This paper offers clarity regarding the convergence of two important issues in today’s business environment. First is the growingconcern over ethical failures of leadership. The obsessive self-interest and egoistic concern for personal gain exhibited by some corporate executives is particularly difficult to understand and overcome. Second is the growing realization that business must embrace the broad concept of personal spirituality. Moral reflection and choice are at the core of ethical leadership, and spiritual and moral development are interdependent. Personal spirituality impacts (...) the leader’s moral stability by contributing to strength of character, reducing egoistic needs, providing means and motivation for true moral choices and actions, and creating a strong moral identity. Current theory and research on spiritual leadership fails to adequately portray the pivotal role of the leader’s personal spiritualtransformation and sense of spirituality in ethical decision-making. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

This is an edition of one of the crucial texts of Renaissance scepticism, Quod nihil scitur, by the Portuguese scholar Franciso Sanches. The treatise, first published in 1581, is a refutation of Aaristotelian dialectics and scientific theory in the search for a true scientific method. This volume provides a critical edition of the original text, an English translation, a substantial introduction, and comprehensive annotation.

Medical-legal partnerships connect legal advocates to healthcare providers and settings. Maintaining effectiveness of medical-legal partnerships and consistently identifying opportunities for innovation and adaptation takes intentionality and effort. In this paper, we discuss ways in which our use of data and quality improvement methods have facilitated advocacy at both patient (client) and population levels as we collectively pursue better, more equitable outcomes.

Integrity is a critical determinant of the effectiveness of research organizations in terms of producing high quality research and educating the new generation of scientists. A number of responsible conduct of research (RCR) training programs have been developed to address this growing organizational concern. However, in spite of a significant body of research in ethics training, it is still unknown which approach has the highest potential to enhance researchers’ integrity. One of the approaches showing some promise in improving researchers’ integrity (...) has focused on the development of ethical decision-making skills. The current effort proposes a novel curriculum that focuses on broad metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day social and professional practices that have ethical implications for the physical sciences and engineering. This sensemaking training has been implemented in a professional sample of scientists conducting research in electrical engineering, atmospheric and computer sciences at a large multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, and multi-university research center. A pre-post design was used to assess training effectiveness using scenario-based ethical decision-making measures. The training resulted in enhanced ethical decision-making of researchers in relation to four ethical conduct areas, namely data management, study conduct, professional practices, and business practices. In addition, sensemaking training led to researchers’ preference for decisions involving the application of the broad metacognitive reasoning strategies. Individual trainee and training characteristics were used to explain the study findings. Broad implications of the findings for ethics training development, implementation, and evaluation in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Alienation and Connection addresses social constructs that perpetuate alienation through suffering. The contributors discuss how alienation through suffering in a variety of contexts can be transformed into connection and reconnection: human relationship with the environment, economic and social systems that disconnect and reconnect, cultural constructs that divide or can heal, encountered difference that brings opportunity, and various manifestations of personal pain that can be survived and even overcome.

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)

As the shield preempting state suits under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act has been successfully pierced and Duke v. U.S. Healthcare, Inc., 57 F.3d 350 ), plaintiff attorneys have begun to use the ERISA statute itself to further litigation against managed care organizations. The court in Shea v. Esensten, 107 F.3d 625, held in a landmark decision that an HMO's failure to disclose financial incentives that discourage a treating physician from providing essential health care referrals for conditions covered under (...) the plan benefit structure is a breach of ERISA's fiduciary duties. (shrink)

As the shield preempting state suits under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act has been successfully pierced and Duke v. U.S. Healthcare, Inc., 57 F.3d 350 ), plaintiff attorneys have begun to use the ERISA statute itself to further litigation against managed care organizations. The court in Shea v. Esensten, 107 F.3d 625, held in a landmark decision that an HMO's failure to disclose financial incentives that discourage a treating physician from providing essential health care referrals for conditions covered under (...) the plan benefit structure is a breach of ERISA's fiduciary duties. (shrink)

This landmark work provides a systematic introduction to systems of modal logic and stands as the first presentation of what have become central ideas in philosophy of language and metaphysics, from the "new theory of reference" and non-linguistic necessity and essentialism to "Kripke semantics.".

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vacabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury (...) trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inatriculate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. About the Author: Elaine Scarry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, (...) and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. (shrink)

Just Business provides the first comprehensive, reasoned framework for resolving questions of business ethics and corporate governance. Innovative, accessible, and global in scope, its powerful Ethical Decision Model can be used to manage the ethical problems of business as they arise in all their complexity and variety. Just Business combines business realism with philosophical rigor, and demonstrates that it is not necessary to emasculate or to adulterate business for business to be ethical. The book benefits from Elaine Sternberg's extensive (...) experience as an academic philosopher, an international investment banker, and head of successful businesses. She is now Principal of a London-headquartered consultancy firm, and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. (shrink)

"--J.M.Coetzee "Here is a writer almost magically summoning up the world through words and ideas, in a new way, and so guiding the reader, lovingly, to receive the treasures and accept the pleasures of this book as naturally as breathing.

