significant limitations within the ethical consumerism literature, and moves the understanding of ethical consumer behaviour forward. Further, the operationalisation of this model offers insight and strategic direction for marketing managers attempting to bridge the intention–behaviour gap of the ethically minded consumer. (shrink)

When business organisations become involved in contributing to and resolving social issues, they enter areas traditionally seen as the purview of governments. In doing so, they begin to take on the expectations and responsibilities of government; they become politicised. This politicisation is a product of business’s success and power and appears largely unavoidable. Adopting Matten & Crane’s (2005a) extended view of corporate citizenship, business organisations’ responsibilities extend to the administration of citizens’ social, civil and political rights. We term these areas (...) where business organisations take over the administration of citizenship rights as the social governance gap. Drawing upon the agenda of Margolis and Walsh (2003), we seek to enhance the understanding of how business navigates its responsibilities within the social governance gap, including its function as a significant actor influencing societal development and wellbeing. We do this through an exploration of Rio Tinto’s involvement in the WA Future Fund. This paper forms part of an introductory scoping case study of the Rio Tinto WA Future fund and its function as one of Rio Tinto’s diverse responses to community development issues in Western Australia. (shrink)

This article revisits and further develops Mitchell et al.’s (Acad Manag Rev 22(4):853–886, 1997 ) theory of stakeholder identification and salience. Stakeholder salience holds considerable unrealized potential for understanding how organizations may best manage multiple stakeholder relationships. While the salience framework has been cited numerous times, attempts to develop it further have been relatively limited. We begin by reviewing the key contributions of other researchers. We then identify and seek to resolve three residual weaknesses in Mitchell et al.’s ( 1997 (...) ) framework, thereby strengthening its foundations for further development. We argue, first, that urgency is not relevant for identifying stakeholders; second, that it is primarily the moral legitimacy of the stakeholder’s claim that applies to stakeholder salience; and last, that the salience of stakeholders will vary as the degrees of the attributes vary. These insights inform revised definitions of stakeholder salience and legitimacy, and necessitate a new theoretical underpinning for the role of legitimacy. Finally, we present an extensive agenda for future research with the objective of refueling research in stakeholder salience. (shrink)

Sustainability is increasingly a matter of concern in the corporate world. Many business scholars have analyzed the phenomenon from institutional and cultural perspectives, addressing the key questions of what drives the spread of sustainability principles, and also why sustainability adoption varies so widely among organizations and cultures. In this article, we propose that sustainability adoption can be better explained by integrating the insights from the institutional and cultural perspectives. This would break the current practice of choosing one approach or the (...) other, a trend that has estranged these fields despite their obvious overlap in questions, core constructs, and theoretic arguments. We therefore introduce a model that emphasizes a dual-effect of culture—namely, culture plays a role in "norming" the proliferation of sustainability-relevant institutions, while also influencing the "conforming" to pressures for sustainability emanating from these institutions. We offer theoretic insights not only for explaining sustainability adoption but also for addressing the recognized challenge of bringing culture back into institutional theory. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

While mainstream CSR research has generally explored and argued for positive ethical, social and environmental performance, critical CSR scholars argue that change has been superficial—at best, and not possible in any substantial way within the current capitalist system. Both views, however, only address the role of business within larger systems. Little attention has been paid to the everyday material CSR practice of individual managers. We go inside the firm to investigate how the micro-level acts of individual managers can aggregate to (...) drive transformation of the macro-level business logic. We draw on the strategy-as-practice approach to organize our research. The study reveals two orientations towards the integration of personal ethics into the workplace: abdication and activism. These orientations are supported by managerial practice such as reproductive and coping tactics and covert and overt tactics ; and, three enabling conditions of activist practice: empowerment and psychological safety, moral shock, and morality praxis. While our findings illustrate the tremendous challenges managers face when attempting to influence organizational practices towards their ethical and environmental aspirations, we also show that under specific conditions, individual managers can become fully engaged advocates and drivers of positive change from the inside. In so doing, our individual-level analysis of intrapreneurship provides a more complex picture of the possibilities for positive change than have been previously put forth by mainstream and critical CSR research. (shrink)

First published in Switzerland in 1935 and now available for the first time in English translation, _Heritage of Our Times_ is a bold work of cultural criticism by a major twentieth-century German philosopher. Recalling work by Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, Ernst Bloch's study of everyday life and politics during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany is a brilliant historical analysis of the cultural conditions leading to German fascism. A half-century later, Bloch's prescient meditations on culture and politics (...) still retain their explosive power and are certain to provoke controversy and discussion among cultural critics, philosophers, social theorists, and historians. In their Introduction, the translators contextualize the book within the political and intellectual tendencies of the period and Bloch's other work. (shrink)

