This article investigates relationships between countries' legal traditions and their quality of life as measured by a number of widely reported social indicators; in so doing it also offers a critique of a highly influential body of work which is widely cited in the literatures of corporate governance, economics and finance. That body of work has shown, inter alia, statistically significant relationships between legal traditions and various proxies for investor protection. We show statistically significant relationships between legal traditions and various (...) proxies for societal health. Our comparative evidence suggests that the interests of investors are not congruent with the interests of wider society, and that the criteria for judging the effectiveness of approaches to corporate governance should be broadened. (shrink)

If a critique of everyday life is to become a serious undertaking, virtually everything we experience needs to be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny. Even fairy tales. Like so much else in modern culture, these tales may not be as innocuous as they appear. To the extent that the culture industry has appropriated them and uses their motifs to manipulate consciousness or shape behavior, especially in children, fairy tales may be more effective as instruments of social control than one (...) would think. Perhaps for this reason the study of these tales is too important to be left to folklore aficionados or specialists in children's literature. (shrink)

Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of cross-linguistic data discussed by contemporary epistemologists and the philosophical debates they have generated.

Recent trends in psychiatry involve a transition from categorical to dimensional frameworks, in which the boundary between health and pathology is understood as a difference in degree rather than as a difference in kind. A major tenet of dimensional approaches is that no qualitative distinction can be made between health and pathology. As a consequence, these approaches tend to characterize such a threshold as pragmatic or conventional in nature. However, dimensional approaches to psychopathology raise several epistemological and ontological issues. First, (...) we review major sources of evidence usually recruited in support of the dimensional trend (focusing on clinical observation and biological data), and we show that these are connected to different conceptualizations of how dimensional traits extend across health and pathology. Second, we criticize two unquestioned assumptions that stand at the core of the dimensional trend: a) that there is continuity from health to pathology at the symptomatic level; b) that such continuity reflects an underlying continuity in the genetic liability for pathological conditions. Third, we argue against the idea of a conventional threshold by showing that such a view implies a linear relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. Fourth, drawing on epigenetics and developmental biology, we offer a characterization of mental disorders as stable and dynamic constellations of multi-level variables that differ qualitatively from ‘healthy states’. We conclude by showing that our account has several theoretical advantages over both categorical and dimensional approaches. Notably, it provides crucial insights into psychological development over time and individual differences, with major implications in terms of intervention and clinical decision-making. (shrink)

Trust is a hot topic of academic research. Across disciplines – from philosophy to psychology to sociology – there is a growing body of scholarship on trust.1 This scholarship addresses, among othe...

We propose in this paper to focus upon the de-ontological self concept discoverable in Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. In a larger study, we intend to contrast this “no self” paradigm with major pro-ontological formulations of the self concept. These pro-ontological definitions can be divided into three basic types, namely the absolute-universal self, the transcendental-constituting self, and the natural-organic self.

ArgumentThis paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago’s sweatshop system. Kelley’s case shows that her surveys were most effective as “grounded” knowledge, rooted in a local community with which she was well acquainted. Her social survey, re-enacted by (...) lawmakers and the press, provided the evidence that moved her target audience to legal action. Chemist and propagator of the Home Economics Movement Ellen Richards situated the social problem, and hence its solution, not in exploitative working conditions, but in the inefficient and wasteful usage of available resources by the poor. Laboratory work, she argued, would enable the development of optimal standards, and educational programs should bring these standards to the household by means of models and exhibits. With this aim, she constructed public spaces that she ran as food laboratories and sanitary experiments. Kelley and Richards thus crossed the doorsteps of the household in very different ways. While Florence Kelley entered the household to change the living and working conditions of the poor by changing the law, Richards flipped the household inside out by bringing women into hybrid public laboratory spaces to change their behavior by experiment and instruction. (shrink)

Since 2010, the European Journal of Anaesthesiology has required the reporting of five items concerning ethical approval in articles describing human research: ethics committee’s name and address, chairperson’s name, study’s protocol number and approval date. We aimed to assess whether this requirement has helped to identify and to contact the referenced ethics committees. In this cross-sectional study, we analysed articles requiring ethical approval, according to the Swiss federal law for human research and published in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology (...) in 2011. Ethics committees were searched through our institutional Internet access based on information provided in the articles. The last search was performed in November 2015. Numbers of items reported, of ethics committees identified, and of those that confirmed having provided ethical approval are reported. Of 76 articles requiring ethical approval, 74 declared it. Ethics committees’ names and addresses were mentioned in 63/74, protocol numbers in 51/74, approval dates in 48/74, and chairpersons’ names in 45/74. We could identify 44/74 committees; 36/74 answered our inquiry and 24/74 confirmed their role. Thirty-four of 74 articles reported all five items; in 25/34, we were able to identify an ethics committee, 18/34 answered our inquiry, and 15/34 confirmed their role. Forty of 74 articles reported ≤4 items; in 19/40, we were able to identify an ethics committee, 18/40 answered our inquiry, and 9/40 confirmed their role. Reporting five items significantly increased identification of ethics committees and their confirmation of ethical approval. Twelve of 74 ethics committees were unable to confirm their role in approving the study. Even when details concerning ethical approval were reported in these studies of human research, we were unable to identify almost half of the ethics committees concerned. The reporting of five items, compared with reporting ≤4, was associated with facilitated identification of ethics committees, and increased the likelihood that they would be able to confirm the study’s approval. Future research should identify which information facilitates identification of, and contact with, ethics committees. (shrink)

