Although a growing body of research has shown the positive impact of ethical leadership on workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. In this investigation, we explore an important boundary condition of ethical leadership by exploring how employees’ moral awareness may lessen the need for ethical leadership. Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we suggest that when individuals already possess a heightened level of moral awareness, ethical leadership’s role in reducing deviant actions may (...) be reduced. However, when individuals lack this strong moral disposition, ethical leadership may be instrumental in inspiring them to reduce their deviant actions. To enhance the external validity and generalizability of our findings, the current research used two large field samples of working professionals in both Turkey and the USA. Results suggest that ethical leadership’s positive influence on workplace deviance is dependent upon the individual’s moral awareness—helpful for those employees whose moral awareness is low, but not high. Thus, our investigation helps to build theory around the contingencies of ethical leadership and the specific audience for whom it may be more influential. (shrink)

Which country, politician, or policy is more of a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic death toll? Which of the two factories causally contributed more to the pollution of the nearby river? A wide-ranging portion of our everyday thought and talk, and attitudes rely on a graded notion of causation. However, it is sometimes highlighted that on most contemporary accounts, causation is on-off. Some philosophers further question the legitimacy of talk of degrees of causation and suggest that we avoid it. Some (...) hold that the notion of degrees of causation is an illusion. In this paper, I’ll argue that causation does come in degrees. (shrink)

It seems intuitive to think that if you contribute more to an outcome, you should be more morally responsible for it. Some philosophers think this is correct. They accept the thesis that ceteris paribus one's degree of moral responsibility for an outcome is proportionate to one's degree of causal contribution to that outcome. Yet, what the degree of causal contribution amounts to remains unclear in the literature. Hence, the underlying idea in this thesis remains equally unclear. In this article, I (...) will consider various plausible criteria for measuring degrees of causal contribution. After each of these criteria, I will show that this thesis entails implausible results. I will also show that there are other plausible theoretical options that can account for the kind of cases that motivate this thesis. I will conclude that we should reject this thesis. (shrink)

This study examines a proposed model whereby ethical leadership positively influences the level of meaning followers experience in their work, which in turn positively impacts followers’ levels of work engagement and organizational identification, as well as reduces their levels of workplace envy. We further hypothesized that cognitive reappraisal strategies for emotional regulation would moderate the ethical leadership–meaningful work relationship. The model was tested in a stratified random field sample of 440 employees and their direct supervisors in the aviation industry in (...) Turkey. Results based on data collected at two points in time showed that ethical leadership has a significant and positive direct effect on engagement and organizational identification, as well as indirect effects on those two outcomes through meaningfulness. Finally, results show that ethical leadership has a significant negative direct effect on workplace envy. Further, results showed that cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation strategy positively moderates, i.e., strengthens, the relationship between ethical leadership and meaningful work. (shrink)

Does one’s causal responsibility increase the degree of one’s moral responsibility? The proponents of resultant moral luck hold that it does. Until quite recently, the causation literature has almost exclusively been interested in the binary question of whether one factor is a cause of an outcome. Naturally, the debate over resultant moral luck also revolved around this binary question. However, we have seen an increased interest in the question of degrees of causation in recent years. And some philosophers have already (...) explored various implications of a graded notion of causation on resultant moral luck. In this paper, I will do the same. But the implications that I will draw attention to are bad news for resultant moral luck. I will show that resultant moral luck entails some implausible results that leave resultant moral luck more indefensible than it was previously thought be. I will also show that what is typically taken to be the positive argument in favor of resultant moral luck fails. I will conclude that we should reject resultant moral luck. (NOTE: Email me for a copy.). (shrink)

Suppose a jury rejects a Black defendant’s testimony because they believe that Black people are often untrustworthy. Or suppose the male members of a board reject a female colleague’s suggestions because they believe that women are too often irrational. Imagine also a woman whose postpartum depression is dismissed by her doctor as mere ‘baby blues.’ All these three people suffer what contemporary English philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice refers to a wrong done to someone as a knower (...) or transmitter of knowledge: due to unjustified prejudice, someone is unfairly judged to not have the knowledge or reasonable beliefs that they actually have. Fricker identifies two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. This essay explains these forms of epistemic injustice and surveys some suggestions for how to prevent them. (shrink)

