Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: (1) breaking rules and standard operating procedures; (2) challenging authority and avoiding tradition; (3) creating conflict, competition and stress; and (4) taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into (...) ethical issues associated with engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. (shrink)

Ethics researchers advise managers of organizations to link rewards and punishments to ethical and unethical behavior, respectively. We build on prior research maintaining that organizations operate at Kohlbergs stages of moral reasoning, and explain how the over-reliance on rewards and punishments encourages employees to operate at Kohlbergs lowest stages of moral reasoning. We advocate designing organizations as ethical communities and relying on different assumptions about employees in order to foster ethical reasoning at higher levels. Characteristics associated with ethical communities are (...) identified and AES Corporation and Semco S/A serve as examples of corporations exhibiting the design characteristics and assumptions of ethical organizations. (shrink)

Ethics instructors often use cases to help students understand ethics within a corporate context, but we need to know more about the impact a case-based pedagogy has on students’ ability to make ethical decisions. We used a pre- and post-test methodology to assess the effect of using cases to teach ethics in a finance course. We also wanted to determine whether recent corporate ethics scandals might have impacted students’ perceptions of the importance and prevalence of ethics in business, so we (...) used in-depth case studies of several of the major scandals (e.g., Enron, Tyco, Adelphia). Our results are somewhat surprising since studying ethics scandals positively impacts students’ ethical decision making and their perceptions of the ethics of businesspeople. (shrink)

Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: breaking rules and standard operating procedures; challenging authority and avoiding tradition; creating conflict, competition and stress; and taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into ethical issues associated with (...) engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. (shrink)

Explanations of organizational misconduct frequently point to declining firm performance and/or the actions of unethical or suspect leaders. Evidence that high-performing firms act illegally or unethically is an enigma. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by exploring organizational performance using aspirational rather than absolute measures and examining the effect that suspect leader succession has on the increased probability of organizational misconduct. Our analysis of 128 collegiate football programs competing between 1953 and 2016 reveals an increased likelihood (...) of misconduct among organizations with strong as well as weak performance, most notably in comparison to competitive peer programs. Social- and self-referenced aspirations produced distinct relationships between relative performance and misconduct. The impact of leader succession was conditional. The data revealed an increased likelihood of infraction episodes with the appointment of suspect leaders. In some instances, however, a reduced likelihood of misconduct accompanied succession events involving untainted leaders. (shrink)

Ethics researchers focus on moral awareness as a precursor to ethical decision making, but they pay little attention to framing processes that precede moral awareness. This study addresses this gap in the literature to examine how a student entrepreneur starting a venture while completing an assignment frames issues and how these frames affect moral awareness (i.e., whether or not the entrepreneur considers ethical dimensions). Framing does not occur in isolation but is part of a sensemaking process involving others. Using a (...) single case study method, we capture an entrepreneur’s framing process over time as the new venture emerges and our data reveals frames that may preclude consideration of ethical dimensions, including some frames developed and reinforced through entrepreneurship education. We make a contribution to the entrepreneurship education literature by suggesting ways to incorporate ethics into entrepreneurship courses. (shrink)

We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of 33 cases of internal and external whistleblowers wrongfully fired for reporting wrongdoing. Our results show external whistleblowers have less tenure with the organization, greater evidence of wrongdoing, and they tend to be more effective in changing organizational practices. External whistleblowers also experience more extensive retaliation than internal whistleblowers, and patterns of retaliation by management against the whistleblower vary depending on whether the whistleblower reports internally or externally. We discuss implications for organizations and whistleblowers, (...) and we conclude that researchers need to develop different theoretical explanations of internal and external whistleblowing processes. (shrink)

We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of 33 cases of internal and external whistleblowers wrongfully fired for reporting wrongdoing. Our results show external whistleblowers have less tenure with the organization, greater evidence of wrongdoing, and they tend to be more effective in changing organizational practices. External whistleblowers also experience more extensive retaliation than internal whistleblowers, and patterns of retaliation by management against the whistleblower vary depending on whether the whistleblower reports internally or externally. We discuss implications for organizations and whistleblowers, (...) and we conclude that researchers need to develop different theoretical explanations of internal and external whistleblowing processes. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 147-157, Spring 2022.

A crucial feature of Kant's critical-period writing on the sublime is its grounding in moral psychology. Whereas in the pre-critical writings, the sublime is viewed as an inherently exhausting state of mind, in the critical-period writings it is presented as one that gains strength the more it is sustained. I account for this in terms of Kantian moral psychology, and explain that, for Kant, sound moral disposition is conceived as a sublime state of mind.

