Management scholars have paid close attention to the construct of organizational or corporate reputation, particularly in the applied business ethics and corporate social responsibility fields. Extant research demonstrates that CR is one of the key mediators between CSR and important organizational outcomes, which ultimately improve organizational performance. Yet, hitherto the research focused on CR construct has been plagued by multiple definitions, conflicting conceptualizations, and unclear operationalizations. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical ground for positioning of CR as (...) an assessment construct that is modeled as a second-order factor affecting individual first-order dimensions, and to provide methodological and empirical support toward such conceptualization. We assert that intangible, socially complex, and causally ambiguous CR can be accurately estimated through its individual measurable dimensions. Using survey data from Peru, we empirically test the hypothesized second-order reflective model within a hierarchy of nested and non-nested models, and compare its model fit and predictive power with alternative conceptualizations. Modeling CR as a second-order reflective construct relies on a set of theoretical propositions and yields several methodological advantages, including strong conceptual interpretability and parsimony when tested within a nomological context. We explicitly demonstrate positive organizational outcomes of CR: customer trust, corporate identification, in-role behavior, and extra-role behavior. Then, we demonstrate that the shorter scales of CR can be used as a good proxy for the full construct measure. The paper concludes by highlighting theoretical insights, and methodological and managerial implications of the findings. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated model of ethical decision‐making in business that incorporates teleological, deontological and existential theory. Existentialism has been curiously overlooked by many scholars in the field despite the fact that it is so fundamentally a theory of choice. We argue that it is possible to seek good organisational ends (teleology), through the use of right means (deontology), and enable the decision‐maker to do so authentically (existentialism). More specifically, we provide a framework that will enable the decision‐maker to (...) integrate the various ethical schools of thought available to them and to apply this framework in the ethical decision‐making process. The model presented makes explicit the existential position of choice and takes into account other contextual moderating factors. Negative Option Marketing is used as a running application to illustrate the role of existentialism in the decision‐making process. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated model of ethical decision‐making in business that incorporates teleological, deontological and existential theory. Existentialism has been curiously overlooked by many scholars in the field despite the fact that it is so fundamentally a theory of choice. We argue that it is possible to seek good organisational ends (teleology), through the use of right means (deontology), and enable the decision‐maker to do so authentically (existentialism). More specifically, we provide a framework that will enable the decision‐maker to (...) integrate the various ethical schools of thought available to them and to apply this framework in the ethical decision‐making process. The model presented makes explicit the existential position of choice and takes into account other contextual moderating factors. Negative Option Marketing is used as a running application to illustrate the role of existentialism in the decision‐making process. (shrink)

An important factor that leads governments to engage in public service contracts with nonprofit organizations is the belief that they share similar ethical and value orientations that will allow governments to reduce monitoring costs. However the notion of the existence of similarities in ethical climate has not been systematically examined. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical climate in government and nonprofit sectors and to determine the extent to which similarities (and differences) exist in ethical climate dimensions. (...) Using survey data and structural equation modeling technique, the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of the ethical climate in the two sectors are tested. Results indicate that while there is a significant overlap in shared perception of ethical climate dimensions, there are also key differences between the two sectors. The outcome of this research provides important preliminary insights for public policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using the nonprofit sector for service delivery. (shrink)

Within the corporate social responsibility research field, the construct of organizational reputation has been extensively scrutinized as a crucial mediator between the firm CSR engagement and valuable organizational outcomes. Yet, the existing literature on organizational reputation suffers from substantive divergence between the studies in terms of defining the construct’s domain, dimensional structure, and the methodological operationalization. The current study aims to refine the organizational reputation construct by reconciling varying theoretical perspectives within the construct’s definitional landscape, suggesting a holistic but parsimonious (...) triadic view on the organizational reputation construct for customer stakeholders. Based on commonly used extant organizational reputation measures, we theoretically and empirically develop the customer-based triadic organizational reputation scale and position it as a superordinate multidimensional construct influencing three distinct first-order dimensions: product and service efficacy, societal ethicality, and market prominence. Results show that the proposed triadic conceptualization of organizational reputation is theoretically defensible, and the resulting scale is cross-culturally generalizable and performs well compared with existing, longer measures of organizational reputation. Together, the organizational reputation model developed here suggests that, for cognitive economy and functional efficiency, customers will access a second-order reflective model of organizational reputation as the default implicit attitude, which in turn will activate reflections of the implicit attitude in the form of first-order dimensions. (shrink)

An important factor that leads governments to engage in public service contracts with nonprofit organizations is the belief that they share similar ethical and value orientations that will allow governments to reduce monitoring costs. However the notion of the existence of similarities in ethical climate has not been systematically examined. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical climate in government and nonprofit sectors and to determine the extent to which similarities (and differences) exist in ethical climate dimensions. (...) Using survey data and structural equation modeling technique, the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of the ethical climate in the two sectors are tested. Results indicate that while there is a significant overlap in shared perception of ethical climate dimensions, there are also key differences between the two sectors. The outcome of this research provides important preliminary insights for public policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using the nonprofit sector for service delivery. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to address the limited amount of research in the realm of organizational ethical climate in the not-for-profit sector. The paper draws from Victor and Cullen's (1988) theoretical framework which, combines the constructs of cognitive moral development, ethical theory, and locus of analysis. However, as a point of departure from Victor and Cullen's work, the authors propose an alternative methodology to extract ethical climate dimensions based on theoretical considerations. Using the Ethical Climate Questionnaire (ECQ), an exploratory (...) factor analysis is conducted followed by a confirmatory factor analysis using LISREL. The resulting five dimensions are labelled as: individual caring, machiavellianism, independence, social caring, and law and code. Findings provide a somewhat disparate perspective of the ethical climates in a not-for-profit context. First, there is a more discriminating perception of benevolent climate than its for-profit counterpart. Second, the dimensions are polarized between the individual and the cosmopolitan loci of analysis. These findings are then discussed with implications and direction for future research. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

We have several intuitive paradigms of defeating evidence. For example, let E be the fact that Ernie tells me that the notorious pet Precious is a bird. This supports the premise F, that Precious can fly. However, Orna gives me *opposing* evidence. She says that Precious is a dog. Alternatively, defeating evidence might not oppose Ernie's testimony in that direct way. There might be other ways for it to weaken the support that Ernie's testimony gives me for believing F, without (...) the new evidence itself intuitively constituting reasons to believe one way or the other about Precious's flight ability. An example: Ursula tells me that Ernie has no idea what Precious's species is; he's just guessing. She may not herself want to or be in a position to weigh in about Precious's real species or flight ability. I call defeating evidence of this sort *undermining evidence. (shrink)

James Tully: To Think and Act Differently collects classic, contemporary, and previously unpublished examples of public philosophy in action from across James Tully's four decades of scholarship. The book provides readers with a perspicuous representation of public philosophy as an ongoing experiment with reconstructing the practice of political theory as a democratizing and diversifying dialogue between scholars and citizens. This volume offers an overview of this participatory mode of political philosophy and political change by reconstructing the arc of (...) Tully's intellectual trajectory in contexts, illuminating moments of clarification and transformation, and the ways it continues to shed new insights into the challenges of citizenship in the present. Topics discussed include approaches to the history of political though, constitutionalism, democratic theory, comparative political theory, intercultural dialogue and translation; Indigenous political thought; settler colonialism and empire; climate change and sustainability; modernity; nonviolence; and mutual aid. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, constitutional law, Indigenous studies, intellectual history, and ecological humanities. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, constitutional law, Indigenous studies, intellectual history, and ecological humanities. (shrink)

Anthology of readings in moral philosophy.

You are going to entrust your soul to the care of a sophist. But I should be surprised if you even know what a sophist is. In the fifth century BC professional educators, the sophists, travelled the Greek world claiming to teach success in public and private life. In this dialogue Plato shows the pretensions of the leading sophist, Protagoras, challenged by the critical arguments of Socrates. From criticism of theeducational aims and methods of the sophists the dialogue broadens out (...) to consider the nature of the good life, and the role of pleasure and intellect in the context of that life. The dialogue combines subtlety of argument with intricacy of dramatic construction and brilliant characterisation. This translation achieves both precision and colloquial naturalness, while the notes and introduction set the arguments in their historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

I argue that on very weak assumptions about truth (in particular, that there are coherent norms governing the use of "true"), there is a proposition absolutely inexpressible with conventional language, or something very close. I argue for this claim "constructively": I use a variant of the Berry Paradox to reveal a particular thought for my readership to entertain that very strongly resists conventional expression. I gauge the severity of this expressive limitation within a taxonomy of expressive failures, and argue that (...) despite its strength there is nothing incoherent about admitting its existence. The argument forms part of a project of clarifying precisely what trade-offs are required to secure the kinds of expressive power truth theorists typically want, in the process showing that the admission of very strong expressive limitations may ultimately prove to be the lesser of two evils. (shrink)

James McCosh, the Scottish philosopher, graduated from the University of Glasgow, spent some time as a minister in the Church of Scotland but then returned to philosophy and spent most of his career at Princeton University. The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment had many influential philosophers at its core. In this book, first published in 1875, McCosh outlines the theories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers and identifies Scottish philosophy as a distinct school of thought. He summarises both the merits and the (...) possible criticisms of each philosopher's work and also gives detailed biographical information. Among the philosophers discussed are the influential David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith. The final chapter focuses on Sir William Hamilton, a philosopher who greatly influenced McCosh. (shrink)

Comatose survivors of cardiac arrest may die following withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy (WLST) due to poor neurologic prognosis. Family members, acting as surrogate decision makers, are frequently asked to decide whether the patient should continue to receive ongoing life-sustaining therapy such as mechanical ventilation in this context of risk of death following removal. Sometimes, physicians and family members disagree about what is in the patient's best interest, and this conflict causes distress for both families and medical personnel. This article examines (...) themes recorded in the medical records of 24 cardiac arrest patients at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) whose families chose to pursue continued life support despite physician recommendations for withdrawal. In documented conversations between patients' families and their providers, the most prominent themes included faith in miracles, the inappropriateness of "playing God," the value of more time with the patient, and differences in how providers and family members perceived the patient's status. (shrink)

It is argued in this paper that recent work on immanence and transcendence in Whitehead scholarship, notably by Basile and Nobo, provides helpful guidelines and ideas for work on problems regarding immanence in Deleuze's philosophy. By following arguments on theism and naturalism in the reception of Whitehead, it argues that Deleuze's philosophy depends on reciprocal relations between that actual and the virtual such that they cannot be considered as separate without also being incomplete. It is then shown that Deleuze's philosophy (...) allows for metaphysical terms such as ‘pure’ without having to concede a separate and self-sufficient pure realm. (shrink)

"Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it irrelevant to (...) many people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively."–Publisher’s description. (shrink)

In 1896 William James published an essay entitled The Will to Believe, in which he defended the legitimacy of religious faith against the attacks of such champions of scientific method as W.K. Clifford and Thomas Huxley. James's work quickly became one of the most important writings in the philosophy of religious belief. James Wernham analyses James's arguments, discusses his relation to Pascal and Renouvier, and considers the interpretations, and misinterpretations, of James's major critics. Wernham shows (...) convincingly that James was unaware of many destructive ambiguitities in his own doctrines and arguments, although clear and consistent in his view that our obligation to believe in theism is not a moral but a prudential obligation -- a foolish-not-to-believe doctrine, rather than a not-immoral-to-believe one. Wernham also shows that the doctrine is best read as affirming the wisdom of gambling that God exists, a notion which James failed to distinguish from believing and which, among other things, he explicitly identified with faith. James's pragmatism, a theory concerning the meaning of truth, is shown to be quite distinct from the doctrine of The Will to Believe. In concentrating on a careful analysis of this doctrine of the will-to-believe, Wernham not only makes a major contribution to understanding James's philosophy, but also clarifies issues in the philosophy of religion and in the analysis of belief and faith. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism is the political theory which holds that coercive laws and policies are justified when and only when they are grounded in reasons of the public. The standard interpretation of public reason liberalism, consensus accounts, claim that the reasons persons share or that persons can derive from shared values determine which policies can be justified. In this paper, I argue that consensus approaches cannot justify fair educational policies and preserving cultural goods. Consensus approaches can resolve some controversies about (...) teaching values in the educational system, such as curriculum choice. But they cannot determine which culture goods, e.g., architecture, artwork, or language ought to be preserved in the education system. Consensus approaches cannot fairly resolve competing claims about these kinds of disputes. -/- I propose that convergence accounts of public reason, which allow individuals to draw on their own comprehensive doctrines in limited ways, can remedy these weaknesses in the mainline public reason tradition. The convergence approach can justify a pluralist state that can advance valuable community goods. John Henry Newman’s advocacy of liberal arts education finds resonance in other cultures, notably among Confucians, illustrating that there can be a shared moral vision and inquiry into the good life across deep substantive disagreements about educational values and policies, once we expand our notion of justification to be more inclusive. (shrink)

What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sorts of causal claims found in the special sciences (and in common sense) and, on the other hand, the world as described by physics? A standard picture goes like this: the fundamental laws of physics are causal laws in the sense that they can be interpreted as telling us that realizations of one set of physical factors or properties “causes” realizations of other properties. Causal claims in the special sciences are (...) then true (to the extent that they are) in virtue of “instantiating” these underlying causal laws; as it is often put, the latter serve as “truth-makers” for the former. The picture is thus one according to which the notion of cause, as it occurs in the special sciences, is reflected or “grounded” in a fairly straightforward and transparent way in a similar notion that occurs in fundamental physics. This paper explores some alternatives to this picture. (shrink)

How reasonable and rational can science be when its practitioners speak of "revolutions" in their thinking and extol certain theories for their "beauty"? James W. McAllister addresses this question with the first systematic study of the aesthetic evaluations that scientists pass on their theories. P. A. M. Dirac explained why he embraced relativity by saying, "It is the essential beauty of the theory which I feel is the real reason for believing in it." Dirac's claim seems to belie rationalist (...) accounts of science. Using this and a wealth of other historical examples, McAllister explains how scientists' aesthetic preferences are influenced by the empirical track record of theories, describes the origin and development of aesthetic styles of theorizing, and reconsiders whether simplicity is an empirical or an aesthetic virtue of theories. McAllister then advances an innovative model of scientific revolutions, in opposition to that of Thomas S. Kuhn. Three detailed studies demonstrate the interconnection of empirical performance, beauty, and revolution. One examines the impact of new construction materials on the history of architecture. Another reexamines the transition from the Ptolemaic system to Kepler's theory in planetary astronomy, and the third documents the rise of relativity and quantum theory in the twentieth century. (shrink)

James Wynn’s timely investigation highlights scientific studies grounded in publicly gathered data and probes the rhetoric these studies employ. Many of these endeavors, such as the widely used SETI@home project, simply draw on the processing power of participants’ home computers; others, like the protein-folding game FoldIt, ask users to take a more active role in solving scientific problems. In Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement, Wynn analyzes the discourse that enables these scientific ventures, as (...) well as the difficulties that arise in communication between scientists and lay people and the potential for misuse of publicly gathered data. (shrink)

In multiple robot systems, the problem of allocation of complex tasks to heterogeneous teams of robots, also known as the multiple robot coalition formation problem, has begun to receive considerable attention. Efforts to address the problem range from heuristics based approaches that search the subspaces of the coalition structure to evolutionary learning approaches. Conventional approaches typically strive to optimize a single objective function such as the number of tasks executed or the time required to execute all tasks, or a weighted (...) function of such objectives. In real world applications, objectives such as minimizing distance traveled and maximizing the number of tasks completed are often conflicting in nature. The coalition formation problem thus naturally lends itself to a multi-objective optimization approach based on evolutionary learning. In this paper, we formulate the problem of mapping coalitions of robots to a set of tasks as a multi-objective optimization problem and propose a variant of non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm to arrive at trade-off solutions. Additionally, we extend the solution to domains where robot resources are non-additive. Simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in generating the set of Pareto-optimal solutions. (shrink)