This is an intellectual autobiography that aims to explain how I am both an analytic philosopher who writes on questions of moral relativism and pluralism and also on classical Confucianism and Daoism. I have written on the subjects of moral psychology and moral epistemology, articulating what I see to be a fruitful consilience between insights of both Confucian and Daoist thinkers and some of the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience. I regard as synergistic and completely logical this combination of (...) interests, but many find it surprising, so I identify the experiences and influences that brought me to where I am now. (shrink)

The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research – including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) – suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary:After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence (...) and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions.Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words – contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects. (shrink)

This paper explores the topic of military ethics, what we mean by that term, what it covers, how it is understood, and how it is taught. It suggests that the unifying factor that makes this a coherent subject beyond individual national interpretations of it is the core idea of military professionalism. The paper draws out the distinction between training and education and draws on research conducted by a number of different people and agencies, including the International Committee of the Red (...) Cross, to establish what factors contribute to effective pedagogy and the inculcation of appropriate attitudes and behaviours. The paper concludes by looking at the way military ethics contributes to military outcomes from protecting civilians and the vulnerable to building resilience in our own military personnel to protect their mental health, through to the strategic costs of losing the moral high ground if behaviour is seen to fall short of that expected from military professionals. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

This book offers both the theoretical background behind the minority effect, teachers' personal experiences as they experienced being a minority, and their analyses and insights for teaching diverse learners. This book uses real-life experiences of diverse people to illustrate that, if not understood and addressed, situational minorities at school or work are unlikely to perform at their highest potentials.

Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent (...) sincerely asserts that p, non-linguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

CHRISTIAN ETHICS IS VIRTUALLY DEVOID OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK. Many Christian ethicists practice "veranda ethics": They write from a vast social remove from the issues they address, like poverty and war, as observers. Fieldwork, as illustrated by casework in Northern Uganda, provides a way to overcome this remove.

We discuss four methodological issues regarding cross-cultural judgment studies of facial expressions of emotion involving design, sampling, stimuli, and dependent variables. We use examples of relatively recent studies in this area to highlight and discuss these issues. We contend that careful consideration of these, and other, cross-cultural methodological issues can help researchers minimize methodological errors, and can guide the field to address new and different research questions that can continue to facilitate an evolution in the field’s thinking about (...) the nature of culture, emotion, and facial expressions. (shrink)

The purpose of our article is to describe the initial development process of the subordinate influence ethics (SIE) measure, an instrument that was crossculturally conceived, designed, and validity tested to measure upward influence ethics strategies of professional subordinates across different societies, as well as within a single society. Development of the SIE began by defining the SIE constructs through theoretical review and empirical (nominal group technique) assessments in Germany, France, Hong Kong, and the U. S. In the present measurement development (...) phase, the SIE has been found to consist of three distinct dimensions: pro-organizational behaviors, self-serving behaviors, and maliciously intended behaviors. The construct validity of the SIE was examined across 4113 subjects from 30 countries. A reduced model of the SIE was developed empirically to represent the "best model" for the three-factor scale. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking (...) eighteen different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, (...) we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Development ethicists from one society may help understand and evaluate social change in another society. After examining several types of such cross-cultural assessments, the author argues that insider-outsider hybrids are the most promising cross-cultural dialogue partners.

Objective: To identify the frequency and nature of care conflict dilemmas that United States long-term care providers encounter, response strategies, and use of ethics resources to assist with dispute resolution. Design: An online cross-sectional survey was distributed to the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine (AMDA). Results: Two-thirds of participants, primarily medical directors, have rejected surrogate instructions and 71% have managed family conflict. Conflict over treatment decisions and issues interpreting advance directives were frequently reported. Half of facilities lack (...) a formal dispute mediation policy. Only five respondents have called an ethics consult for assistance. Conclusion: Ethically tense care conflicts commonly arise in long-term and post-acute care facilities. Few facility procedures incorporate ethics resources into actual practice. Recommendations are made to create actionable policy, increase access to ethics services, and support staff skill development in order to improve the end-of-life care experiences for patients, families, and care facility staff. (shrink)