It has been insufficiently remarked that Murdoch deems “Kant’s ethical theory” to be “one of the most beautiful and exciting things in the whole of philosophy” in her 1959 essay “The Sublime and the Good”. Murdoch specifically has in mind the connection between Kant’s ethics and his theory of the sublime, which runs via the moral feeling of respect (Achtung). The chapter examines Murdoch’s interest in Kant on this point as a way to tease out the range of issues that (...) complicate Kant’s significance for the development of Murdoch’s distinctive conception of ethics as it is articulated in _The Sovereignty of Good_ and earlier essays. It focuses on her particular concerns about the moral dangers of consolation, and why this led her to propose reworking the Kantian theory of the sublime as a theory of art, and specifically of tragedy. (shrink)

This Element considers Kant's account of the sublime in the context of his predecessors both in the Anglophone and German rationalist traditions. Since Kant says with evident endorsement that 'we call sublime that which is absolutely great' and nothing in nature can in fact be absolutely great, Kant concludes that strictly speaking what is sublime can only be the human calling to perfect our rational capacity according to the standard of virtue that is thought through the moral law. The Element (...) takes account of the difference between respect and admiration as the two main varieties of sublime feeling, and concludes by considering the role of Stoicism in Kant's account of the sublime, particularly through the channel of Seneca. (shrink)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been _incapable_ of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon _agential demotion_. (shrink)

A new reading of Plato’s political thought Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships (...) between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule. Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought. (shrink)

The paper argues that existing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an "analysis of experience" (e.g., those of Kitcher and Strawson) fail because they do not properly appreciate the method of the work. The author argues that the Critique provides an analysis of the faculty of reason, and counts as an analysis of experience only in a derivative sense.

‘War is definitely hell on earth’. All too often, we hope the hell will be short-lived, over in a few days, and yet, as we know from experience, hell can go on and on and on. For healthcare workers who provide care to victims of conflict, the work raises many ethical dilemmas. The stories showcased in this edition of NIB share the experiences of a handful of brave individuals and how they navigated their professional ethical obligations as well as their (...) personal convictions during times of conflict. Adeptly portrayed are various approaches to ethical dilemmas, such as adhering to the ethical imperative of medical impartiality, the limits of professional and personal responsibility, coping with moral distress, and the power of humanity, evident through the collective efforts of strangers to help others. This commentary reflects on the ethical grey zones of being a healthcare provider in conflict, as there is no single right way of fulfilling professional obligations, each context being different. As several stories highlight, whilst stressful, the solidarity and comradery of working in a healthcare team can provide great support, purpose, and motivation. (shrink)

The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healthcare have immense potential to improve the care of patients. While there are some emerging practices surro...

This book explores the role and implications of responsibility for anthropology, asking how responsibility is recognised and invoked in the world, what relations it draws upon, and how it comes to define notions of the person, institutional practices, ways of knowing and modes of evaluation. The category of responsibility has a long genealogy within the discipline of anthropology and it surfaces in contemporary debates as well as in anthropologists' collaboration with other disciplines, including when anthropology is applied in fields such (...) as development, medicine, and humanitarian response. As a category that unsettles, challenges and critically engages with political, ethical and epistemological questions, responsibility is central to anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, collaborative research, and applied engagement. With chapters focused on a variety of cultural contexts, this volume considers how anthropology can contribute to a better understanding of responsibility, including the 'responsibility of anthropology' and the responsibility of anthropologists to specific others. (shrink)

This revolutionary book empowers its readers intellectually by providing a snapshot of perennial and timely philosophical topics. Written by twenty expert women in philosophy and representing a diverse and pluralistic approach to philosophy as a discipline, this book appeals to a wide audience. Individual readers, especially girls and women ages 16-24, as well as university and high school educators and students who want a change from standard anthologies that include few or no women will find value in these pages. This (...) volume contains several notable features: the book is divided into four sections that correspond to major fields in Philosophy-metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics-but the chapters within those sections provide fresh ways of understanding those fields. " Every chapter begins with a lively anecdote about a girl or woman in literature, myth, history, science, or art to introduce the chapter's specific topic." Chapters are dominated by women's voices, with nearly all primary and secondary sources used coming from women in the history of philosophy and a diverse set of contemporary women philosophers. "All chapters offer the authors' distinct philosophical perspectives written in their own voices and styles, representing diverse training, backgrounds, and interests." The Introduction and Prologue explicitly invite the book's readers to engage in philosophical conversation and reflection, thus setting the stage for continued contemplation and dialogue beyond the book itself. The result is a rigorous yet accessible entry-point into serious philosophical contemplation designed to embolden and strengthen its readers' own senses of philosophical inquiry and competence. The book's readers will feel confident in knowing that expert women affirm an equitable and just intellectual landscape for all and thus have lovingly collaborated to write this book. (shrink)

