Rather than being inherently evil, business lobbying is a socially responsible activity which needs to be restrained by ethical standards. To be effective in a business environment, traditional ethical standards need to be translated into language which business persons can speak comfortably. Economical explanations must also be available to explain why ethical standards are appropriate in business. Eight such standards and their validating arguments are proposed with examples showing their use. Internal dialogues regarding the ethics of lobbying objectives and tactics (...) will plausibly occur only in businesses which recognize social responsibility mandates. Public interest stakeholders could hasten this recognition by making use of information made available by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 to institute external dialogues regarding lobbying by specific businesses and industry groups. Given practical ethical standards and the information on business lobbying provided by the law, the press, corporate activists, consumers, pension fund managers and the public can apply pressure for ethical lobbying practices. (shrink)

Management practitioners and scholars have worked diligently to identify methods for ethical decision making in international contexts. Theoretical frameworks such as Integrative Social Contracts Theory (Donaldson and Dunfee, 1994, Academy of Management Review 19, 252–284) and more recently the Global Business Citizenship Approach [Wood et al., 2006, Global Business Citizenship: A Transformative Framework for Ethics and Sustainable Capitalism. (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY)] have produced innovations in practice. Despite these advances, many managers have difficulty implementing these theoretical concepts in daily (...) practice. Using the example of recent decisions by internet service providers Google, Yahoo, and MSN regarding censorship requirements in China, we offer six heuristic questions to help managers to resolve cross-cultural ethical conflicts in which the firm’s way of doing business differs from the practice in the host country. Recognizing that companies can take different approaches to law and ethics (Paine, 1994, Harvard Business Review 72(2), 107–117), our aim is to provide a management decision process to deal with demands or opportunities for engaging in questionable business practices in a host country. (shrink)

Cross cultural ethical conflicts are a major challenge for managers of multinational corporations (MNEs) when an MNE''s business practices and a host country''s practices differ. We develop a set of decision principles to help MNE managers deal with these conflicts and illustrate with examples of ethical conflicts faced by MNEs doing business in contemporary Russia (DeGeorge, 1994). We discuss the generalizability of the principles by comparing them to the Donaldson (1989) and Buller and Kohls (1997) decision models. Finally we discuss (...) changes in the cross cultural ethical problems facing MNE managers and offer suggestions for future corporate and academic work on these problems. (shrink)

The news reminds us almost daily that the truth is apparently not highly valued by many in business. This paper develops two prescriptive standards — the Expectation and Reputation guidelines — that may help businesspeople avoid violating clearly accepted truth standards. The guidelines also assist in determining whether truth is required in circumstances where honesty seems in conflict with the practical demands of business. A discussion of why, when and how these guidelines may be applied to facilitate truth-telling by business (...) organizations follows, along with illustrative examples. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, managers at Exxon decided to seek lower cost disposal in Louisiana for oil-field wastes declared hazardous in Alabama. This decision resulted in injuries to the residents of Grand Bois, Louisiana; the disposal company; Exxon; and the oil industry in the state. Given the need for business and society to manage business operations for mutual benefit, it is essential to understand why businesses injure the public so that similar incidents do not happen again. The authors use three (...) analytical perspectives to suggest how corporations may make unethical decisions without purposefully setting out to do so: their managers may fail to understand changing social expectations for corporate behavior; they may adopt organizational structures, policies, and procedures that block ethical action in the name of efficiency; and they may follow unwritten rules of behavior for career success that exclude ethics. These perspectives suggest that individual Exxon managers may not have been making greed-based decisions, weighing corporate gains against harms to others. The situation more likely involved a failure, for the reasons discussed, to raise ethics questions in making business decisions. This explanation does not make much difference to those injured nor does it absolve those who made the decisions. It does make a difference to society and to companies seeking to understand factors that have to be overcome in any large corporation that wishes to prevent such events from occurring. (shrink)

This study adds to the empirical evidence supporting a significant connection between ethics and profitability by examining the connection between published reports of unethical behaviour by publicly traded U.S. and multinational firms and the performance of their stock. Using reports of unethical behaviour published in the Wall Street Journal from 1989 to 1993, the analysis shows that the actual stock performance for those companies was lower than the expected market adjusted returns. Unethical conduct by firms which is discovered and publicized (...) does impact on the shareholders by lowering the value of their stock for an appreciable period of time. Whatever their views on whether ethical behaviour is profitable, managers should be able to see a definite connection between unethical behaviour and the worth of their firm's stock. Stockholders, the press and regulators should find this information important in pressing for greater corporate and managerial accountability. (shrink)

