Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 192-208, January 2022.

Despite the extensive research in both the determinants and the results of corporate social responsibility (CSR), relatively few studies have considered extra-legal institutions as potential determinants of CSR. Our work fills this gap by looking at how media attention affects CSR over a long-term period in a continental European setting. Our results show that media coverage positively affects CSR. Additional scrutiny triggered by media coverage encourages dominant owners to signal their commitment to limiting self-dealing transactions and their orientation toward stakeholders' (...) needs through CSR investments. Additionally, our results reveal that this signaling device offers greater benefits and lower costs in firms where controlling owners show a voting-cash flow wedge. Our results are relevant to different actors such as investors, auditors, and policy makers as they provide solid evidence that media coverage is an important driver of CSR orientation in a continental European setting. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity(DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. This (...) subversion of academia ― disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy ― is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. -/- Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. -/- List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Erik. J. Olsson, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

Commitment has been perceived as a strategic topic in organizations due to its positive effect on retaining talent, increasing performance, or boosting employees’ innovative behavior. However there are many focis of commitment in the workplace, which has represented a challenge to human resources management, who need implement measures to improve the employee’s commitment. Recent research has suggested a need to conduct studies about commitment, namely antecedents and the relationship between different focis, to understand the dynamic and directionality between them. Hence, (...) the purpose of this work is to analyze how employees’ emotional awareness relates with two focis of commitment, also assessing the mediating role of affective commitment to the leader. The study uses structural equation modeling and Lisrel to test the hypotheses considering the multidimensionality of organizational commitment, employees emotional awareness, and the affective commitment to the leader, under the scope of Social Exchange Theory. The Mackinon’s Z Test was used to assess the mediation role of affective commitment to the leader. The sample is composed for 403 employees from two multinational companies. The results provide empirical evidence about the mediating role of affective commitment to the leader in the relationship between employees’ emotional awareness and organizational commitment, and the employees’ emotional awareness as an antecedent of commitment. The implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the clarification of concepts usually found in books on quantum mechanics, aided by knowledge from the field of the theory of operators in Hilbert space. Frequently the basic distinction between bounded and unbounded operators is not established in books on quantum mechanics. It is repeatedly overlooked that the condition for an unbounded operator to be symmetric (Hermitian) is not sufficient to make it self-adjoint. To make things worse, nearly all operators in (...) quantum mechanics are unbounded. Often one finds statements such as: For any linear operator A we can write a Hermitian operator HA=(A+A+)/2, where Hermitian is thought to mean self-adjoint. Along these lines, self-adjointness of the momentum operator in generalized coordinates, taken from that expression, is questioned. In particular, the redescription in terms of spherical polar coordinates and its implications for the eventual loss of self-adjointness of the momenta conjugate to them are studied. (shrink)

The construction of the quantum-mechanical Hamiltonian by canonical quantization is examined. The results are used to enlighten examples taken from slow nuclear collective motion. Hamiltonians, obtained by a thoroughly quantal method (generator-coordinate method) and by the canonical quantization of the semiclassical Hamiltonian, are compared. The resulting simplicity in the physics of a system constrained to lie in a curved space by the introduction of local Riemannian coordinates is emphasized. In conclusion, a parallel is established between the result for various coordinates (...) and a proposed procedure for quantizing the semiclassical Hamiltonian for a single coordinate. (shrink)

After a brief review of the field formulations and the relativistic non-instantaneous action-at-a-distance formulations of some well known classical theories, we study Rivacoba’s generalization of a theory with a linearly rising potential as a relativistic non-instantaneous action-at-a-distance theory. For this case we construct the corresponding field theory, which turns out to coincide with a model proposed by Kiskis to describe strong interactions. We construct the action functional for this field theory. Although this model belongs to the class of Lagrangian theories (...) with higher derivatives, it is shown that its action-at-a-distance counterpart has a much simpler form. A proposal to construct an action-at-a-distance description of Yang-Mills interactions is also presented. (shrink)

Today's sweatshops violate our notions of justice, yet they continue to flourish. This is so because we have not settled on criteria that would allow us to condemn and do away with them and because the poor working conditions in certain places are preferable to the alternative of no job at all. In this paper, we examine these phenomena. We consider the definitional dilemmas posed by sweatshops by routing a standard definition of sweatshops through the precepts put forward in the (...) literature on justice and virtue ethics. We conclude that fixing on definitions is pointless and misleading and that we are better off looking at whether or not a workplace violates the basic human rights of workers and whether or not the working conditions there cohere with situations on which we have already rendered judgments. In the end, we suggest guidelines for businesses that operate in the global workplace to help them avoid charges of running sweatshops. These recommendations account for the harsh living conditions in certain developing and emerging countries as well as the norms of societies in developed countries. (shrink)

Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. They examine the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong learning and speech and language acquisition, considering vocal imitation, auditory learning, an early vocalization phase, the structural properties of birdsong and human language, and the striking (...) similarities between the neural organization of learning and vocal production in birdsong and human speech. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language. Contributors: Hermann Ackermann, Gabriël J.L. Beckers, Robert C. Berwick, Johan J. Bolhuis, Noam Chomsky, Frank Eisner, Martin Everaert, Michale S. Fee, Olga Fehér, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Jonathan B. Fritz, Sharon M.H. Gobes, Riny Huijbregts, Eric Jarvis, Robert Lachlan, Ann Law, Michael A. Long, Gary F. Marcus, Carolyn McGettigan, Daniel Mietchen, Richard Mooney, Sanne Moorman, Kazuo Okanoya, Christophe Pallier, Irene M. Pepperberg, Jonathan F. Prather, Franck Ramus, Eric Reuland, Constance Scharff, Sophie K. Scott, Neil Smith, Ofer Tchernichovski, Carel ten Cate, Christopher K. Thompson, Frank Wijnen, Moira Yip, Wolfram Ziegler, Willem Zuidema. (shrink)

This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories around periods of self-development would also occur when imagining future events associated with the self. Participants completed an AM task and future thinking task. In both tasks, memories and future events were cued using participant-generated identity statements . Participants then dated their memories and future events, and finally gave an age at which each identity statement was judged to emerge. Dates of memories and future events were recoded as temporal distance from (...) the identity statement used to cue them. AMs and future events both clustered robustly around periods of self-development, indicating the powerful organisational effect of the self. We suggest that life narrative structures are used to organise future events as well as memories. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on representations of irregular migration in a Scandinavian context and how irregular migrants are constructed as a target group. A common feature in many European states is the difficult attempt to navigate between an urge for control and respecting, upholding and promoting humanitarian aspects of migration management. Legitimizing policies therefore become extremely important as governments have to appease national voters to remain in power and have to respect European regulations and international conventions. Doing so (...) raises questions of social, political and economic rights, of moral obligations, of sovereignty, and of equity, as well as of how to define target groups and legal and categorical statuses into the debates. Having a backdrop in the theoretical framework of Carol Bacchi, Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram and Giorgio Agamben, this article looks at how policy problematizations and constructions of target populations guide and legitimize particular policy approaches and may end up marginalizing and excluding groups in society and ultimately become a challenge for democracy.Dansk abstract: Legitimering af politik: Hvordan politiske tilgange til irregulære indvandrere formuleres og legitimeres i SkandinavienFokus i denne artikel er på repræsentationer af irregulær migration i en skandinavisk kontekst og hvordan illegale indvandrere er konstrueret som målgruppe. Et fælles træk i mange vesteuropæiske nationalstater er det svære forsøg på at navigere mellem kontrol og samtidig respektere, forsvare og fremme humanitære aspekter af migrationsstyringen. At legitimere den givne politik er derfor blevet særdeles vigtigt fordi regeringerne er nødt til at formilde de nationale indvandringsskeptiske vælgere for at forblive ved magten og er nødsaget til at respektere europæiske regler og internationale konventioner. Dette italesætter en diskussion om sociale, politiske og økonomiske rettigheder, af moralske forpligtelser, af suverænitet, af at definere målgrupper og juridiske statuskategorier i debatterne. Artiklen har baggrund i en teoretisk ramme som er udstukket af Carol Bacchi, Anne Schneider, Helen Ingram og Giorgio Agamben. Artiklen ser på, hvordan politiske problematiseringer og konstruktioner af målgrupper vejleder og legitimerer bestemte politiske strategier og kan ende med at marginalisere og udelukke grupper i samfundet og i sidste ende blive en udfordring for demokratiske principper som sådan. (shrink)

Experiments using a modified gap paradigm, where regular trials are intermingled with catch trials, demonstrate that the relative frequency of express versus regular saccades distinctly depends on catch trial frequency. More specifically, it has been shown that the probability of an express saccade depends stochastically on the type of the preceding trial, that is, on the sequence of stimuli. We discuss whether such contextual effects can be accommodated within the framework of Findlay & Walker's model.

