Nine codes of ethics from companies in the Swedish financial sector were subjected to a content analysis to determine how they address and treat employees. The codes say a great deal about employee conduct and misconduct but next to nothing about employee rights, their rightful expectations or their value to the firm. The normative analysis – echoing some of the value-based HRM literature – draws on the foundational values of respect, equality, reciprocity and care. The analysis shows that most of (...) the codes are in conflict with these values. Such a treatment is then in conflict with fairness and risks harming the employees. Some of the features that make these codes ethically problematic are typical of how corporate codes have been described in previous code studies. Consequently, the normative analysis reaches beyond the scope of this material and in the end, what is at stake, is a very typical code design. (shrink)

Some libertarians argue that informed consent alone makes transactions in the labour market morally justified. In contrast, some of their critics claim that such an act of consent is no guarantee against coercion. To know whether agreements are voluntary, we need to assess the quality of the offers or the prevailing background conditions. ISCT theorists argue that it is imperative to take social norms into account when evaluating the labour market. We present a novel framework for moral assessment in the (...) labour market, which takes consent, background conditions and norms into account, but which mainly focuses on the offers and demands made. Consent renders a transaction legitimate in the same way we regard a fair election legitimate even if we object to its outcome. For offers to be substantially justified, exploitation must be avoided and offers must give expression to the value of community. Only then they are morally justified. (shrink)

Valeroso ha sido el esfuerzo de Arno Münster, filósofo franco-alemán, profesor de la Universidad de Amiens, por hacer conocer la obra de Ernst Bloch. Esta lucha, larga de muchos años de enseñanza e investigación, a veces solitaria, a veces a contracorriente de ciertas tendencias dominantes en la filosofía universitaria continental europea, se materializa una vez más con ocasión de la publicación de su último libro que reagrupa de una serie de conferencias de diverso contenido temático sobre el pensamiento de Bloch, (...) pronunciadas en distintos escenarios a lo largo de los últimos cinco años. La primera, establece una especie de cuadro comparativo entre la idea de “comprenderse a sí mismo en la existencia” de Kierkegaard, el concepto de angustia en Heidegger y la ontología del todavía-no de Bloch. (shrink)

Some medical services have long generated deep moral controversy within the medical profession as well as in broader society and have led to conscientious refusals by some physicians to provide those services to their patients. More recently, pharmacists in a number of states have refused on grounds of conscience to fill legal prescriptions for their customers. This paper assesses these controversies. First, I offer a brief account of the basis and limits of the claim to be free to act on (...) one’s conscience. Second, I sketch an account of the basis of the medical and pharmacy professions’ responsibilities and the process by which they are specified and change over time. Third, I then set out and defend what I call the “conventional compromise” as a reasonable accommodation to conflicts between these professions’ responsibilities and the moral integrity of their individual members. Finally, I take up and reject the complicity objection to the conventional compromise. Put together, this provides my answer to the question posed in the title of my paper: “Conscientious refusal by physicians and pharmacists: who is obligated to do what, and why?”. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.

This book argues that political libertarianism can be grounded in widely shared, everyday moral beliefs--particularly in strictures against shifting our burdens onto others. It also seeks to connect these philosophical arguments with related work in economics, history, and politics for a wide-ranging discussion of political economy.

Research on algorithms tends to focus on American companies and on the effects their algorithms have on Western users, while such algorithms are in fact developed in various geographical locations and used in highly diverse socio-cultural contexts. That is, the spatial trajectories through which algorithms operate and the distances and differences between the people who develop such algorithms and the users their algorithms affect remain overlooked. Moreover, while the power of big data algorithms has been recently compared to colonialism (Couldry (...) and Mejias 2019), the move from the colonial gaze (Yegenoglu 1998) to the algorithmic gaze (Graham 2010) has yet to be fully discussed. This article aims to fill these gaps by exploring the attempts to algorithmically conceptualize “the Other”. Based on the case study of an Israeli user-profiling company and its attempts to sell its services to East Asian corporations, I show that the algorithmic gaze—algorithms’ ability to characterize, conceptualize, and affect users—stems from a complex combination between opposing-but-complimentary perspectives: that it is simultaneously a continuation of the colonial gaze and its complete opposite. The ways in which algorithms are being programmed to see the Other, the ways algorithmic categories are named to depict the Other, and the ways people who design such algorithms describe and understand the Other are all different but deeply interrelated factors in how algorithms “see.” I accordingly argue that the story of algorithms is an intercultural one, and that the power of algorithms perpetually flows back and forth—between East and West, South and North. (shrink)

This the tenth volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cogntive Science series. It concerns metarepresentation: the construction and use of representations that represent other representations. Metarepresentations are ubiquitous among human beings, whenever we think or talk about mental states or linguistic acts, or theorize about the mind or language. It is crucial to the unconscious process we use to divine the mental states of others, and ultimately to any workable theory of the mind. This volume collects previously unpublished studies on (...) the subject by an interdisciplinary group of contributors, including: Daniel Dennett, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. (shrink)

Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena. (Published Online November 9 2006).

In this chapter, we focus on the debate over publicly maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the United States and South Africa. After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist and neutrally categorize removalist and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put (...) on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments. (shrink)

In this article I shall analyse and evaluate analytic theists’ views of what it takes to be a person of faith. I suggest that the subject can be approached by posing requirements a person must allegedly fulfil in order to count as a person of faith. These requirements can be referred to as aspects of faith. According to my analysis, four different aspects of faith can be distinguished: the cognitive, the evaluative-affective, the practical, and the interpersonal. There have been divergent (...) assessments about which aspects are indispensable for faith and how they should be understood. (shrink)

BackgroundWhereas many adolescents and young people with HIV require the transfer of care from paediatric/adolescent clinics to adult ART clinics, this transition is beset with a multitude of factors that have the potential to hinder or facilitate the process, thereby raising ethical challenges of the transition process. Decisions made regarding therapy, such as when and how to transition to adult HIV care, should consider ethical benefits and risks. Understanding and addressing ethical challenges in the healthcare transition could ensure a smooth (...) and successful transition. The purpose of this study was to analyze the ethical challenges of transitioning HIV care for adolescents into adult HIV clinics.MethodsData presented were derived from 191 adolescents attending nine different health facilities in Uganda, who constituted 18 focus group discussions. In the discussions, facilitators and barriers regarding adolescents transitioning to adult HIV clinics were explored. Guided by the Silences Framework for data interpretation, thematic data analysis was used to analyze the data. The principles of bioethics and the four-boxes ethics framework for clinical care (patient autonomy, medical indications, the context of care, and quality of life) were used to analyze the ethical issues surrounding the transition from adolescent to adult HIV care.ResultsThe key emerging ethical issues were: reduced patient autonomy; increased risk of harm from stigma and loss of privacy and confidentiality; unfriendly adult clinics induce disengagement and disruption of the care continuum; patient preference to transition as a cohort, and contextual factors are critical to a successful transition.ConclusionThe priority outcomes of the healthcare transition for adolescents should address ethical challenges of the healthcare transition such as loss of autonomy, stigma, loss of privacy, and discontinuity of care to ensure retention in HIV care, facilitate long-term self-care, offer ongoing all-inclusive healthcare, promote adolescent health and wellbeing and foster trust in the healthcare system. Identifying and addressing the ethical issues related to what hinders or facilitates successful transitions with targeted interventions for the transition process may ensure adolescents and young people with HIV infection remain healthy across the healthcare transition. (shrink)

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher‐order or‘reflective’propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credat sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument (...) in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts. (shrink)

From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co-operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from an evolutionary and a cognitive (...) point of view. (shrink)

This chapter determines a major empirical hurdle for any future discipline of memetics. It mainly shows that one can find very similar copies of some cultural item, link these copies through a causal chain of events which faithfully reproduced those items, and nevertheless not have an example of memetic inheritance. In addition, the stability of cultural patterns is proof that fidelity in copying is high despite individual variations. It is also believed that what is offered as an explanation is precisely (...) what needs to be explained; what is offered as a solution is in fact the very problem to be solved. Moreover, the issue is whether the relative stability observed in cultural transmission is proof of replication. The example of the acquisition of language is briefly addressed. The Darwinian model of selection is informative, and in various ways, for thinking about culture. Imitation is of course well worth investigating. On the other hand, the grand project of memetics is misled. (shrink)

The ‘self’ is increasingly used as a variable in cognitive experiments and correlated with activity in particular areas in the brain. At first glance, this seems to transform the self from an ephemeral theoretical entity to something concrete and measurable. However, the transformation is by no means unproblematic. We trace the development of two important experimental paradigms in the study of the self, self-face recognition and the adjective self ascription task. We show how the experimental instrumentalization has gone hand in (...) hand with a simplification of the self-concept, and how more conceptual and theoretical reflections on the structure, function and nature of self have either disappeared altogether or receded into the background. We argue that this development impedes and complicates the interdisciplinary study of self. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently claimed that intrinsicality can be analysed in terms of the metaphysical notion of grounding. Since grounding is a hyperintensional notion, accounts of intrinsicality in terms of grounding, unlike most other accounts, promise to be able to discriminate between necessarily coextensive properties that differ in whether they are intrinsic. They therefore promise to be compatible with popular metaphysical theories that posit necessary entities and necessary connections between wholly distinct entities, on which it is plausible that (...) there are such properties. This paper argues that this promise is illusory. It is not possible to give an analysis of intrinsicality in terms of grounding that is consistent with these theories. Given an adequate analysis should be compatible with these theories, it follows that it is not possible to analyse intrinsicality in terms of grounding. (shrink)

行動経済学によって、さまざまに系統的な不合理さが見えてきた。手をかけることが高評価をもたらすIKEA効果、やる気をそいでいる高額ボーナス、自分で思いついた(と思わせられた)意見は好ましい、雑用は一気に 片づけるほうが楽...。行動経済学研究の第一人者が、わたしたちがなぜ、どのように不合理な行動をしてしまうのかをユニークな実験で紹介。わかりやすい数々の実例で経済の真の姿を解明し、よりよい決断へとつなげ る話題作。.

An understanding of cause--effect relationships is fundamental to the study of cognition. In this book, outstanding specialists from comparative psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy present the newest developments in the study of causal cognition and discuss their different perspectives. They reflect on the role and forms of causal knowledge, both in animal and human cognition, on the development of human causal cognition from infancy, and on the relationship between individual and cultural aspects of causal understanding. The result (...) is a state-of-the-art, informative, insightful, and interdisciplinary debate aimed at the non-specialist. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of the US generic drug supply chain to foreign production. Many policies have been proposed to mitigate this vulnerability. In this article, we argue that nonprofit drug manufacturers have the potential to make important contributions.

I argue for the merits of studying historical moral revolutions to inform moral and political philosophy. Such a research program is not merely of empirical, historical interest but has normative implications. To explain why, I situate the proposal in the tradition of naturalized epistemology. As Alison M. Jaggar and other scholars have argued, a naturalistic approach is characteristic of much feminist philosophy. Accordingly, I argue that the study of moral revolutions would be especially fruitful for feminist moral and political philosophers.

First Published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the last decade, Venezuelans have faced a range of challenges such that by 2023, nearly 7.2 million have fled, the vast majority hosted within the region. One country particularly stands out: Colombia has accepted over 2.5 million. Colombia’s behaviour does not appear motivated by legal obligations or universal ethical principles; it is hard to make sense of in terms of international ethical and political theory. Rather, Colombian state and society make reference to mundane, localised concepts of friendship, fraternity and (...) the reciprocity of a shared history. Such everyday ethics is generally ignored in existing debates. I argue that immigration ethics could helpfully begin from concrete, everyday ethical behaviour rather than idealisation and abstraction. Instead of initially asking what states and societies should do regarding immigration, we could ask what do they already do, why and how? This article therefore explores how Colombian politicians and civil society actors understood their welcoming actions through an awareness of entangled histories, reciprocity, friendship and solidarity: everyday, vernacular ways in which responsibility-taking is rationalised and practiced. My argument is not that Colombia’s actions are normatively right, or an enactment of immigration justice. Rather, these actions were ambivalent: the messy, pragmatic result of negotiating different, competing responsibilities, principles and emotions. The results were imperfect, heavily gendered, but also unprecedented. Those advocating greater societal responsibility for immigrants would perhaps do best to look beyond the global north, shun the universal and start from local activities founded in vernacular, everyday ethics. (shrink)

The claim that the human cognitive system tends to allocate resources to the processing of available inputs according to their expected relevance is at the basis of relevance theory. The main thesis of this chapter is that this allocation can be achieved without computing expected relevance. When an input meets the input condition of a given modular procedure, it gives this procedure some initial level of activation. Input-activated procedures are in competition for the energy resources that would allow them to (...) follow their full course. What determines which of the procedures in competition get sufficient resources to trigger their full operation is the dynamics of their activation. This dynamics depend both on the prior degree of mobilisation of a modular procedure and on the activation that propagates from other active modules. It is quite conceivable also that the mobilisation of some procedures has inhibitory effects on some others. The relevance-theoretic claim is that, at every instant, this dynamics of activation provides rough physiological indicators of expected relevance. The flow of energy in the system is locally regulated by these indicators. As a result, those input-procedure combinations that have the greatest expected relevance are the more likely ones to receive sufficient energy to follow their course. (shrink)

In this paper I will address whether the restriction on the creation of human embryos solely for the purpose of research in which they will be used and destroyed in the creation of human stem cell lines is ethically justified. Of course, a cynical but perhaps accurate reading of the new Obama policy is that leaving this restriction in place was done for political, not ethical, reasons, in light of the apparent public opposition to creating embryos for use in this (...) research. But the issue of whether the restriction is ethically justified remains important, even if only for another day in the policy arena. (shrink)

Abstract:While a ubiquitous phenomenon, initial public offerings (IPOs) have received no attention in the ethics literature. We provide an overview of a series of potential conflicts of interest that pervade the IPO process. We also report the results of an empirical assessment of IPOs and those elements that may inform a substantive moral hazard faced by key players in the period prior to and just after an IPO.

This paper discusses two epistemic principles that are important to buyers and sellers: the appeal to popularity and the appeal to incentive structures. I point out the various ways these principles are defeasible, and then offer some examples of them at work in the contexts of hiring, politics and the arts. Finally, I consider why these principles are generally neglected, and conclude that our neglect is unwarranted on both epistemic and moral grounds.

It is often held that identity properties like the property of being identical to Paris are intrinsic. It is also often held that, while some logically uninstantiable properties are intrinsic, some logically uninstantiable properties are non-intrinsic. The combination of these views, however, raises a problem, since virtually every existing account of intrinsicality fails to analyse a notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true. In this paper, I argue that, given the orthodox theory of counterlogicals, there is no (...) notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true. If this argument is sucessful, then, at least given orthodoxy about counterlogicals, we face no challenge in analysing a notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true, since there is no such notion. In addition, if we are also convinced that there is a notion of intrinsicality on which one of these views is true and a notion of intrinsicality on which the other of these views is true, we should hold that there is more than one notion of intrinsicality. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce attempted to develop his semiotic theory of cognitive signs interpretation, which are originated in our basic perceptual operations that quasi-prove the truth of perceptual judgment representing reality. The essential problem was to explain how, by a cognitive interpretation of the sequence of perceptual signs, we can represent external physical reality and reflectively represent our cognitive mind’s operations of signs. With his phaneroscopy introspection, Peirce shows how, without going outside our cognitions, we can represent external reality. Hence Peirce (...) can avoid the Berkeleyian, Humean, and Kantian phenomenologies, as well as the modern analytic philosophy and hermeneutic phenomenology. Peirce showed that with the trio of semiotic interpretation – abductive logic of discovery of hypotheses, deductive logic of necessary inference, and inductive logic of evaluation – we can reach a complete proof of the true representation of reality. This semiotic logic of reasoning is the epistemic logic representing human confrontation in reality, with which we can achieve knowledge and conduct our behavior. However, Peirce did not complete his realistic revolution to eliminate previously accepted nominalistic and idealistic epistemologies of formal logic and pure mathematics. Here, I inquire why Peirce did not complete his historical realist epistemological revolution and following that inquiry I attempt to reconstruct it. (shrink)

After a unilateral focus on medical professional obligations to patients in most of the 20th century, there is a growing, if modest, interest in patient responsibility. This article critiques some public assertions, explores the ethics literature, and attempts to find some consensus and moral grounds for positions taken on the question, "Does a patient have moral obligations in the process of interactions with medical and other professional caregivers?" There is widespread agreement on a few responsibilities, such as "truth telling" and (...) "avoiding harm to others," but no apparent consensus either on the list of duties or on the appropriate justification for such duties. The context and clinical realities of patient interactions are noted to suggest that feasibility is important in making judgments of patient obligations. (shrink)