"Racism and Anti-Blackness" in America is very bad.1 What has pragmatism had to say about this? Charles S. Peirce was a racist and thought that blacks are inferior.2 Much as most readers of this journal love him for other things, Peirce's pragmatism needs to change in this regard insofar as it bears on his racist views. A significant part of Peirce's racism came from his appreciation of science. Louis Agassiz strongly opposed Darwinian evolution and upheld racist views regarding Africans; he (...) was a close friend of Peirce's father, Benjamin Peirce, who long defended Agassiz. After the Civil War, many scientists added Mexicans and Native Americans to the list of inferior peoples who needed to be controlled by the... (shrink)

Common arguments for truth in religious pluralism absolutize an ultimate or lived component of religion, reducing a positive affirmation of plurality to deeper unity or exclusion. The arguments of John Hick, William Connolly, Nicholas Rescher, and S. Mark Heim fall into such a trap. By considering how an indeterminate concept of ultimacy, proposed by Robert C. Neville, fares against the problems their arguments raise, it will be shown that such a concept of ultimacy can both give rise to and (...) grow out of communal experiences and the nature of the world. The indeterminate ultimate, communal experiences, and the world pluralize themselves once understood in mutual relation. (shrink)

Chance both guides our credences and is an objective feature of the world. How and why we should conform our credences to chance depends on the underlying metaphysical account of what chance is. I use considerations of accuracy (how close your credences come to truth-values) to propose a new way of deferring to chance. The principle I endorse, called the Trust Principle, requires chance to be a good guide to the world, permits modest chances, tells us how to listen to (...) chance even when the chances are modest, and entails but is not entailed by the New Principle. As I show, a rational agent will obey this principle if and only if she expects chance to be at least as accurate as she is on every good way of measuring accuracy. Much of the discussion, and the technical results, extend beyond chance to deference to any kind of expert. Indeed, you will trust someone about a particular question just in case you expect that person to be more accurate than you are about that question. (shrink)

These essays collectively present new perspectives on the history of modern science in China since 1900. Fa‐ti Fan describes how science under the Republic of China after 1911 exhibited a complex local and international character that straddled both imperialism and colonialism. Danian Hu focuses on the fate of relativity in the physics community in China after 1917. Zuoyue Wang hopes that a less nationalist political atmosphere in China will stimulate more transnational studies of modern science, which will in turn reveal (...) the underlying commonalities in different national contexts. Sigrid Schmalzer compares the socialist and the capitalist contexts for science in China and reopens the sensitive question of the “mass line” during the Cultural Revolution. Grace Shen describes the tensions early Chinese scientists felt when choosing between foreign models for modern geology and their own professional identities in China. Taken together, these accounts present us with a comparative history of modern science in China that is both globally and locally informed. (shrink)

Evidential Decision Theory and Causal Decision Theory are the leading contenders as theories of rational action, but both face counterexamples. We present some new counterexamples, including one in which the optimal action is causally dominated. We also present a novel decision theory, Functional Decision Theory, which simultaneously solves both sets of counterexamples. Instead of considering which physical action of theirs would give rise to the best outcomes, FDT agents consider which output of their decision function would give rise to the (...) best outcome. This theory relies on a notion of subjunctive dependence, where multiple implementations of the same mathematical function are considered to have identical results for logical rather than causal reasons. Taking these subjunctive dependencies into account allows FDT agents to outperform CDT and EDT agents in, for example, the presence of accurate predictors. (shrink)

There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision (...) using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and Campbell-Moore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection. (shrink)

The present study investigated how the magnitude the word blindness suggestion effect on Stroop interference depended on hypnotic suggestibility when given as an imaginative suggestion and under conditions in which hypnosis was not mentioned. Hypnotic suggestibility is shown to be a significant predictor of the magnitude of the imaginative word blindness suggestion effect under these conditions. This is therefore the first study to show a linear relationship between the imaginative word blindness suggestion effect and hypnotic suggestibility across the whole hypnotizability (...) spectrum. The results replicate previous findings showing that highs respond to the word blindness suggestion to a greater extent than lows but extend previous work by showing that the advantage for those higher on the hypnotizability spectrum occurs even in a non-hypnotic context. Negative attitudes about hypnosis may not explain the failure to observe similar effects of the word blindness suggestion in less hypnotizable individuals. (shrink)

Some propositions are more epistemically important than others. Further, how important a proposition is is often a contingent matter—some propositions count more in some worlds than in others. Epistemic Utility Theory cannot accommodate this fact, at least not in any standard way. For EUT to be successful, legitimate measures of epistemic utility must be proper, i.e., every probability function must assign itself maximum expected utility. Once we vary the importance of propositions across worlds, however, normal measures of epistemic utility become (...) improper. I argue there isn’t any good way out for EUT. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany texts in the Epicurean tradition mention gratitude but do not explicitly explain its function in Epicurean ethics. I review passages that mention or discuss gratitude and ingratitude a...