This paper addresses the problems that must be considered if computers are going to treat their users as individuals with distinct personalities, goals, and so forth. It first outlines the issues, and then proposes stereotypes as a useful mechanism for building models of individual users on the basis of a small amount of information about them. In order to build user models quickly, a large amount of uncertain knowledge must be incorporated into the models. The issue of how to resolve (...) the conflicts; hot will arise along such inferences is discussed. A system, Grundy, is described that builds models of its users, with the aid of stereotypes, and then exploits those models to guide it in its task, suggesting novels that people may find interesting. If stereotypes are to be useful to Grundy, they must accurately characterize the users of the system. Some techniques to modify stereotypes on the basis of experience are discussed. An analysis of Grundy's performance shows that its user models are effective in guiding its performance. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the currently sparse literature on transnational families and gender. It focuses on the retrospective accounts of Caribbean-born adults who as children were serial migrants, joining their parents in the UK following a period of separation. It considers aspects of their relationships with their siblings and with their mothers and fathers. The article illuminates what the serial migrants viewed as contradictory everyday practices that produced ‘non-shared environments’. It discusses three ways in which transnationalism appeared to (...) be a central part of the serial migrants’ family lives. First, it was embodied. Second, it was lived as cultural difference between Caribbean-born and UK-born siblings. Third, it was reported to be evident in parental practices. The article illustrates the importance of viewing gendered narratives in a psychosocial intersectional perspective. (shrink)

The powerful images of the events^ of 9/11 have made an indelible impression on the world psyche. It has given rise to a pervasive rhetoric in practically all fields attempting to explain, interpret and understand the underlying causes and world changing consequences of the events. In a post-modern and secular world it has led to a refocusing on the religious fervour and ideals at work in established religions and in movements that are ostensibly devoid of all religious motivation, such as (...) expansive globalization and American free enterprise capitalism. I argue that similar ideological and "religious" notions are at work in the conflict of worldviews represented by this historical event. In order to substantiate this claim and an identification of the ideological sources of the malaise at work in the world requires a clear distinction between religion, myth and ideology and the legitimate role played by constitutive root metaphors in culture, science and society. Root metaphor analysis reveals the underlying 'war of worlds' at work in the foundational symbolizations of the world (Gibson Winter, 1981) which function as fundamental building blocks of the "cultural cosmologies" of society (Harrington, 1995, 360). It is not only religious convictions that shape the world but the choices of metaphors by scientists, educators and politicians are not random and innocent but fraught with root metaphorical notions as religious as those of their ostensibly secular counterparts and thus laden with frameworks that dramatically alter the perception of phenomena and the behaviour and actions of groups. Harrington's (1995) analysis of the role of holism in the shadow of the Third Reich shows this very clearly. Recognition of the presence and influence of root metaphors of an ideological nature will contribute to the dies-enchantment with their allure. This paper attempts to develop a methodology on the basis of which it is possible to distinguish between the legitimate function of root metaphors in science and society and their hypostatization. (shrink)

This is the first volume on category theory for a broad philosophical readership. It is designed to show the interest and significance of category theory for a range of philosophical interests: mathematics, proof theory, computation, cognition, scientific modelling, physics, ontology, the structure of the world.

How tax practitioners approach ethical dilemmas remains generally unexplored in academic literature. We use here Rest’s original Defining Issues Test (Development in judging moral issues. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979; Moral development. Advances in research and theory. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), combined with a tax context-specific test and in conjunction with a control group of non-tax specialists, to examine tax practitioners’ moral reasoning in a social and tax context. We investigate: (i) the effect of a tax context on (...) issues raised (finding that practitioners generally reason at lower levels than in social scenarios); (ii) whether the profession attracts people who reason at certain levels (finding that it does not); and (iii) whether practitioners are affected by training/socialization in their professional context (finding that that they are). (shrink)

Much has been said about intuitionistic and classical logical systems since Gentzen’s seminal work. Recently, Prawitz and others have been discussing how to put together Gentzen’s systems for classical and intuitionistic logic in a single unified system. We call Prawitz’ proposal the Ecumenical System, following the terminology introduced by Pereira and Rodriguez. In this work we present an Ecumenical sequent calculus, as opposed to the original natural deduction version, and state some proof theoretical properties of the system. We reason that (...) sequent calculi are more amenable to extensive investigation using the tools of proof theory, such as cut-elimination and rule invertibility, hence allowing a full analysis of the notion of Ecumenical entailment. We then present some extensions of the Ecumenical sequent system and show that interesting systems arise when restricting such calculi to specific fragments. This approach of a unified system enabling both classical and intuitionistic features sheds some light not only on the logics themselves, but also on their semantical interpretations as well as on the proof theoretical properties that can arise from combining logical systems. (shrink)