This study examines a mediated model of ethical leadership on ethical climate, turnover intention, and affective commitment. It is suggested that managers are role models in their organizations. Specifically, through ethical leadership behavior, managers can influence perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn will positively influence organizational members’ turnover intention, and affective commitment. The results indicate that ethical leadership has both direct and indirect effect on affective commitment and turnover intention. The indirect effect of ethical leadership involves shaping perceptions of (...) ethical climate, which in turn, engenders greater affective organizational commitment and less turnover intention. (shrink)

Some memories are more actively cultivated than others, manifesting the obsessive and slippery theaters of contested histories. This may encourage us to explore the ways in which representations of the past are conveyed. While Holocaust awareness has grown globally, its presence in Turkish academia has been limited since the millennium. Recent studies predominantly frame how Turkey integrates the Holocaust within the settled narratives. However, public perception has been shaped by narratives of Turkish consulates saving numerous Turkish Jews from Nazi oppression. (...) This prevalent life-saver theme has become a cornerstone in Holocaust Memory, strengthened by various publications and documentaries. This research mainly investigates Turkey’s restrictive border policy and rescuing activities concerning the Jewish migration during the Second World War and its present-day recollections in today’s Turkey. Through a detailed case analysis, the study contends that popular historical beliefs differ from the facts. Ultimately it reads these accounts in relation to necropolitics that dictates which memories are allowed to live and which are rendered, emphasizing how even in remembrance, a politics of life and death exists. (shrink)

I argue for responsibility internalism. That is, moral responsibility (i.e., accountability, or being apt for praise or blame) depends only on factors internal to agents. Employing this view, I also argue that no one is responsible for what AI does but this isn’t morally problematic in a way that counts against developing or using AI. Responsibility is grounded in three potential conditions: the control (or freedom) condition, the epistemic (or awareness) condition, and the causal responsibility condition (or consequences). I argue (...) that causal responsibility is irrelevant for moral responsibility, and that the control condition and the epistemic condition depend only on factors internal to agents. Moreover, since what AI does is at best a consequence of our actions, and the consequences of our actions are irrelevant to our responsibility, no one is responsible for what AI does. That is, the so-called responsibility gap exits. However, this isn’t morally worrisome for developing or using AI. Firstly, I argue, current AI doesn’t generate a new kind of concern about responsibility that the older technologies don’t. Then, I argue that responsibility gap is not worrisome because neither responsibility gap, nor my argument for its existence, entails that no one can be justly punished, held accountable, or incurs duties in reparations when AI causes a harm. (shrink)

I have written this article as a modest response to some of the criticisms of the ‘event’ that is at the centre of Alain Badiou’s thought and is the most salient concept. By addressing Badiou’s con...

While a number of studies are being done on ethical leadership, little is known about the role of ethical ideology and organizational justice in the relation of the ethical leadership behavior and individual behaviors such as work engagement and organizational misbehavior has tended to be neglected in ethics literature. This study examines the mediating effects of organizational justice on the relations of ethical leadership, work engagement and organizational misbehavior. Also, it investigates the moderating effect of ethical ideology on the relationships (...) among these variables. It proposes that managers’ ethical values and organizational members’ ethical perspectives such as absolutism, exceptionism, situationism, and subjectivism have the potential to be agents of virtue within the organizations. Employee attributions and emotional reactions to the unethical behavior of their leaders are important factors on individual behavior outcomes. So, in this study it is hypothesized that ethical leadership behavior affects organizational justice perception and this, respectively, affects organizational members’ work engagement and organizational misbehavior. It is also hypothesized that ethical ideology would moderate the relationship between the ethical leadership and organizational justice. Results indicate that ethical leadership has both direct and indirect influence on work engagement and organizational misbehavior. Finally, practical implications are discussed, and suggestions for the future research are made. (shrink)

Contractualist work in business ethics as well as in economic organization theory views opportunistic behaviors as problematic since they create economic harm and are often considered to violate ethical norms. Yet, much of the empirical literature on opportunism has adopted a rather simplistic definition of opportunistic behaviors as behaviors that violate formal and/or relational contracts and assumed that instances of opportunism can be unequivocally defined by simply referring to the content of contracts. The consequence of this assumption has been a (...) disregard for factors other than the content of contracts that may influence whether exchange partners judge an unexpected behavior they face during exchange relationships as opportunistic or not. The present investigation explores the factors that shape exchange partners’ subjective opportunism judgments through two vignette-based laboratory experiments. Results from the first experiment, where subjects were asked to take the perspective of a harmed party, show that opportunism judgments are influenced by the type of the behavior, type of the causal account provided for the behavior, perceived type of the exchange, and personality traits of the actor making the judgment. The second experiment, in which subjects were asked to take the perspective of the transgressor, demonstrates the influence of perspective. In particular, victims are more likely to assess a given unexpected behavior as opportunistic than transgressors, and their judgments do not relate to the underlying factors in the same way as the victims’ judgments. I discuss implications in terms of the governance of interfirm exchange relationships. (shrink)

This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a specific focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an (...) interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism fluctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth. (shrink)

This is the first complete, one-volume English translation of the ancient Chinese text Xunzi, one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and elegant works in the tradition of Confucian thought. Through essays, poetry, dialogues, and anecdotes, the Xunzi articulates a Confucian perspective on ethics, politics, warfare, language, psychology, human nature, ritual, and music, among other topics. Aimed at general readers and students of Chinese thought, Eric Hutton’s translation makes the full text of this important work more accessible in English than ever (...) before. Named for its purported author, the Xunzi has long been neglected compared to works such as the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. Yet interest in the Xunzi has grown in recent decades, and the text presents a much more systematic vision of the Confucian ideal than the fragmented sayings of Confucius and Mencius. In one famous, explicit contrast to them, the Xunzi argues that human nature is bad. However, it also allows that people can become good through rituals and institutions established by earlier sages. Indeed, the main purpose of the Xunzi is to urge people to become as good as possible, both for their own sakes and for the sake of peace and order in the world. In this edition, key terms are consistently translated to aid understanding and line numbers are provided for easy reference. Other features include a concise introduction, a timeline of early Chinese history, a list of important names and terms, cross-references, brief explanatory notes, a bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Catastrophic risk raises questions that are not only of practical importance, but also of great philosophical interest, such as how to define catastrophe and what distinguishes catastrophic outcomes from non-catastrophic ones. Catastrophic risk also raises questions about how to rationally respond to such risks. How to rationally respond arguably partly depends on the severity of the uncertainty, for instance, whether quantitative probabilistic information is available, or whether only comparative likelihood information is available, or neither type of information. Finally, catastrophic risk (...) raises important ethical questions about what to do when catastrophe avoidance conflicts with equity promotion. (shrink)

A promise to do some action seems to create a binding obligation to do that action. And yet, paradoxically, an obligation seems not to be a fact that we can create or bring into existence; we can create an obligation only by creating or bringing into existence something else. The only way to avoid the paradox is to show that the act of promising creates something other than an obligation, which nonetheless binds us to perform the action in question. After (...) considering and rejecting various options such as the promisee's expectation and the promisor's resolve, Prichard locates the bindingness of a promise in a prior general promise, which allows the noises we make when promising to generate an obligation to perform the promised action. (shrink)

What are 'emotions'? This book offers a balanced survey of facts and theory.

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Science Without Numbers caused a stir in 1980, with its bold nominalist approach to the philosophy of mathematics and science. It has been unavailable for twenty years and is now reissued in a revised edition with a substantial new preface presenting the author's current views and responses to the issues raised in subsequent debate.

To the question ‘What does it mean to act or to do something?’, replies that it is not easy to identify a common character in actions. Begins by examining the position of Cook Wilson, who maintains that ‘to do something’ means to originate, cause, or bring into existence, either directly or indirectly, some not yet existing state either in oneself or some other body. Although Prichard agrees that usually action involves causing something, he observes that causing a change is not (...) itself an activity. In moving one's hand, one performs that indefinable mental activity of willing some change. The movement of the hand is the effect of the action, not the action itself, a fact overlooked by thinkers like Locke. Turning to the nature of the desire behind one's willing, Prichard rejects the view that this desire is actually a desire for the change willed. Despite forceful objections, Prichard maintains that this desire is the desire for the willing of that change. (shrink)

An English language translation accompanies the original Greek text of Aristotle's book about the nature of the state, constitutions, revolutions, democracy, and oligarchy.

Suppose that a decision-maker's aim, under certainty, is to maximise some continuous value, such as lifetime income or continuous social welfare. Can such a decision-maker rationally satisfy what has been called "continuity for easy cases" while at the same time satisfying what seems to be a widespread intuition against the full-blown continuity axiom of expected utility theory? In this note I argue that the answer is "no": given transitivity and a weak trade-off principle, continuity for easy cases violates the anti-continuity (...) intuition. I end the note by exploring an even weaker continuity condition that is consistent with the aforementioned intuition. (shrink)

According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent's desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticised both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent's attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent of her utility and probability functions. The main (...) problem with that approach is that it suggests that attitudes to risk are wholly distinct from people's (non-instrumental) desires. To overcome this problem, we develop a framework where an agent's utility function is defined over chance propositions (i.e., propositions describing objective probability distributions) as well as ordinary (non-chance) ones, and argue that one should explain different risk attitudes in terms of different forms of the utility function over such propositions. (shrink)

This volume is a wonderful introduction to Foucault and a testimony to the deep humanity of the man himself.

Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of survival chances. I identify (...) four desiderata that, I contend, any such justification should satisfy, and explain how my account meets these desiderata, unlike some previous accounts. (shrink)

Prichard's concern here is whether a person's obligation depends either on features of his or her situation or on features of his or her thoughts about that situation. Related to this contrast between the objective view and the subjective view is the issue of whether an obligation is an obligation to do some action. To the latter issue, Prichard responds that an obligation is not an obligation to do something, but an obligation to set ourselves to do something; as a (...) consequence, it is necessary to modify the terms of Prichard's primary concern. This modification diminishes the force of the objective view and does nothing to eliminate the central difficulty in the subjective view, namely, that the obligation to do some action is said to depend not on the character that the action would have, but on our belief that it would have that character. The belief that some general character picks out obligations derives from the mistaken habit of regarding the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as equivalent to ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’. Having highlighted this mistake, Prichard holds that in instances where we have considered the circumstances fully, our thoughts about the situation decide whether we ought to perform a given activity. (shrink)

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

The act of exchanging one thing for another seems to involve a promise. The confidence needed to relinquish something one has on the understanding that one will receive what another has in exchange can be expressed in terms of resolve. In binding oneself, one thinks that if the other binds himself or herself to perform a given action, then he or she will do that action. In cases in which one person's action does not precede the other's, one's promise involves (...) thinking that if the other binds himself or herself, then he or she will carry out the promised action. (shrink)

In this paper we briefly examine and evaluate Quine’s physicalism. On the supposition, in accordance with Quine’s views, that there can be no change of any sort without a physical change, we argue that this point leaves plenty of room to understand and accept a limited autonomy of the special sciences and of other domains of disciplinary and common-sense inquiry and discourse. The argument depends on distinguishing specific, detailed programs of reduction from the general Quinean strategy of reduction by explication. (...) We argue that the details of the relations of particular sciences, disciplines and domains of discourse depend on empirical evidence and empirical-theoretical developments and that the generalized approach of reduction by explication is also subject to related empirical-theoretical constraints. So understood, physicalism lacks much of the controversial force and many of the implications sometimes associated with it. (shrink)

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

Maintaining that the existence of Moral Philosophy, as it is usually understood, rests on a mistake, Prichard undertakes to formulate our true attitude towards moral obligations. The right action does not depend upon either our own good or what is good. Obligations are underivative, immediate, and self‐evident, and therefore, we do not come to appreciate them through argument or a process of non‐moral thinking. The mistake on which Moral Philosophy rests, which links obligation to virtue or desire, parallels the mistake (...) underpinning the Theory of Knowledge. Like moral obligation, knowledge is immediate; it need not be vindicated or improved by additional knowledge. (shrink)

I defend a weak version of the Pigou-Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot accommodate. However, the principle can be justified (...) by the same reasoning that has recently been used to defend the core axiom of ex post prioritarianism and egalitarianism, namely, Pigou-Dalton for well-being. The arguably biggest challenge for proponents of Pigou-Dalton for chances is that it violates State Dominance for social prospects. However, I argue that we have independent reason for rejecting State Dominance for social prospects, since it prevents a social planner from properly respecting people's preferences. (shrink)