In this paper I hope to show that Geach misunderstands the nature of Plato's argument in the Euthyphro and more importantly the reasoning behind the dialectical strategy adopted by Socrates. Furthermore I shall argue that Geach's reading of the Euthyphro engenders serious difficulties, that stand in the way of understanding the manner in which Plato construes the problem of determining the nature of, and relationship between universal and particulars, which is of great significance because it is precisely this problem, in (...) relation to piety, that is central to the Euthyphro. In the appendix I shall sketch the outline of an argument in order to justify the assumption that the theory of Forms is present in the Euthyphro. (shrink)

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a (...) latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a (...) latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina el parecer del obispo y humanista Juan Bautista Pérez , uno de los primeros críticos de las reliquias desenterradas en Granada a partir de 1588. Dada su política morisca bastante progresista en la diócesis de Segorbe, bien habría podido Pérez aprobar la aparición de los plomos, que creaban una historia común para cristianos y musulmanes. Su erudición, por el contrario, le hizo concluir que los plomos fueron una fabricación moderna, y que su veneración pondría en peligro de (...) desviación religiosa al pueblo español. El parecer de Pérez es un ejemplo de rigor, creatividad, y devoción religiosa entre los humanistas de finales del siglo XVI. (shrink)

We consider the questions of whether or not large language models (LLMs) have beliefs, and, if they do, how we might measure them. First, we consider whether or not we should expect LLMs to have something like beliefs in the first place. We consider some recent arguments aiming to show that LLMs cannot have beliefs. We show that these arguments are misguided. We provide a more productive framing of questions surrounding the status of beliefs in LLMs, and highlight the empirical (...) nature of the problem. With this lesson in hand, we evaluate two existing approaches for measuring the beliefs of LLMs, one due to Azaria and Mitchell (The internal state of an llm knows when its lying, 2023) and the other to Burns et al. (Discovering latent knowledge in language models without supervision, 2022). Moving from the armchair to the desk chair, we provide empirical results that show that these methods fail to generalize in very basic ways. We then argue that, even if LLMs have beliefs, these methods are unlikely to be successful for conceptual reasons. Thus, there is still no lie-detector for LLMs. We conclude by suggesting some concrete paths for future work. (shrink)

In Plato's Lysis, Socrates' conversation with Lysis features logical fallacies and questionable premises and closes with a blatantly eristic trick. I show how the form and content of these arguments make sense if we interpret them from the perspective of Socrates' pedagogical goals. Lysis is a competitive teenager who, along with his friend Menexenus, enjoys the game of eristic disputation. Socrates recognizes Lysis' predilections, and he constructs his arguments to engage Lysis' interests and loves, while also drawing the boy into (...) thinking philosophically about the issues that the arguments raise about love, freedom, and happiness. (shrink)

Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in (...) intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. (shrink)

What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as (...) readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue. Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past. (shrink)

This article reflects on William E Scheuerman’s The End of Law and the value of the liberal rule of law. It puts Scheuerman’s concerns about Schmitt’s attacks on the liberal rule of law in dialogue with Schmitt’s theory of ‘legal revolution’. It argues that, although Schmitt was neither a liberal nor a democrat, his work on legal revolution can help liberals respond to populist attacks on liberal constitutional essentials.

Marshall and colleagues (2024) offer a framework for emergency physicians (EPs) tasked with caring for “resuscitated opioid users”—or patients who have recently overdosed on opioids. This framework...

This article critically examines Busk's Democracy in Spite of the Demos, which critiques the “categorical imperative of democracy.” Although Busk effectively challenges the commitment to value-neutral democratic procedures as the foundation for legitimate law, his alternative, curtailing powerful interests ability to manipulate voters using “socially necessary delusions,” risks establishing elite rule. This article instead proposes basic liberal rights as the normative foundation for legitimate public order and militant democracy as its most effective institutional safeguard, arguing that this combination better realizes (...) human emancipation. (shrink)

Mild and moderate mental illnesses can hinder labor force participation, lead to work interruptions, and hamper earning potential. Targeted interventions have proven effective at addressing these problems. But their potential depends on labor protections that enable people to take advantage of these interventions while keeping jobs and income.