'Trade in Health is a timely reflection on the interface of economics with the ethics and public policy facets of the international movement of patients. Health issues such as these are at the forefront of modern political economy."National" health is increasingly less so. Reisman's previous scholarship in this area is brought to bear in an insightful and eminently readable and engaging fashion. In an area where uncovering the facts is more difficult than "decyphering the Dead Sea Scrolls", such a reflective (...) work on the critical aspects of political economy helps to fill a void in considering whether such trade is likely to be in the interests of patients, nations and the global community. In addition to the rosy picture of healthy and wealthy tourists having a sojourn for medical care during a vacation, Reisman is not afraid to tackle the thorny issues concerning trade in organs, eggs and even death, in this sobering and comprehensive volume. It is a rare skill to bring the luminaries of Smith, Marshall, Mill and Confucius to bear on such a contemporary tale! International travel by patients is at the nexus of a revolution in global health. It is driving and affecting aspects of foreign investment, health worker migration and e-health provision. Reisman skilfully links these foundations of health care, and as such provides critical text for consideration by those seeking to build and strengthen future health systems. Trade in Health is an excellent overview. It provides critical insights for those new to the area as well as new information and challenges for those of us involved for a number of years.' - Richard Smith, Professor of Health Ssytem Economics and Dean of Faculty of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK. Once exports and imports meant agriculture and industry. In the global economy and the electronic age, trade is also expanding into the service sector. This timely book closely examines trade in health. It documents the growth of a cross-national service that in the past was mainly consumed at home. Following from his highly successful book Health Tourism, Professor David Reisman offers a comprehensive and searching multidisciplinary account of the way in which medical services, patients, capital and professionals are making up a global healthcare economy that crosses borders. He reflects on their pursuit of lower prices, better quality and a differentiated product, and suggests that public policy is essential if the ethical capital of interdependent societies is not to be eroded by the international market in health and care. Written in a concise and lucid form, this original book will be of great interest to all people interested in the internationalization of health care. Combining theory and empirical evidence from economics, tourism and medical care, scholars involved in health policy and social administration will find much of significance in this authoritative study. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that the Indian subcontinent is home to two markedly different systems of kinship that broadly correspond to prominent linguistic and geographical divisions in the region: those of the Indo-Āryan North and the Dravidian South. Moreover, scholars have widely agreed that the most distinctive feature of Dravidian kinship is the widespread practice of cross-cousin marriage in its various forms. In the Indo-Āryan North, by contrast, a man is generally forbidden from marrying a woman to whom (...) he is biologically related in any way within a fairly large number of generations. Nevertheless, by the close of the first millennium CE, Brāhmaṇa intellectuals throughout India shared in common both a canon of scriptural sources and a complex tradition of jurisprudence known as Dharmaśāstra. Hence, this raises the question: How did classical Brāhmaṇical jurists of the North and the South deal with the controversial issue of cross-cousin marriage? It is this question that this article aims to address in comprehensive detail. In particular, it will trace the treatment of cross-cousin marriage within Dharmaśāstra from the earliest texts of the tradition up to the two earliest and most prominent juridical defenses of the custom, composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It will then conclude by drawing attention to a rare case where a particular Dharmaśāstra work can be seen to have influenced the marriage practices in a particular region of South India in the premodern past. (shrink)

Despite the supreme political and economic significance of boundaries--and ongoing challenges to existing national boundaries--scant attention has been paid to their ethics. This volume explores how diverse ethical traditions understand the political and property rights reflected in territorial and jurisdictional boundaries. It is the first book to bring together thinkers from a range of traditions, both religious and secular, to discuss the ethics of boundaries. Each contributor represents a tradition's views on questions surrounding the use of boundaries to delimit property (...) and political rights. What does it mean to own something? What resources should not be privately owned? What justifies the erection of political boundaries between one people and another? How ''hard'' should such boundaries be? What rights extend to minorities within a state? Should territorial boundaries coincide with social ones? Does national autonomy have an ethical basis, or is it an aspect of modern power politics? Should we aim for a more inclusive community than that afforded by modern nation-states? Cross-chapter dialogue and a substantive conclusion draw out similarities and differences among the traditions represented, traditions that include Christianity, classical liberalism, Confucianism, international law, Islam, Judaism, liberal egalitarianism, and natural law. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Nigel Biggar, Joseph Boyle, Joseph Chan, Russell Hardin, Will Kymlicka, Loren Lomasky, Robert McCorquodale, Richard B. Miller, David Novak, Sulayman Nyang, Michael Nylan, Raul C. Pangalangan, Daniel Philpott, Jeremy Rabkin, Hillel Steiner, M. Raquibuz Zaman, and Noam J. Zohar. (shrink)

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the minds (...) and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

We explore the implications of a hierarchical structure, consisting of the higher order dimensions of nonspecific Positive Activation and Negative Activation and multiple specific negative affects and positive affects at the lower level. Emotional blends of the same valence are an essential part of this structure and form the basis of the higher order Negative and Positive Activation dimensions. Mixed cross-valence emotions are not central to this hierarchical scheme but are compatible with it. We examine the frequency of pure (...) emotional states, same-valence emotional blends, and cross-valence mixed emotions in a large momentary mood sample. (shrink)

Starting from an analysis of Wittgenstein's reasons for placing all true-seeming sentences about the relation between language and the world in the class of utterances that lack a truth-value and can only communicate in the privileged way, the doctrine of showing is investigated in Wittgenstein's later writings. In contrast to the view that the concept of showing simply disappeared with the abandonment of the picture theory of the sentence it is argued that much of his erarly doctrine of showing survives (...) in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. (shrink)