The research focuses on the patterns of traditional religious and cultural practices of the Idoma People of Nigeria. The study also seeks to investigate the cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma traditional society which were affected by the advent of Christianity in the area. Some of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma people before the advent of Christianity will be examined, as well as the people response to the new faith and the propelling factors behind the responses (...) of the people. The study adopted qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method of data analysis. Personal interview forms a primary source of data collection while the secondary source includes library sources. The study reveals that the advent of Christianity in the Idoma traditional society had some impact and consequences on their traditional and cultural practices. Some of the Idoma beliefs and practices affected include ancestor veneration, polygamous marriage, burial rites, widowhood practices, naming ceremony among others which are no longer practiced the way it used to be practiced before the advent of Christianity. The study recommends among other things that, there should be a synergy between Idoma traditional beliefs and practices and Christianity for peaceful co-existence, progress and developments in the area. (shrink)

Some of the traditions and cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma people of Nigeria have been influenced both positively and negatively as a result of the advent of Christianity in the area. The aim of this research is to investigate some of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma people before the advent of Christianity, the people’s response to the new faith and the propelling factors behind the responses of the people. In doing so, a comparative study on (...) these beliefs and practices after the advent of Christianity in Idoma traditional society was done. The study adopts a qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method for data analysis. Personal interviews form a primary source of data collection, while the secondary source includes library sources. This method of study was chosen to allow the data collected to speak for themselves without any interference from the researchers. The study unveils that the advent of Christianity in the Idoma traditional society had some impact and consequences on the traditional and cultural practices of the people, such as death and burial ceremonies, the Aje-alekwu festival and widowhood practices among others. The study recommends that there should be a synergy between Idoma traditional beliefs and practices and Christianity for peaceful co-existence, progress and development in the area. Contribution: It is erroneously believed that in the contemporary society, traditional religious practices are going to die and become a thing of the past. However, one would observe from this study that Idoma people still hold their traditional beliefs and practices in high esteem despite the influence of Christianity in the area. (shrink)

Oxford University ENGLISH FACULTY LIBRARY Manor Road Oxford OX1 3UQ Opening Hours: Monday to Friday: 9.30 am to 7 pm in Full Term. (9.30 am to 1 pm, ...

While the origin and development of the just war tradition until the early modern period blended concerns, ideas, and practices from the moral, legal, political, and military spheres, from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth it largely disappeared as a conscious source of moral reflection about war and its restraint. Beginning in the 1960s, however, American theologian Paul Ramsey initiated a recovery of just war thinking in a series of writings applying the principles of discrimination and proportionality, ideas he traced (...) both to Augustinian theology and to natural law, to the debate over nuclear weapons and later to the Vietnam War. Ramsey's work directly engaged both theological and policy debate over military force, initiating lines of reflection that have since developed further and become increasingly institutionalized. This brief essay examines the nature of Ramsey's just war thought and its influence over the last 40 years. (shrink)

Recently the relevance of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger has been critiqued in nursing literature. However, this critique is based primarily upon an appropriation of Heidegger that does not reflect an understanding of meaning as grounded in temporality. Therefore, this paper aims to (1) explicate Heidegger's grounding of meaning, (2) briefly contrast Heidegger's and Husserl's notions of the origin of meaning, (3) describe how Heidegger was first introduced to nursing, and (4) illustrate through examples from a research study how the (...) philosophy of Heidegger might inform the phenomenological researcher. (shrink)

Following Aristotle (who himself was following Parmenides), philosophers have appealed to the distributional reflexes of expressions in determining their semantic status, and ultimately, the nature of the extra-linguistic world. This methodology has been practiced throughout the history of philosophy; it was clarified and made popular by the likes of Zeno Vendler and J.L. Austin, and is realized today in the toolbox of linguistically minded philosophers. Studying the syntax of natural language was fueled by the belief that there is a conceptually (...) tight connection between the syntax of our language and its semantics, and the belief that there is a similarly tight connection between the semantics of our language and metaphysical facts about the world. We are less confident than our colleagues about the relation syntax has to semantics and metaphysics. In particular, we do not believe that the current status of theoretical syntax (or semantics or metaphysics) provides much support for either of the above two beliefs. We will illustrate our view with a case study regarding the status of complex demonstratives. We will show that a recent and particularly subtle syntactically based argument for the semantic/metaphysical status of complex demonstratives does not in fact show what semantic category complex demonstratives are.. (shrink)