Stalnaker’s ‘Assertion’ (1978 [1999]) offers a classic account of diagonalization as an approach to the meaning of a declarative sentence in context. Here I explore the relationship between diagonalization and some puzzles in Mahtani’s book The Objects of Credence. Diagonalization can influence how we think about both credence and desirability, so it influences both components of a standard expected utility equation. In that vein, I touch on two of Mahtani’s case-studies, chance and the finite version of the Two Envelope Paradox.

Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way to (...) distinguish clinical placebos from standard medical treatments. (shrink)

Is the debate over the existence of numbers unsolvable? Mario Gómez-Torrente presents a novel proposal to unclog the old discussion between the realist and the anti-realist about numbers. In this paper, the strategy is outlined, highlighting its results and showing how they determine the desiderata for a satisfactory theory of the reference of Arabic numerals, which should lead to a satisfactory explanation about numbers. It is argued here that the theory almost achieves its goals, yet it does not capture the (...) relevant association between how a number can be split up and the morphological property of Arabic numerals to be positional. This property seems to play a substantial role in providing a complete theory of Arabic numerals and numbers. (shrink)

Programs, policies, and technologies — particularly those concerned with health equity — are often designed with justice envisioned as the end goal. These policies or interventions, however, frequently fail to recognize how the beneficiaries have historically embodied the cumulative effects of marginalization, which undermines the effectiveness of the intended justice. These well-meaning attempts at justice are bounded by greater socio-historical constraints. Bounded justice suggests that it is impossible to attend to fairness, entitlement, and equity when the basic social and physical (...) infrastructures underlying them have been eroded by racism and other historically entrenched isms. Using the case of Brazil’s National Health Policy for the Black Population, this paper proposes that bounded justice can contribute to justice discourses by serving as a concept, a proffering to a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework, and a potential analytic for those interested in the design of policy, technology, and programmatic interventions towards health equity. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

I propose a unified solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle and free choice permission. I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of act dependence, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does. The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of 'may' and 'ought'. This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction — equivalent to Boolean disjunction (...) on the diagonal, but with a different two-dimensional character — that explains the puzzling facts in terms of semantic consequence. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over her own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant’s conception of moral virtue as it is (...) developed in his later work, chiefly the Metaphysics of Morals. Melissa Merritt’s book is a distinctive contribution to this recent turn to virtue in Kant scholarship. Merritt argues that we need a clearer, and textually more comprehensive, account of what reflection is, in order not only to understand Kant’s account of virtue, but also to appreciate how it effectively rebuts long-standing objections to the Kantian reflective ideal. (shrink)

Within the growing developmental literature on children's testimonial learning, the emphasis placed on children's evaluations of testimonial evidence has shielded from view some of the more collaborative dimensions of testimonial learning. Drawing on recent philosophical work on testimony and interpersonal trust, we argue for an alternative way of conceptualizing the social nature of testimonial learning. On this alternative, some testimonial learning is the result of a jointly collaborative epistemic activity, an activity that aims at the epistemic goal of true belief, (...) but that does so by means of an irreducibly social process. (shrink)

The relationship between truth and politics has rarely seemed more vexed. Worries about misinformation and disinformation abound, and the value of expertise for democratic decision-making dismissed. Whom can we trust to provide us with reliable testimony? In Truth and Evidence, the latest in the NOMOS series, Melissa Schwartzberg and Philip Kitcher present nine timely essays shedding light on practices of inquiry. These essays address urgent questions including what it means to #BelieveWomen; what factual knowledge we require to confront challenges (...) like COVID-19; and how white supremacy shapes the law of evidence. (shrink)

While readers of Euripides' Hippolytus have long regarded Phaedra's deltos as a mechanism of punitive revenge, I argue here that the tablet models itself on a judicial curse (defixio) and that its main function is to ensure victory for Phaedra in the upcoming “trial” over her reputation. In support of my thesis I examine three interrelated phenomena: first, Hippolytus' infamous assertion that his tongue swore an oath while his mind remains unsworn (612); second, Phaedra's status as a biaiothanatos; and third, (...) Phaedra's claim that Hippolytus “will learn sophrosune” (731), a speech act that, I conclude, anticipates the silencing effect on Hippolytus of Phaedra's death and her writing. (shrink)