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

While much of the empirical accounting literature suggests that, if differences do exist, Big Four employees are more ethical than non-Big Four employees, this trend has not been evident in the recent media coverage of Big Four tax practitioners acting for multinationals accused of aggressive tax avoidance behaviour. However, there has been little exploration in the literature to date specifically of the relationship between firm size and ethics in tax practice. We aim here to address this gap, initially exploring tax (...) practitioners’ perceptions of the impact of firm size on ethics in tax practice using interview data in order to identify the salient issues involved. We then proceed to assess quantitatively whether employer firm size has an impact on the ethical reasoning of tax practitioners, using a tax context-specific adaptation of a well-known and validated psychometric instrument, the Defining Issues Test. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas involving tax issues were identified by members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants as posing the most difficult ethical problem for them (Finn et al., Journal of Business Ethics 7(8), pp. 607–609, 1988). The KPMG tax shelter fraud case proves that the tax profession has not gone untainted in the age of numerous accounting and corporate scandals, such as the Enron débâcle (Sikka and Hampton, Accounting Forum 29(3), 325–343, 2005). High-profile scandals serve to highlight the problems (...) caused by differences in ethical judgement among accountants and tax practitioners and the issue of ethics has been brought publicly to the forefront of the profession. Nevertheless, the nature and dimension of ethical issues in tax practice have been largely unexplored (Erard, Journal of Public Economics 52(2), 163–197, 1993; Marshall et al., Journal of Business Ethics 17(12), 1265–1279, 1998; Frecknall Hughes, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Leeds, 2002). This research aims to contribute to the debate on ethics in tax practice by reporting interview data on tax practitioners’ perceptions of ethics in the jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom and exploring the link or equation of ethics with risk management. (shrink)

This paper reports on the development of a research instrument designed to explore ethical reasoning in a tax context. This research instrument is a version of the Defining Issues Test originally developed by Rest [1979a, Development in Judging Moral Issues ; 1979b, Defining Issues Test ], but adapted to focus specifically on the environment encountered by tax practitioners. The paper explores reasons for developing a context- specific test, and details the manner in which this was undertaken. The study on which (...) it is based aims to compare the reasoning of tax practitioners in the taxspecific context and in the general social context covered by the original DIT, and to compare this with the reasoning of non-specialists in these two contexts. The paper therefore also considers the issues that arise when using such tests to compare reasoning in different domains or to compare groups. The focus on instrument development to measure ethical reasoning in a specific domain will contribute to the literature on research methods in the area of the DIT and will facilitate cross-study comparisons. (shrink)

"--Robert Fagles, translator of Homer's "Iliad" "I finished "Dreaming by the Book" feeling that fundamental aspects of the nature of consciousness had been peeled open and exposed to view."--Stephen M. Kosslyn, author of "Image and Brain".

Recent semantic approaches to scientific structuralism, aiming to make precise the concept of shared structure between models, formally frame a model as a type of set-structure. This framework is then used to provide a semantic account of (a) the structure of a scientific theory, (b) the applicability of a mathematical theory to a physical theory, and (c) the structural realist’s appeal to the structural continuity between successive physical theories. In this paper, I challenge the idea that, to be so used, (...) the concept of a model and so the concept of shared structure between models must be formally framed within a single unified framework, set-theoretic or other. I first investigate the Bourbaki-inspired assumption that structures are types of set-structured systems and next consider the extent to which this problematic assumption underpins both Suppes’ and recent semantic views of the structure of a scientific theory. I then use this investigation to show that, when it comes to using the concept of shared structure, there is no need to agree with French that “without a formal framework for explicating this concept of ‘structure-similarity’ it remains vague, just as Giere’s concept of similarity between models does ...” (French, 2000, Synthese, 125, pp. 103–120, p. 114). Neither concept is vague; either can be made precise by appealing to the concept of a morphism, but it is the context (and not any set-theoretic type) that determines the appropriate kind of morphism. I make use of French’s (1999, From physics to philosophy (pp. 187–207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) own example from the development of quantum theory to show that, for both Weyl and Wigner’s programmes, it was the context of considering the ‘relevant symmetries’ that determined that the appropriate kind of morphism was the one that preserved the shared Lie-group structure of both the theoretical and phenomenological models. (shrink)