Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

Ciencias sociales : saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos / Edgardo Lander / - Europa modernidad y eurocentrismo / Enrique Dussel / - La colonialidad a lo largo y a lo ancho : el hemisferio occidental en el horizonte colonial de la modernidad / Walter D. Mignolo / - Naturaleza del poscolonialismo : del eurocentrismo al globocentrismo / Fernando Coronil / - El lugar de la naturaleza y la naturaleza del lugar : ¿globalización o postdesarrollo? / Arturo Escobar / - Ciencias sociales, (...) violencia epistémica y el problema de la invención del otro / Santiago Castro-Gómez / - Superar la exclusión, conquistar la equidad : reformas, políticas y capacidades en el ámbito social / Alejandro Moreno / - Abrir, impensar, y redimesionar las ciencias sociales en América Latina y el Caribe. ¿Es posible una ciencia social no eurocéntrica en nuestra región? / Francisco López Segrera / - Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina / Aníbal Quijano. (shrink)

We critically reconsider an old hypothesis of the role of the dekad in Pythagorean philosophy. Unlike Zhmud, we claim that: 1) the dekad did play a role in Philolaus’ astronomical system, and 2) Aristotle did not project Plato’s theory of the ten eidetic numbers onto the Pythagoreans. We claim that the dekad, as the τέλειος ἀριθμός, should be understood in Philolaus’ philosophy as completeness and the basis of counting in Greek – as in most other languages – in a decimal (...) system. Additionally, we argue that the number ten is not even a candidate for the τέλειος ἀριθμός in Plato’s philosophy. As a final result of our discussion, we compare and contrast Philolaus’, Plato’s, and Speusippus’ accounts of completeness in relation to numbers. (shrink)

The offer-and-acceptance analysis has long been questioned as not (easily) applicable to certain methods of contracting. This paper looks at this analysis through the prism of normative powers and identifies much deeper problems with the analytic explanation of how such unilateral normative powers as offer and acceptance can generate such a normative result as concluding a contract. It argues that even if the powers to offer and accept are exercised, as they are in certain methods of contracting, these are not (...) the normative powers that create contractual obligations; such obligations are always created by the jointly exercised power to contract. The paper substantiates an account of the power to contract as a sui generis normative power and explains the role the unilateral powers to offer and to accept play when they are exercised, while also explaining why there is no need to ‘invent’ offering and accepting where there are none. (shrink)

The word excellence is derived from the Latin word excellentia, and it means the quality of being extremely good. Human excellences could be defined as those human qualities that make a person outstanding, exceptional, superior, or, in one word, the best of one's kind in any field of human activities. Frequently, it is synonymously used with the word virtue, narrowly meaning moral excellence.

The question "Where do we come from?" has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (_chora_, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of "matrixial/maternal hospitality" producing space and matter of and for the other. Irina Aristarkhova theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary (...) scholarship, she applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question "Can the machine nurse?" is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. Aristarkhova concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other. (shrink)

In her seminal attack on modern moral philosophy, G. E. M. Anscombe claims that Kant's ‘rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it’. Although this so-called problem of relevant descriptions has received considerable attention in the literature, there is little agreement on how it should be understood or solved. My aim in this paper is, first, to clarify the problem (...) by clearing up several misunderstandings, and, second, to show that the problem is rooted in a standard assumption about Kant's stance on the scope of moral principles—an assumption that precludes its solution. I argue that the problem consists in the fact that Kant's formula of universal law seems to stand in need of an account of moral sensibility that does not render the formula superfluous. But, as my discussion of existing solutions reveals, there can be no such account. Instead, I propose a dissolution: we should think of the formula of universal law itself as Kant's account of moral sensibility. In order to do so, we must reject the standard assumption that a principle is universal if and only if it holds for all instances of the action type that it specifies. (shrink)

New media (highly interactive digital technology for creating, sharing, and consuming information) affords users a great deal of control over their informational diets. As a result, many users of new media unwittingly encapsulate themselves in epistemic bubbles (epistemic structures, such as highly personalized news feeds, that leave relevant sources of information out (Nguyen forthcoming)). Epistemically paternalistic alterations to new media technologies could be made to pop at least some epistemic bubbles. We examine one such alteration that Facebook has made in (...) an effort to fight fake news and conclude that it is morally permissible. We further argue that many epistemically paternalistic policies can (and should) be a perennial part of the internet information environment. (shrink)

Based on a dual process view of ethical judgment, we examine the role of empathic concern and perspective taking on the acceptability of lying to protect the company. We hypothesize that these traits will matter to a different extent under conditions of high and low perceived time hurriedness. Our research hypotheses are tested in a survey of 134 US workers. Results show that empathic concern reduces the acceptability of lying to protect the company for individuals who tend to do things (...) quickly and feel in a hurry at work. On the other hand, perspective taking reduces the acceptability of lying for individuals who experience low levels of time hurriedness. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

En el Gran Discurso de Protágoras, en el diálogo platónico que lleva su nombre, Platón pone en boca de Protágoras un mito acerca del origen, desarrollo y naturaleza del ser humano, que es de gran relevancia filosófica. Se expresa que los dioses crearon a los seres mortales desde dos elementos: la tierra y el fuego. A su vez, también asignaron dos titanes, Epimeteo y Prometeo, para que proveyeran a los mortales de sus facultades. ¿Acaso esto implica que la creación no (...) fue terminada por los dioses? ¿Hasta qué punto los dioses crearon enteramente al ser humano? ¿Podría afirmarse que este es un mito creacionista? El desarrollo de los seres vivientes puede dividirse en cuatro instancias. A lo largo de este artículo, se proponen distintos modelos hermenéuticos para responder los interrogantes mencionados anteriormente. (shrink)

We suggest that understanding unethical behavior in organizations involves understanding how people view themselves and their relationships with others, a concept known as self-construal. Across multiple studies, employing both field and laboratory settings, we examine the impact of three dimensions of self-construal (independent, relational, and collective) on unethical behavior. Our results show that higher levels of relational self-construal relate negatively to unethical behavior. We also find that differences in levels of relational self for men and women mediate gender differences in (...) unethical behavior. We discuss both the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)

El propósito de este libro es de examinar cuales fueron los órdenes epistemológicos, las prácticas discursivas y los mecanismos disciplinarios que hicieron posible en el siglo XX la construcción de un objeto de conocimiento llamado "Latinoamérica", y de una serie de saberes filosóficos sobre "lo latinoamericano". El autor realiza un ejercicio deconstructivo de aquellas narrativas que, con base a la creación de identidades homogéneas, buscaron presentar a Latinoamérica como lo "otro" de la modernidad occidental, e incluso como el continente llamado (...) a mostrar un camino nuevo de liberación para toda la humanidad. A través de un diálogo con pensadores como Foucault, Said, Rama, Lyotard, Mignolo y Spivak, el autor muestra que los principales temas, registros y motivos esgrimidos a favor de una "exterioridad" latinoamericana con respecto a la modernidad, son en realidad discursos pertenecientes a un orden moderno del saber. (shrink)

As in science and philosophy, thought experiments in mathematics link a problem to new epistemic resources that are unavailable in a given practice, e.g., Euclidean geometry. Thought experiments invite us to perform an imaginary scenario involving counterfactual, deductive and sensory elements. This chapter aims to pinpoint the beneficial peculiarities of thought experiments in mathematics in comparison with inferences, diagrams and calculative procedures. Reflection about thought experiments assists us to realize both the limits and opportunities in mathematical thinking. Henceforth, the analysis (...) of examples suggests a broader understanding of mathematical, thought and experiment. (shrink)

As a cognitivist about emotions, Socrates takes the fear of death to be a belief that death is a bad thing for the one who dies. Socrates, however, thinks there are reasons for thinking death is not a bad thing at all, and might even be a blessing. So the question considered in this paper is: how would Socrates explain the fact that so many people believe death is bad?

Johann Gottfried Herder, like his contemporaries, reflected on language and in 1772 published the Treatise on the Origin of Language, which in the previous year had earned the distinction of the Berlin Academy for best essay. However, even today, much of his thought is unknown, ignoring the fact that some of the modern approaches of contemporary philosophy, philosophical anthropology or even sociobiology are already stated there, namely in the narratives resulting from the enunciation of the four natural laws. More than (...) justifying the origin of language, the philosopher’s essay also allows us to understand human nature, inserting its genesis at the heart of philosophical anthropology and contradicting, if not even confronting in this way, the divine tradition of this attribution. Thus, at first, a generic analysis of the work will be carried out, highlighting the fundamental theses that will allow the establishment of a dialogue with some of the contemporary philosophical approaches. Then, admitting the possibility of a scenario of technological singularity, as stated by Irving John Good, Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil, to verify the plausibility and validity of Herder’s theses regarding the scope of language and human nature and how this could constitute a frontier of resistance. (shrink)

Pothos & Busemeyer's (P&B's) query about whether quantum probability can provide a foundation for the cognitive modeling embodies so many underlying implications that the subject is far from exhausted. In this brief commentary, however, I suggest that the conceptual thresholds of the meaningful learning give rise to a typical Boltzmann's weighting measure, which indicates astatistical verisimilitudeof quantum behavior in the human cognitive ensemble.

The debates between various Buddhist and Hindu philosophical systems about the existence, definition and nature of self, occupy a central place in the history of Indian philosophy and religion.

The aim of this article is to discuss quantitative content analysis as established in communication sciences as a method for research in business ethics. We argue that communication sciences and business ethics are neighboring disciplines, which allow the transfer of quantitative content analysis from communication sciences to business ethics. Technically, quantitative content analysis can be applied through human as well as software coding. Examples for both applications are provided and discussed. We make reference to the software solutions ‘Leximancer’, ‘Crawdad’, and (...) ‘Wordle’, and examine their suitability and limitations with regard to ethical questions for researching business ethics. We recommend a mixed‐method approach, combining human and software coding. Furthermore, we propose a three‐step process that discusses quantitative content analysis as a method for business ethics, including an ethical research objective, and most importantly, concluding with ethical reasoning and interpretation of the quantitative results. (shrink)

Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence. Anachronistic readings of evolution, which view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae, continue to influence public policy and common morality. The (...) assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have converged on cognitive functions comparable to those found in vertebrates. The exclusion of invertebrates is also motivated by cognitive-affective biases that covertly influence moral judgment, as well as a flawed balancing of scientific uncertainty against moral risk. All these factors shape moral attitudes toward basal vertebrates too, but they are particularly acute in the arthropod context. Moral consistency dictates that the same standards of evidence and risk management that justify policy protections for vertebrates also support extending moral consideration to certain invertebrates. Moving beyond a vertebrate-centered conception of welfare can also clarify foundational moral concepts in their own right. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal that significant changes are taking place in the agricultural sector in the processes of management and organization of production, since the digitalization of the economy itself and other spheres of public life, in fact, is a kind of stimulus for the structural and technological transformation of the agro-industrial complex. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the article examines the modern realities and the immediate prospects of the digital agricultural revolution taking (...) place in the world, and its impact on the process of forming human resources has not yet been sufficiently studied. As a result, it was revealed that the development of rural areas and agriculture in the context of the introduction of digital technologies is unrealistic without highly professional specialists and workers with the potential for training and development. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the origin, development and nature of human beings as it is described in Plato’s Protagoras myth. My main claim is that, according to this story, the human is a multi-dimensional being with various aspects and dispositions. After the creation of mortals had been finished, the human dispositions were further developed and differentiated through time. The creation and further development of living beings is to be divided into four stages, out of which the (...) pre-political and political are of particular significance for humans. I will attempt to show that each of these stages can be better accounted for by using the different hermeneutical models, or by finding out which theory underlines each of them. (shrink)

In Protagoras’ so called Great Speach, in Plato’s dialogue named after him, the Greek philosopher attributes the sophist a myth about the origin, development and nature of human beings, which has philosophical relevance. It is said that the gods created the mortal beings out of two elements, earth and fire. They assigned two titans, Epimetheus and Prometheus, to provide mortals with their faculties. Do this implies that creation had not been finished by the gods? To what extent do the gods (...) entirely create human beings? Is this mith a creationist one? In this paper, the development of living beings is divided in four stages, and different hermeneutic and explanatory models are proposed to adress the myth and answer the questions raised before. (shrink)

We apply the “wisdom of the crowd” idea to human category learning, using a simple approach that combines people's categorization decisions by taking the majority decision. We first show that the aggregated crowd category learning behavior found by this method performs well, learning categories more quickly than most or all individuals for 28 previously collected datasets. We then extend the approach so that it does not require people to categorize every stimulus. We do this using a model‐based method that predicts (...) the categorization behavior people would produce for new stimuli, based on their behavior with observed stimuli, and uses the majority of these predicted decisions. We demonstrate and evaluate the model‐based approach in two case studies. In the first, we use the general recognition theory decision‐bound model of categorization (Ashby & Townsend, ) to infer each person's decision boundary for two categories of perceptual stimuli, and we use these inferences to make aggregated predictions about new stimuli. In the second, we use the generalized context model exemplar model of categorization (Nosofsky, ) to infer each person's selective attention for face stimuli, and we use these inferences to make aggregated predictions about withheld stimuli. In both case studies, we show that our method successfully predicts the category of unobserved stimuli, and we emphasize that the aggregated crowd decisions arise from psychologically interpretable processes and parameters. We conclude by discussing extensions and potential real‐world applications of the approach. (shrink)

Introduction. Innovationism in various areas of society has changed both the natural and social environment. The change speed in the new infor- mation and communication field is the reason for many questions related to studying the problems of society and the machine, finding out the place of artificial intelligence in social relations. These pro- cesses stimulated the philosophical research, the subject of which was man, modern technologies, scenarios for the development of society, socio- cultural and political-legal forms of its organization. (...) Since the 90s of the twentieth century in the West and later in Russia, a transhumanistic concept has been formed, which connects man, society and technology in a special way. Representatives of transhumanism study the technical develop- ments of human immortality and build models of the perfect man, pursuing as a goal, his deliver- ance from suffering and disease. Transhumanistic perspectives actualize the need for a thorough, constructive and critical assessment of the possible advantages and risks of technological development, and its impact on the political and legal structure. In this regard, the ability to see and isolate the features of this process and subsequent reflection is fundamentally important. The purpose of the article is to consider political and legal transformations in the context of the interaction of modern technologies and soci- ety through the prism of transhumanistic perspec- tives, to identify possible directions of philosophical reflection of political and legal modes of modernity. Methods. To achieve the research goal, general scientific methods of cognition were used: analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, comparison, abstraction. The article also applied institutional- functional and system-structural approaches, the method of interpretation and content analysis. The analysis of public opinion and special labeling of artificial intelligence was carried out with the help of appealing to network content (social networks, blogs, and forums). Communication channels reproduce messages mentioning modern technolo- gies from the point of view of the philistine world- view based on stereotypes broadcast in society and the influence of popular culture. Content analysis revealed the relevance of the spectrum of labeling, relative to artificial intelligence systems, includ- ing the verbs “create”, “destroy”, “help”, “enslave”. Regarding the sphere of labor, law and politics, the positions differ, from outright alarmism to utopian images of social well-being. Scientific novelty of the study. The article analyzes the prospects of considering the phenom- enon of social transformations, the forms of their representation through political and legal views as exemplified by transhumanism. Results. The author attempts to give a comprehen- sive description of social changes in the field of public administration, legal regulation, legal per- sonality and legal responsibility, social equality of participants in legal relations through the specific refraction of these social phenomena in transhu- manistic ideas. The spectrum of the main problems in the sphere of interests of the transhumanistic worldview is listed. Conclusion. Turning to modernization strategies on the example of transhumanism is a natural and necessary need in the political and legal sphere, in particular. In the course of the analysis, a wide range of problems were identified that actualize the social and axiological and anthropological optics of the research. Diverse forms of transhumanistic political trends act as manifestations of socio-legal reflection on the intensification of innovation- ism, which is capable of radically changing human nature. (shrink)

The question of whether object recognition is orientation-invariant or orientation-dependent was investigated using a repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. In RB, the second occurrence of a repeated stimulus is less likely to be reported, compared to the occurrence of a different stimulus, if it occurs within a short time of the first presentation. This failure is usually interpreted as a difficulty in assigning two separate episodic tokens to the same visual type. Thus, RB can provide useful information about which representations are (...) treated as the same by the visual system. Two experiments tested whether RB occurs for repeated objects that were either in identical orientations, or differed by 30, 60, 90, or 180°. Significant RB was found for all orientation differences, consistent with the existence of orientation-invariant object representations. However, under some circumstances, RB was reduced or even eliminated when the repeated object was rotated by 180°, suggesting easier individuation of the repeated objects in this case. A third experiment confirmed that the upside-down orientation is processed more easily than other rotated orientations. The results indicate that, although object identity can be determined independently of orientation, orientation plays an important role in establishing distinct episodic representations of a repeated object, thus enabling one to report them as separate events. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)