Many years before Adam Smith, numerous theologians associated with the School of Salamanca, such as Domingo de Soto, Juan de Lugo, Juan de Mariana, Luís Saravia de la Calle, Martin de Azpilcueta, Luis de Molina, Leonard Lessius, Thomas Cajetan, and Francisco Garcia had made great strides in the development of economics. Specifically, these theologians, otherwise known as the “Scholastics,” analyzed and argued against price and wage controls by explaining that the only “just” prices and wages are those that are (...) set by the market, examined and pushed back against prohibitions on usury, understood the concept of time preference, and helped develop monetary theory in multiple ways. They also demonstrated that all of this was consistent with the Catholic religion. This paper analyzes the ways in which these early theologians contributed to the development of economics and reconciled it with their Catholicism. (shrink)

Children's comprehension of the universal quantifiers all and each was explored in a series of experiments using a picture selection task. The first experiment examined children's ability to restrict a quantifier to the noun phrase it modifies. The second and third experiments examined children's ability to associate collective, distributive, and exhaustive representations with sentences containing universal quantifiers. The collective representation corresponds to the "group" meaning (for All the flowers are in a vase all of the flowers are in the same (...) vase). The distributive representation implies a pairing (e.g., each flower paired with a vase for Each flower is in a vase). The exhaustive representation exhausts both sets (e.g., for The flowers are in the vases all the flowers are in vases and all the vases have flowers in them). Four- to 10-year-olds children had little difficulty restricting the quantifier all to the noun it modified in a task which required them to attend to the group feature of all. In contrast, only 9- and 10-year-olds were able to solve the task when the quantifier was each and the pictures showed entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. Children showed a preference for associating collective pictures with sentences containing all and distributive pictures with sentences containing each. The results suggest that between the ages of 5 and 10 years, children's semantic representations undergo less radical changes than others have proposed. Instead, developmental change may occur gradually as children acquire linguistic cues which map onto existing semantic representations. (shrink)

This paper retraces some of the contrast between Aquinas and Scotus with respect to the metaphysical foundations of morality in order to highlight how subtle differences pertaining to the relationship between the divine will and the divine intellect can tip a thinker toward either an unalloyed natural law theory (NLT) or something that at least starts to move in the direction of divine command theory (DCT). The paper opens with a brief consideration of three distinct elements in Aquinas’s work that (...) might tempt one to view him in a DCT light, namely: his discussion of the divine law in addition to the natural law; his position on the so-called immoralities of the patriarchs; and some of his assertions about the divine will in relation to justice. We then respond to each of those considerations. In the second and third of these cases, following Craig Boyd, we illustrate how Aquinas’s conviction that the divine will follows the ordering of the divine intellect can help inform the interpretive disputes in question. We then turn our attention to Scotus’s concern about the freedom of the divine will, before turning to his discussion of the natural law in relation to the Decalogue as a way of stressing how his two-source theory of the metaphysical foundations of morality represents a clear departure from Aquinas in the direction of DCT. (shrink)

God and Morality in the Christian Tradition provides a scholarly overview from multiple contributors regarding questions of morality in regards to the Christian religious standpoint.

We reply to Christoph Jäger's criticism of the conditional probability solution (CPS) to the value problem for reliabilism due to Goldman and Olsson (2009). We argue that while Jäger raises some legitimate concerns about the compatibility of CPS with externalist epistemology, his objections do not in the end reduce the plausibility of that solution.

The growing interest in lifestyle campaigns as a means to promote public health has increased steadily during the past several decades. Governments, national health organizations, NGOs, and wealthy donors are collaborating with media professionals and academic scholars to address the pressing health issues of the 21st century. To counter the potential negative influences of hundreds of lifestyle advertising messages that media consumers are exposed to on a daily basis, health communication professionals are designing more sophisticated campaigns that blend beneficial health (...) information with various forms of entertainment media. This article discusses important ethical considerations raised by health professionals and media scholars and considers lifestyle campaigns within the context of competing ethical approaches to social change. A heuristic model is presented that facilitates a communitarian ethical approach to lifestyle campaigns, examining four important groups of stakeholders. Specific recommendations for future lifestyle campaigns based on this model are proposed. (shrink)

Grime (1979) in a recently developed theory distinguished three basic plant strategies: stress tolerance,ruderality and competition. He relates them to environments characterized in terms of stress and disturbance. Classifications of strategies and environments both are ultimately defined in terms of production. This tends to make the theory tautological. If the theory is to make sense, environments had better be defined in independent terms.

