Online research in philosophy

The SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management will be the first substantive scholarly work to provide a map of the state of art research in the growing field ...

In the early 2000s, the development of local food systems in advanced industrial countries has expanded beyond creation and support of farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture farms and projects to include targeted Buy Local Food campaigns. Non-governmental groups in many U.S. places and regions have launched such campaigns with the intent of motivating and directing consumers toward more local food purchasing in general. This article examines the current manifestations and possibilities for social justice concerns in Buy Local Food campaigns, (...) by considering them within the more general category of “selective patronage“ campaigns. Historical campaign examples, such as Buy Union, Buy American, and Buy Black campaigns, offer instructive comparisons to contemporary consumer campaigns promoting local food. Through examining the construction of threats, intended beneficiaries, products to be avoided, and those to be preferentially selected, the paper demonstrates how selective patronage campaigns have emphasized social justice needs and concerns for designated groups in ways that have been potentially exclusionary of other disadvantaged groups and thus undermining of social justice more broadly. As a contemporary instance of “selective patronage,“ Buy Local Food campaigns exhibit similar contradictory impulses, which are intensified by the conceptual and practical pitfalls in designating “local.“ The article concludes by considering how the challenges and prospects for commitments to social justice in local food consumer campaigns reinforce the importance of emerging initiatives centered on domestic fair trade. (shrink)

Three contemporary acts—corporate theft, sexual abuse of minors, and abortion—when done by generally moral people whose consciences at times seems to be inoperative, all share the same dynamic of harming an innocent person entrusted to them. Drawingupon philosophical anthropology, I argue that these acts reveal a mislocation of conscience in the emotions, imagination, memory, theoretical intellect, or will as defended by Hume, James, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, or Hegel. In this article Aquinas and certain contemporary Catholic philosophers engage these erroneous views (...) about conscience. They defend the position that conscience is found in a person’s exercise of the practical intellect as integrated with, but not supplanted by, these other operations. Throughout the analysis Christine Gudorf’s existential reflection on the relation of her conscience to abortion is analyzed. I argue that many generallymoral people today have in one area either disengaged, locked tight, or transferred their conscience by what Robert Lifton calls “The Faustian Bargain of Doubling.”. (shrink)

In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consent order to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The order decreed the AICPA to lessen its longstanding ethics code which had until then banned the receipts of commissions, referral fees and contingent fees. The FTC alleged that the AICPA banned receipt of the fees as an attempt to restrain trade (FTC, 1990).In the present study, we sought to determine if CPAs'' preference for bans on commissions, referral fees and (...) contingent fees is related to their moral reasoning whereby CPAs perceive the bans to serve as a means of resolving ethical issues. While determining this matter cannot prove whether the bans did or did not actually result in restrained trade, it can offer insight into the perceived ethical importance to CPAs of the overturned rules. Based on a random sample of AICPA members and using Rest''s Defining Issues Test (DIT) to measure moral reasoning, we did not find a CPA''s moral reasoning to be related to his/her preference for ethics rules which ban commissions, referral fees or contingent fees. However, our results did indicate that most CPAs prefer banning commissions, referral fees and contingent fees, with those CPAs holding a higher financial stake in public accounting, namely partners, favoring banning referral fees and contingent fees significantly less than CPAs with a lesser stake. Further, we noted a significant negative relationship between financial stake and moral reasoning. These results seem to suggest that self-interest among CPAs may influence their moral reasoning.Further study is needed to examine the relationship between self-interest of CPAs and their moral reasoning. If self-interest clouds moral judgments made by CPAs, capital markets are in danger. Rendering an independent audit opinion must exclude self-interest. (shrink)

v. 1. The Aristotelian revolution, 750 BC-AD 1250 -- v. 2. The early humanist Reformation, 1250-1500.