Rather than being inherently evil, business lobbying is a socially responsible activity which needs to be restrained by ethical standards. To be effective in a business environment, traditional ethical standards need to be translated into language which business persons can speak comfortably. Economical explanations must also be available to explain why ethical standards are appropriate in business. Eight such standards and their validating arguments are proposed with examples showing their use. Internal dialogues regarding the ethics of lobbying objectives and tactics (...) will plausibly occur only in businesses which recognize social responsibility mandates. Public interest stakeholders could hasten this recognition by making use of information made available by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 to institute external dialogues regarding lobbying by specific businesses and industry groups. Given practical ethical standards and the information on business lobbying provided by the law, the press, corporate activists, consumers, pension fund managers and the public can apply pressure for ethical lobbying practices. (shrink)

Modern Chinese history told from a Buddhist perspective restores the vibrant, creative role of religion in postimperial China. It shows how urban Buddhist elites jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities alike engage with (...) Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China. Using fresh archival and primary sources, along with extensive ethnographic research, this volume vividly portrays these events and more, recasting Buddhism as a critical factor in China's twentieth-century development. Each chapter connects a moment in Buddhist history to a significant theme in Chinese history, creating new narratives of Buddhism's involvement in the emergence of urban modernity, the practice of international diplomacy, the mobilization for total war, and other transformations of state, society, and culture. Working across an extraordinary thematic range, the book reincorporates Buddhism into the formative processes and distinctive character of Chinese history. (shrink)

Salespeople have a moral obligation to prospect/customer, company and self. As such, they continually encounter truth-telling dilemmas. "lgnorance" and "conflict" often block the path to morally correct sales behaviors. Academics and practitioners agree that adoption of ethical codes is the most effective measure for encouraging ethical sales behaviors. Yet no ethical code has been offered which can be conveniently used to overcome the unique circumstances that contribute to the moral dilemmas often encountered in personal selling. An ethical code is developed (...) that charts ethical paths across a variety of sales settings (addressing "ignorance") while illustrating why the cost associated with acting morally is generally reasonable (addressing "conflict"). The code applies the universal transactional notions of customer expectations and salesperson reputation to illustrate why and when salespeople are morally required to tell the truth. In doing so, the code tackles head-on the vexing question of how best to juggle mixed motives - involving self-interests, corporate-concerns, cus-tomer-needs and other influences such as the nature of the transaction. The issue of how mixed motives can be dealt with through moral means is one that ethicists have previously sidestepped (Stark, 1993). (shrink)

Cross cultural ethical conflicts are a major challenge for managers of multinational corporations (MNEs) when an MNE's business practices and a host country's practices differ. We develop a set of decision principles to help MNE managers deal with these conflicts and illustrate with examples of ethical conflicts faced by MNEs doing business in contemporary Russia (DeGeorge, 1994). We discuss the generalizability of the principles by comparing them to the Donaldson (1989) and Buller and Kohls (1997) decision models. Finally we discuss (...) changes in the cross cultural ethical problems facing MNE managers and offer suggestions for future corporate and academic work on these problems. (shrink)

Pictures in historical chapters of textbooks convey information about the values and assumptions of the authors’professions and the larger culture. We scrutinized 15 recent abnormal psychology textbooks for reproductions of art created before 1900. Thirteen works appeared in three or more textbooks. Overall, these pictures support a “Whiggish” account of history that celebrates the present and gives a distorted, incomplete rendering of the past. The 13 pictures tended to depict the mentally ill as an underclass who are released from their (...) literal and metaphorical shackles by men who are “ahead of their time” in their struggles against prevailing ignorance. The pictures also emphasized the difference of the mentally ill by presenting a catalogue of stereotypic visual elements attributed to insanity throughout Western history. We argue for the inclusion in textbooks of “history for the sake of the past” as a way of genuinely engaging different ideologies and thereby stimulating interest in our own implicit values and biases. (shrink)

The uniqueness of human cognition and language has long been linked to systematic changes in developmental timing. Selection for postnatal skeletal ossification resulted in progressive prolongation of universal patterns of primate growth, lengthening infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Language emerged as communication increased in complexity within and between communities rather than from selection for some unique features of childhood or adolescence, or both.

Sociocultural influences on the development of child language skills have been widely studied, but the majority of the research findings were generated in Northern contexts. The current crosslinguistic, multisite study is the first of its kind in South Africa, considering the influence of a range of individual and sociocultural factors on expressive vocabulary size of young children. Caregivers of toddlers aged 16 to 32 months acquiring Afrikaans, isiXhosa, South African English, or Xitsonga as home language completed a family background questionnaire (...) and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory about their children. Based on a revised version of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, information was obtained from the family background questionnaire on individual factors, microsystem-related factors, and exosystem-related factors. All sociocultural and individual factors combined explained 25% of the variance in expressive vocabulary size. Partial correlations between these sociocultural factors and the toddlers’ expressive vocabulary scores on 10 semantic domains yielded important insights into the impact of geographic area on the nature and size of children’s expressive vocabulary. Unlike in previous studies, maternal level of education and SES did not play a significant role in predicting children’s expressive vocabulary scores. These results indicate that there exists an interplay of sociocultural and individual influences on vocabulary development that requires a more complex ecological model of language development to understand the interaction between various sociocultural factors in diverse contexts. (shrink)

Joining the dialogue on the relationship between the law and business ethics, Jeffrey Nesteruk and Eric W. Orts have offeredconceptions of the law as a positive influence rather than a negative curb on corporate behavior. While these “legal optimists” pursue anoble end in promoting higher ethical standards for corporations through the law, they may be overly optimistic in their suggestion that these more skillfully wielded legal models will influence corporate behavior for the better. Reviewing the basic tenets of their two (...) approaches, this paper uses corporate responses to environmental statutes to suggest that while legal optimism may offer hope for promoting corporate ethics, it has definite limitations in its current stage of development. (shrink)

Management practitioners and scholars have worked diligently to identify methods for ethical decision making in international contexts. In this paper we offer sixheuristic questions to help corporate managers resolve cross-cultural ethical conflicts involving questionable business practices in a host country. Our aim is to provide practical guidance for discussion within a firm on whether or not to do business the firm’s way, the host’s way or refrain from doing business there (the highway).

In the early 1990s, managers at Exxon decided to seek lower cost disposal in Louisiana for oil-field wastes declared hazardous in Alabama. This decision resulted in injuries to the residents of Grand Bois, Louisiana; the disposal company; Exxon; and the oil industry in the state. Given the need for business and society to manage business operations for mutual benefit, it is essential to understand why businesses injure the public so that similar incidents do not happen again. The authors use three (...) analytical perspectives to suggest how corporations may make unethical decisions without purposefully setting out to do so: their managers may fail to understand changing social expectations for corporate behavior; they may adopt organizational structures, policies, and procedures that block ethical action in the name of efficiency; and they may follow unwritten rules of behavior for career success that exclude ethics. These perspectives suggest that individual Exxon managers may not have been making greed-based decisions, weighing corporate gains against harms to others. The situation more likely involved a failure, for the reasons discussed, to raise ethics questions in making business decisions. This explanation does not make much difference to those injured nor does it absolve those who made the decisions. It does make a difference to society and to companies seeking to understand factors that have to be overcome in any large corporation that wishes to prevent such events from occurring. (shrink)

Joining the dialogue on the relationship between the law and business ethics, Jeffrey Nesteruk and Eric W. Orts have offeredconceptions of the law as a positive influence rather than a negative curb on corporate behavior. While these “legal optimists” pursue anoble end in promoting higher ethical standards for corporations through the law, they may be overly optimistic in their suggestion that these more skillfully wielded legal models will influence corporate behavior for the better. Reviewing the basic tenets of their two (...) approaches, this paper uses corporate responses to environmental statutes to suggest that while legal optimism may offer hope for promoting corporate ethics, it has definite limitations in its current stage of development. (shrink)

Abstract:Joining the dialogue on the relationship between the law and business ethics, Jeffrey Nesteruk and Eric W. Orts have offered conceptions of the law as a positive influence rather than a negative curb on corporate behavior. While these “legal optimists” pursue a noble end in promoting higher ethical standards for corporations through the law, they may be overly optimistic in their suggestion that these more skillfully wielded legal models will influence corporate behavior for the better. Reviewing the basic tenets of (...) their two approaches, this paper uses corporate responses to environmental statutes to suggest that while legal optimism may offer hope for promoting corporate ethics, it has definite limitations in its current stage of development. (shrink)

Understanding recreational experiences is a longstanding research tradition and key to effective management. Given the complexities of human experience, many approaches have been applied to study recreational experience. Two such approaches are the experiential approach (based in a positivistic paradigm) and emergent experience (based in an interpretive paradigm). While viewed as being complementary, researchers have not offered guidance for incorporating the approaches into a common model of recreational experience. This study utilized longitudinal, qualitative data to examine aspects of recreational experience (...) posited by these two approaches. Results provided a framework for synthesizing across the two approaches. Respondents had clear pre-activity expectations, and most respondents realized their expected outcomes. This supports the experiential approach. Of the 48 activity narratives, 27 experienced something unexpected, and 45 described process-oriented, intrinsic motivation, suggesting evidence of emergent and unique characteristics specific to an individual’s realization of recreational experience. This supports the application of the emergent experience approach to understand how individuals create meaning from recreational engagements. The paper proposes a model for integrating results of the two approaches. While not advocating for any specific approach, the findings can serve as an example of building a holistic model of the outdoor recreation experience. The purpose of the model is to allow for a more complete understanding of how individuals create recreation experiences, more complete documentation of the benefits of outdoor recreation for both researchers and managers, and better synthesis across studies. (shrink)

Salespeople have a moral obligation to prospect/customer, company and self. As such, they continually encounter truth-telling dilemmas. "lgnorance" and "conflict" often block the path to morally correct sales behaviors. Academics and practitioners agree that adoption of ethical codes is the most effective measure for encouraging ethical sales behaviors. Yet no ethical code has been offered which can be conveniently used to overcome the unique circumstances that contribute to the moral dilemmas often encountered in personal selling. An ethical code is developed (...) that charts ethical paths across a variety of sales settings (addressing "ignorance") while illustrating why the cost associated with acting morally is generally reasonable (addressing "conflict"). The code applies the universal transactional notions of customer expectations and salesperson reputation to illustrate why and when salespeople are morally required to tell the truth. In doing so, the code tackles head-on the vexing question of how best to juggle mixed motives - involving self-interests, corporate-concerns, cus-tomer-needs and other influences such as the nature of the transaction. The issue of how mixed motives can be dealt with through moral means is one that ethicists have previously sidestepped (Stark, 1993). (shrink)

In the wake of ethical scandals and close ethical scrutiny throughout business and the accounting professional today, Brooks/Dunn's BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL ETHICS, 9E provides the ethical insights and strategies you need for corporate and professional success. Learn why ethical behavior is so important and how to recognize potential pitfalls that involve much more than memorizing rules. You master the skills to develop a corporate culture of integrity that maintains stakeholder support and enables directors and auditors to complete their jobs. You (...) also learn how to use ethical strategies to make decisions, as this edition examines the latest information on governance scandals, legal liability and professional accounting and auditing issues. More than 130 cases and readings highlight new and classic cases of fraud, bankruptcy and unprofessional practices to help you better understand appropriate codes of conduct and sound ethical reasoning while strengthening your persuasive and leadership skills for success. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rima Basu and I have offered separate accounts of wokeness as an anti-racist ethical concept. Our accounts endorse controversial doctrines in epistemology: doxastic wronging, doxastic voluntarism, and moral encroachment. Many philosophers deny these three views, favoring instead some ordinary standards for epistemic justification. I call this denial the standard view. In this paper, I offer an account of wokeness that is consistent with the standard view. I argue that wokeness is best understood as ‘group epistemic partiality’. The woke person (...) does extra epistemic work before forming a negative belief about a member of an oppressed social group. Just as we do extra epistemic work when forming belief about our friends, so the woke person does for members of oppressed social groups. I first outline the account. I then raise questions about the scope of wokeness and belief formation. After this, I demonstrate that the group partiality view is consistent with the standard view in epistemology. The partiality view, therefore, should appeal to epistemologists who have adopted the standard view because it is consistent with ordinary standards of justification. I conclude that wokeness as a concept in epistemology should not be controversial for those who endorse the standard view. (shrink)

Vaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

Numerous social, economic and academic pressures can have a negative impact on representations of biomedical research. We review several of the forces playing an increasingly pernicious role in how health and science information is interpreted, shared and used, drawing discussions towards the role of narrative. In turn, we explore how aspects of narrative are used in different social contexts and communication environments, and present creative responses that may help counter the negative trends. As traditional methods of communication have in many (...) ways failed the public, changes in approach are required, including the creative use of narratives. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid holding failures. (...) The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (shrink)

Much of the climate ethics discussion centers on considerations of compensatory justice and historical accountability. However, little attention is given to supporting and defending the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a guide for policymaking. This principle states that those who have benefitted from an instance of harm have an obligation to compensate those who have been harmed. Thus, this principle implies that those benefitted by industrialization and carbon emission owe compensation to those who have been harmed by climate change. Beneficiary Pays (...) is commonly juxtaposed with Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle in the relevant literature. Beneficiary Pays withstands objections that raise suspicion for the latter two. (shrink)

If God is transcendent, how can human beings speak meaningfully about him? The answer lies in analogy, which recognizes both similarity and dissimilarity between God and our God-talk. In his erudite study, Archie Spencer argues for a christological account of analogy as the answer to the problem of God's speakability.

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. (...) Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other. (shrink)

Grigorieff showed that forcing to add a subset of ω using partial functions with suitably chosen domains can add a generic real of minimal degree. We show that forcing with partial functions to add a subset of an uncountable κ without adding a real never adds a generic of minimal degree. This is in contrast to forcing using branching conditions, as shown by Brown and Groszek.

In a reflective and richly entertaining piece from 1979, Doug Hofstadter playfully imagined a conversation between ‘Achilles’ and an anthill (the eponymous ‘Aunt Hillary’), in which he famously explored many ideas and themes related to cognition and consciousness. For Hofstadter, the anthill is able to carry on a conversation because the ants that compose it play roughly the same role that neurons play in human languaging; unfortunately, Hofstadter’s work is notably short on detail suggesting how this magic might be achieved1. (...) Conversely in this paper - finally reifying Hofstadter’s imagination - we demonstrate how populations of simple ant-like creatures can be organised to solve complex problems; problems that involve the use of forward planning and strategy. Specifically we will demonstrate that populations of such creatures can be configured to play a strategically strong - though tactically weak - game of HeX (a complex strategic game).We subsequently demonstrate how tactical play can be improved by introducing a form of forward planning instantiated via multiple populations of agents; a technique that can be compared to the dynamics of interacting populations of social insects via the concept of meta-population. In this way although, pace Hofstadter, we do not establish that a meta-population of ants could actually hold a conversation with Achilles, we do successfully introduce Aunt Hillary to the complex, seductive charms of HeX. (shrink)

It is argued that Adam Smith criticizes David Hume's account of the origin of and continuing adherence to the rule of law for being not sufficiently Humean. Hume explained that adherence to the rule of law originated in the self-interest to restrain self-interest. According to Smith, Hume does not pay enough attention to the passions of resentment and admiration, which have their source in the imagination. Smith's offers a more naturalistic and evolutionary account of the psychological pre-conditions of the establishment (...) and morality of justice than Hume had. Yet, Smith's account also makes room for a thin conception of Lockean natural right to property, while rejecting the contractualist and rationalistic elements in Locke. It emerges that Smith severs the intimate connection that Hobbes and Hume made between justice and property. (shrink)

Volume 22, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 148-150.

This book provides an up-to-date treatment of the subject without arcane terminology or abstract argument.

The majority of North American corporations awakened to the need for their own ethical guidelines during the late 1970s and early 1980s, even though modern corporations are subject to a surprising multiplicity of external codes of ethics or conduct. This paper provides an understanding of both internal and external codes through a discussion of the factors behind the development of the codes, an analysis of internal codes and an identification of problems with them.

This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...) and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do their homework” before closing inquiry. This alternate account makes better sense of puzzles that accounts of doxastic wronging fall prey to. (shrink)