William of Ockham is often thought to be the medieval progenitor of divine command theory. This paper contends that the origin of a thoroughgoing and fully reductive DCT position is perhaps more appropriately laid at the feet of Andrew of Neufchateau. We begin with a brief recapitulation of an interpretive dispute surrounding Ockham in order to highlight how there is enough ambiguity in his work about the metaphysical foundations of morality to warrant suspicion about whether he actually stands at the (...) origin of DCT. We then show how all such ambiguity is jettisoned in the work of Andrew, who explicitly rejects a position similar to one plausibly attributable to Ockham and also articulates a fully reductive DCT. (shrink)

This discussion paper considers how seldom recognised theories influence clinical ethics committees. A companion paper examined four major theories in social science: positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism, which can encourage legalistic ethics theories or practical living bioethics, which aims for theory–practice congruence. This paper develops the legalistic or living bioethics themes by relating the four theories to clinical ethics committee members’ reported aims and practices and approaches towards efficiency, power, intimidation, justice, equality and children’s interests and rights. Different approaches (...) to framing ethical questions are also considered. Being aware of the four theories’ influence can help when seeking to understand and possibly change clinical ethics committee routines. The paper is not a research report but is informed by a recent study in two London paediatric cardiac units. Forty-five practitioners and related experts were interviewed, including eight members of ethics committees, about the work of informing, preparing and supporting families during the extended process of consent to children’s elective heart surgery. The mosaic of multidisciplinary teamwork is reported in a series of papers about each profession, including this one on bioethics and law and clinical ethics committees’ influence on clinical practice. The qualitative social research was funded by the British Heart Foundation, in order that more may be known about the perioperative views and needs of all concerned. Questions included how disputes can be avoided, how high ethical standards and respectful cooperation between staff and families can be encouraged, and how minors’ consent or refusal may be respected, with the support of clinical ethics committees. (shrink)

One of the most potent arguments against physician‐assisted death hinges on the worry that people with disabilities will be subtly coerced to accept death prematurely. The argument is flawed. There is nothing new in PAD: the risk of coercion is already present in current policies about end of life care. And to hold that any such risk is too much is tacitly to endorse vitalism and to deny that people with disabilities are capable of choosing authentically.

The scope of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) could expand in the future to include detailed analysis of the fetal genome. This will allow for the testing for virtually any trait with a genetic contribution, including “non-medical” traits. Here we discuss the potential use of NIPT for these traits. We outline a scenario which highlights possible inconsistencies with ethical decision-making. We then discuss the case against permitting these uses. The objections include practical problems; increasing inequities; increasing the burden of choice; negative (...) impacts on the child, family, and society; and issues with implementation. We then outline the case for permitting the use of NIPT for these traits. These include arguments for reproductive liberty and autonomy; questioning the labeling of traits as “non-medical”; and the principle of procreative beneficence. This summary of the case for and against can serve as a basis for the development of a consistent and coherent ethical framework. (shrink)

This article deals with a mosaic from ancient Zeugma on the Euphrates found in 2002 and recently published with interpretive commentary. Its subject is the story of Theonoe and Leukippe preserved only in Hyginus and nowhere in Greek. Despite this, the authors argue that the myth, in its unique form, can for over one thousand years be connected with romance, mime, pantomime, tragedy and derives ultimately from early Cretan rituals of transvestism. Its immediate inspiration however is imperial pantomime along with (...) the transvestism notorious in that genre, as can be argued from the layout of the mosaic and the iconography of Theonoe, our first clear picture of a pantomime. But the main thrust of the article, especially in appendix B, is to demonstrate that the Hyginus story must now be considered to represent the plot of a lost tragedy, which derived many of its elements from late Euripides, but in its over-enthusiasic use of these represents a post-Euripidean artificially complex plot-type, for which hitherto we had limited evidence. (shrink)

The scope of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) could expand in the future to include detailed analysis of the fetal genome. This will allow for the testing for virtually any trait with a genetic contribution, including “non-medical” traits. Here we discuss the potential use of NIPT for these traits. We outline a scenario which highlights possible inconsistencies with ethical decision-making. We then discuss the case against permitting these uses. The objections include practical problems; increasing inequities; increasing the burden of choice; negative (...) impacts on the child, family, and society; and issues with implementation. We then outline the case for permitting the use of NIPT for these traits. These include arguments for reproductive liberty and autonomy; questioning the labeling of traits as “non-medical”; and the principle of procreative beneficence. This summary of the case for and against can serve as a basis for the development of a consistent and coherent ethical framework. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable.