The author argues that Luther 's two-kingdoms doctrine rests upon a limited conception of law: "criminal" law, to use the terminology of British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart. In contrast, "contract" law is the potent means through which networks of political, economic, and social relations have been built up since Luther 's day. Using the 1523 Leisnig experiment in social governance as an example, the author suggests that Lutheran ethicists need to pay more attention to "cooperative self- obligation " (...) as the basic device through which social covenants are established and sustained. The essay concludes with four emphases that Lutheran ethicists might bring to such a rethinking of law as an ethical concept. (shrink)

Contrary to criticisms by Thomas McInerney, Durable Goods proposes a realistic and empirically testable “covenantal” ethic for moving management and labor beyond tactics of mutual coercion and evasion. Nonetheless, two questions asked by McInerney remain germane. First, should the moral claims of management and labor always receive equal moral consideration, as a matter of justice? To this substantive question Durable Goods admittedly provides a less than satisfactory answer. Second, can the normative theory proposed by Durable Goods, based in part as (...) it is on the Bible, meet the standards of cogency, coherence, and parsimony appropriate to business ethics as a field of rigorous inquiry? This methodological question remains unaddressed. (shrink)

This essay sketches a method for identifying the insights that diverse religious traditions offer to the field of business ethics. Each article in this volume asserts or assumes faith-based claims about what is "truly real" as the ground of moral aspiration and obligation. Four distinct kinds of claims yield four kinds of wisdom, that is, moral guidance for business practice. 1) In Judaism and Islam, scriptural commands, as interpreted authoritatively down through these traditions, yield precise methods for rendering specific moral (...) judgments; in Roman Catholicism, similar guidance is provided through natural law. 2) In Buddhism, Judaism, and most of the surveyed Christian traditions, the values of compassion, love, and justice provide spiritual resources to counter pressures towards immoral behavior in business. 3) The African-American and Mennonite churches interpret their particular histories of oppression to offer distinctive models of fortitude and hope. 4) In Evangelical Calvinism, Mormonism, and Roman Catholic social teaching, convictions about God's redemptive and sanctifying activity offer a robust moral vision for successful striving. (shrink)

The paper attempts to provide a basis for exploring the continued relevance of Catholic social teaching to business ethics, byinterpreting the historic development of a Catholic work ethic and the traditions of Catholic social teaching in light of contemporary discussions of economic globalization, notably those of Robert Reich and Peter Drucker. The paper argues that the Catholic work ethic and the Church’s tradition of social teaching has evolved dynamically in response to the structural changes involved in the history of modern (...) economic development, and thus is well poised to speak to the ethical challenges implicit in the advent of a knowledge-based society. In order to test this thesis, the author sketches an approach to the ethical challenge of corporate downsizing that he believes illustrates the continued relevance of Catholic social teaching to business ethics. (shrink)

The work ethic has been deeply challenged by two trends – the division of labor and the destruction of continuity in employment. Here a narrative model is proposed for reconstructing the work ethic. Narratives embody assumptions about the flow of time, and work becomes charged with meaning when "contractual time" is interrupted, when new functions are invented to cope with obstacles having to do human character and action. Content for this abstract model is provided by four historical movements in the (...) U.S. having to do with the reorganization of work or work relations: scientific management, the human-relations movement, the human-potential movement, and early management thought. (shrink)

This study examines whether scenic beauty judgments based upon photographs of landscapes are similar to scenic beauty judgments based upon on-site experiences of landscapes. Two concerns are emphasized: a concern about the threat to the ecological validity of photo-based assessments caused by differences between on-site and photo-based contexts and a concern that the individual rater, rather than the group average, is the more appropriate unit of analysis for tests of validity of photo-based assessments. On-site scenic beauty assessments were collected from (...) day hikers. These data were compared to photo-based scenic beauty assessments collected from the same persons three months and nine months after their on-site experience. Approximately 38% of participants had insignificant correlations between their on-site and photo-based scenic beauty ratings. These and other results suggest that the validity of photo-based scenic beauty assessments is in doubt, at least for the situation studied here. Moreover, the results suggest that the difference between persons' on-site and photo-based ratings can be explained, in part, by contextual factors such as the mood, meaning, and novelty that differentiate photo-based from on-site landscape experiences. Group averaged on-site and photo-based assessments, however, were very similar, suggesting caution may be in order for studies interpreting summary measures. (shrink)

These sixty contributions from researchers in ethology, ecology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and related fields delve into the behaviors and underlying mechanisms that allow animals and, potentially, robots to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. They focus in particular on simulation models in order to help characterize and compare various organizational principles or architectures capable of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals. Jean-Arcady Meyer is Director of Research at CNRS, Paris. Stewart W. Wilson is a Scientist at (...) The Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (shrink)

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

In this rehabilitation of the relational transaction of compromising, we follow Paul Ricoeur in arguing that at the intersection of diverse orders of value, compromising rises to the level of a moral duty. Thus, an ethics of compromise, rooted in recognition theory, provides a virtuous means of moral engagement with otherness in the context of pluralism. Virtue theory needs to move in an interactive direction by enlisting moral epistemology, for a shift in focus from the individual agent to the interaction (...) of agents ; attending to the political theorists and sociologists who ground meaningful compromise in mutual recognition; and tailoring such recognition to bounded human capacities for rationality and empathy, via "psychological realism"—all in service of attenuating the discomfort and even moral pain that agents may feel when called upon to compromise. (shrink)

This article is about the history of logic in Australia. Douglas Gasking (1911?1994) undertook to translate the logical terminology of John Anderson (1893?1962) into that of Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1921) Tractatus. At the time Gilbert Ryle (1900?1976), and more recently David Armstrong, recommended the result to students; but it is reasonable to have misgivings about Gasking as a guide to either Anderson or Wittgenstein. The historical interest of the debate Gasking initiated is that it yielded surprisingly little information about Anderson's traditional (...) (syllogistic or Aristotelian) logic and its relation to classical (first-order predicate or Russellian) logic, the ostensible topic; but the materials now exist to interpret Anderson's logic in classical logic, possibly as an algebra of classes. This would be of little interest to contemporary logicians, but it might shed some light on Anderson's philosophy. (shrink)

During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, preclinical and clinical research were sped up and scaled up in both the public and private sectors and in partnerships between them. This resulted in some extraordinary advances, but it also raised a range of issues regarding the ethics, rigour, and integrity of scientific research, academic publication, and public communication. Many of the failures of scientific rigour and integrity that occurred during the pandemic were exacerbated by the rush to generate, disseminate, and (...) implement research findings, which not only created opportunities for unscrupulous actors but also compromised the methodological, peer review, and advisory processes that would usually identify sub-standard research and prevent compromised clinical or policy-level decisions. While it would be tempting to attribute these failures of science and its translation solely to the “unprecedented” circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the reality is that they preceded the pandemic and will continue to arise once it is over. Existing strategies for promoting scientific rigour and integrity need to be made more rigorous, better integrated into research training and institutional cultures, and made more sophisticated. They might also need to be modified or supplemented with other strategies that are fit for purpose not only in public health emergencies but in any research that is sped-up and scaled up to address urgent unmet medical needs. (shrink)

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most profound and influential African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century. This volume addresses the complexities of Du Bois' legacy, showing how his work gets to the heart of today's theorizing about the color line.