Love and Friendship in the Western Tradition comprises a collection of essays written over a 25 year period by the late Rev. Professor James McEvoy on the theme of friendship. The book traces the genesis and development of philosophical treatments of friendship from Greek philosophy, through the Middle Ages, to modern and postmodern philosophy. The collection's three major concerns are: (1) the history of philosophical discussions of friendship; (2) the role of friendship in the cultivation of the philosophical life; (...) (3) the marginalization of friendship as a theme for philosophical reflection and practice in the modern period. As the author was primarily a medievalist, a great deal of the focus of the essays is on the development of the theme of friendship in the Middle Ages (in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Aelred of Rievaulx, Henry of Ghent, Robert Grosseteste, etc.). However, this focus, while a value in itself, also serves to connect philosophical perspectives on friendship from before and after the middle ages. It connects to the time before inasmuch as much of the work done on friendship in the Middle Ages is anchored in interpretations of Aristotle and Plato, and it connects to the time after by providing a counterpoint to the modern paradigm of what constitutes the philosophical life. The collection combines historical with thematic approaches to scholarship on this issue and is one of the only books of its kind to do so. It is, perhaps, unique in its historical sweep and will prove to be a canonical source for further research on this topic. (shrink)

To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of _The Boundaries of Humanity_. Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the (...) editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies. (shrink)

A state-based reason for one to intend to perform an action F is a reason for one to intend to F which is not a reason for one to F. Are there any state-based reasons to intend? According to the Explanatory Argument, the answer is no, because state-based reasons do not satisfy a certain explanatory constraint. I argue that whether or not the constraint is correct, the Explanatory Argument is unsound, because state-based reasons do satisfy the constraint. The considerations that (...) undermine the Explanatory Argument also generate a strong, positive case for the existence of state-based reasons to intend. (shrink)

This article explores how the Crash Course video series are being used as a content-focused resource in the social studies classroom. It argues that the Crash Course series, alongside its YouTube competitors, has significantly stepped in to fill a vacuum left by criticisms and the unpopularity of lectures, textbooks, and feature films. With over 15 million subscribers and accumulated views over 1.9 billion, Crash Course has become an important and ubiquitous force in history and social studies classrooms and represents a (...) new genre of educational media found on YouTube. However, the dramatic rise in the popularity of educational videos online has not coincided with a growth in educational research, particularly in social studies and history education. This article explores the findings of a mixed-methods study that examines how and why history and social studies teachers are using Crash Course videos in their teaching and planning. In particular, it analyses descriptive statistics derived from the results of a teacher survey ( n = 181) and semi-structured interviews with seven social studies teachers who have used Crash Course in their classrooms. The authors found that teachers in the study are regularly using the Crash Course video series to deliver content which is clearly meeting a need many social studies teachers have. The videos–short, easily accessible, and fun–fit nicely with demands to keep students engaged, reduce reliance on textbooks, and explore new content that teachers have little time to learn themselves. This study also found that rarely, if ever, are teachers inviting students to evaluate or assess the content, trustworthiness, or perspective of Crash Course videos. This article discusses what is gained and what are the risks of embracing Crash Course in the social studies and history classroom. (shrink)

The goal of human life, according to Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible, is to become as much like god as possible. This book, written in vivid and lucid English, illuminates Greek philosophy by showing how it grows out of ancient Greek religion and how it compares to biblical religion.

The Possibility of Practical Reason explores the foundational questions of moral psychology: How can any of our behavior qualify as acting for a reason? How can any considerations qualify as reasons for us to act? David Velleman argues that both possibilities depend on there being a constitutive aim of action―something that makes for success in action as such. These twelve essays―five of which were not included in the previous edition, two of them previously unpublished―discuss topics such as freedom of the (...) will, shared intention, the relation between value and practical reasoning, the foundations of decision theory, and the motivational role of the imagination. (shrink)

I begin by reviewing some recent work on the status of the geodesic principle in general relativity and the geometrized formulation of Newtonian gravitation. I then turn to the question of whether either of these theories might be said to ``explain'' inertial motion. I argue that there is a sense in which both theories may be understood to explain inertial motion, but that the sense of ``explain'' is rather different from what one might have expected. This sense of explanation is (...) connected with a view of theories---I call it the ``puzzleball view''---on which the foundations of a physical theory are best understood as a network of mutually interdependent principles and assumptions. (shrink)

Consider the argument: Circus-1 Men in clown suits are handing out tickets. So, probably: Circus-2 There’s a circus in town. So: Circus-3 There’s an entertainment venue in town. Presumably you’d be able to warrantedly believe Circus-2 on the basis of Circus-1. And we can suppose you’re reasonably certain that wherever there are circuses, there are entertainment venues. So you’d seem to be in a position to reasonably go on to infer Circus-3.