Abstract:Human and animal research both operate within established standards. In the United States, criticism of the human research environment and recorded abuses of human research subjects served as the impetus for the establishment of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, and the resulting Belmont Report. The Belmont Report established key ethical principles to which human research should adhere: respect for autonomy, obligations to beneficence and justice, and special protections for vulnerable individuals and (...) populations. While current guidelines appropriately aim to protect the individual interests of human participants in research, no similar, comprehensive, and principled effort has addressed the use of (nonhuman) animals in research. Although published policies regarding animal research provide relevant regulatory guidance, the lack of a fundamental effort to explore the ethical issues and principles that should guide decisions about the potential use of animals in research has led to unclear and disparate policies. Here, we explore how the ethical principles outlined in the Belmont Report could be applied consistently to animals. We describe how concepts such as respect for autonomy and obligations to beneficence and justice could be applied to animals, as well as how animals are entitled to special protections as a result of their vulnerability. (shrink)

Under some circumstances, individuals are willing to engage in unethical behaviors that benefit another entity. In this research we advance the unethical pro-organizational behavior construct by showing that individuals also have the potential to behave unethically to benefit their supervisors. Previous research has not examined if employees engage in unethical acts to benefit an entity that is separate from oneself and if they will conduct these acts to benefit a supervisor. Our research helps to address these gaps. We also demonstrate (...) that unethical behavior to benefit a supervisor, what we term unethical pro-supervisor behavior, is more likely to occur if individuals are more (versus less) identified with their organization or supervisor. That is, feeling a sense of oneness with one’s organization or supervisor can result in employees engaging in unethical behavior to help their supervisor. Further, this positive relationship is weakened if the employee possesses higher levels of moral identity. We test our hypotheses with a two-part laboratory study, a field study, and a time-lagged field study. Theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed. (shrink)

(2013). The processes of inference. Argument & Computation: Vol. 4, Formal Models of Reasoning in Cognitive Psychology, pp. 4-20. doi: 10.1080/19462166.2012.674060.

Some philosophers argue that the principles of human reasoning are impeccable, and that mistakes are no more than momentary lapses in “information processing”. This article makes a case to the contrary. It shows that human reasoners commit systematic fallacies. The theory of mental models predicts these errors. It postulates that individuals construct mental models of the possibilities to which the premises of an inference refer. But, their models usually represent what is true in a possibility, not what is false. This (...) procedure reduces the load on working memory, and for the most part it yields valid inferences. However, as a computer program implementing the theory revealed, it leads to fallacious conclusions for certain inferences—those for which it is crucial to represent what is false in a possibility. Experiments demonstrate the variety of these fallacies and contrast them with control problems, which reasoners tend to get right. The fallacies can be compelling illusions, and they occur in reasoning based on sentential connectives such as “if” and “or”, quantifiers such as “all the artists” and “some of the artists”, on deontic relations such as “permitted” and “obligated”, and causal relations such as “causes” and “allows”. After we have reviewed the principal results, we consider the potential for alternative accounts to explain these illusory inferences. And we show how the illusions illuminate the nature of human rationality. (shrink)

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The following overview of the present situation and recent trends in the philosophy of science in the USA brings together bibliographical and institutional evidence to document the last stages of the supersession of logical positivism, the emergence of the historical school , its widespread influence upon other fields as well as within philosophy of science, and finally some of the reactions to it, many of which envision their endeavors as mediations between the historical school and the older logical approaches As (...) well as recording pertinent institutional trends, the report provides a series of capsule summaries of representative work from the extant literature primarily from 1966 to the present. (shrink)

The extant marketing literature provides little guidance for theory development or practice with regard to questions of ethical conformity and the resulting market response. To begin to bridge this research gap, we advance a theoretical framework of ethical conformity in marketing, appealing to marketing ethics, management strategy, and sociological foundations. We set the stage for our theoretical arguments by considering the role of normative expectations related to marketing practices and behaviors held by societal constituents. Against this backdrop, we propose drivers (...) of conformity in marketing, including practices consistent with both overconformity and underconformity. The framework allows us to advance testable research propositions by which questions of ethical conformity may be explored. We conclude by suggesting additional future research needed to develop the domain, specifically in the form of empirical inquiries uncovering firm strategic decisions with ethical implications. (shrink)

Recent just war thought has tended to prioritize just cause among the moral criteria to be satisfied for resort to armed force, reducing the requirement of sovereign authority to a secondary, supporting role: such authority is to act in response to the establishment of just cause. By contrast, Aquinas and Luther, two benchmark figures in the development of Christian thought on just war, unambiguously gave priority to the requirement of sovereign authority as instituted by God to carry out the responsibilities (...) of ensuring a just and peaceful order in the world. On this conception it is the sovereign, in deciding whether to resort to armed force, who must make sure to satisfy the other moral requirements of the jus ad bellum. This paper examines Aquinas and Luther on sovereign authority for use of armed force. Recapturing the importance of this conception is important both for the proper understanding of just war tradition and for working out its implications for such contemporary issues as humanitarian intervention and "regime change.". (shrink)

This article explores political discourse in the context of an online-mediated 2021 rapprochement between Swedish ‘mainstream’ and far-right parties paving the way for their eventual 2022 electoral success and later joint government coalition. The article analyses specifically how the above political accord on the Swedish right – often seen as breaking the long-term cordon sanitaire around Sweden’s far right – would be legitimised via discourses that carried significant elaboration and deepening of the ‘criminality’ and ‘immigration’ connection later recontextualised into the (...) broader Swedish public discourse and public imagination. Using social media analytics and qualitative, critical discourse analysis, we explore in depth a ‘discursive shift’ wherein the focus on criminality would become a key ‘proxy discourse’, i.e., a public-wide implicature, which, while referring to and debating a potentially genuine social issue would be strategically instrumentalised to effectively pre-legitimise ‘moral panics’ around immigration and cultural diversity. The analysis highlights that the emergence as well as the later recontextualisation of the ‘proxy discourse’ in question – implicitly suggesting that criminality, immigration, and cultural diversity are ‘somehow’ inherently connected – not only supported the political mainstreaming of the Swedish far-right’s anti-immigration stance but also normalised the wider tenets of illiberal, nativist ‘politics of exclusion’. (shrink)

In the United States of America, and in much of the world, corporations are afforded a great deal of rights to both protect themselves and others against legal action and mistreatment. To gain these rights, they defended themselves or were defended many times throughout the years in courts under the framework of “legal personhood”—but this same legal personhood is not afforded to most actual living creatures. There is enough similarity in the legal framework afforded to corporations that should be afforded (...) to animals as well, and more than enough evidence to show that it is increasingly necessary to protect and expand animal rights in this way. The argument is simple: because of their sentience, cognition, and emotional intelligence, animals deserve legal personhood. If we can make the argument that a corporation, which is incapable of these things listed above, should have certain unalienable rights, then it is illogical for us to make the argument that animals should not. (shrink)

U.S. journalists must walk a fine line when reporting on hate speech. Journalists have a vested interest in standing up for the First Amendment, which gives them the freedom to do their work. Howev...

Prior stock repurchase studies have found evidence that the announcement of a repurchase program sends a positive signal to the market. Firms engaging in open-market repurchase programs do not have to report how, when, and if they actually repurchased any shares. Evidence following the stock market crash of 1987 indicates that many firms announcing repurchase plans did not actually repurchase any share and, by their own admission, had no intention of repurchasing shares. Companies announcing plans and not following through are (...) apparently within the letter of the law. However, we argue that companies announcing plans with no intention of repurchasing shares are guilty of either lying or sending false signals. These companies create distrust in the investment community and intentionally mislead the public in violation of the SEC's antifraud provisions. Changes in the reporting procedures concerning repurchase plans are ethically and legally warranted. (shrink)

The impact of stress and other psychological variables on Inflammatory Bowel Disease prognosis, treatment response, and functional level is well-established; however, typical IBD treatment focuses on the physiological pathology of the disease and neglects complementary stress-reducing interventions. Recent pilot studies report the benefits of mindfulness-based interventions in people living with IBD, but are limited by small sample sizes. Recruitment challenges to in-person studies may be in part due to the difficulty IBD patients often have adhering to fixed schedules and travel (...) as a result of IBD symptoms such as pain, fatigue, and incontinence. The current study aimed to address this barrier by offering participants access to online mindfulness training, allowing individuals to engage with intervention materials to fit their own schedule. Online mindfulness programs have gained popularity in recent years, as they increase access and flexibility and decrease cost to the user; however, the dropout rate tends to be high. The current study compared the rate of adherence and efficacy of mindfulness training as a function of level of support: self-guided versus supported. Analysis revealed no significant difference in the benefits received between participants in the two groups; however, a significant difference group was found in terms of rate of completion, with 44.1% of the supportive group completing the protocol compared to 11.7% of the self-guided. Common challenges to meditation were measured, but did not significantly predict adherence to the intervention, and experience of these challenges did not significantly change over the duration of the study. Implications of the current research, future directions for the use of MBI for IBD patients, and a discussion of methodological considerations are provided. (shrink)

The standard view of Kant’s retributivism, as well as its more recent reworking in the ‘limited’ or ‘partial’ retributivist reading are, it is argued here, inadequate accounts of Kant on punishment. In the case of the former, the view is too limited and superficial, and in the latter it is simply inaccurate as an interpretation of Kant. Instead, this paper argues that a more sophisticated and accurate rendering of Kant on punishment can be obtained by looking to his construction of (...) the concept of justice. In so doing, not only is a superior account of Kant furnished, but also one up to the task of resolving the vexed issue of justifying legal punishment. (shrink)

Person‐centred care, with its central focus on the patient in partnership with healthcare practitioners, is considered to be the contemporary gold standard of care. This type of care implies effective communication from and by both the patient and the healthcare practitioner. This is often problematic in the case of the paediatric population, because of the many communicative challenges that may arise due to the child's developmental level, illness and distress, linguistic competency and disabilities. The principle of universal design put forth (...) in conventions and legislation means that the design of products and services should be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible. Augmentative and alternative communication encompasses strategies, for example pictures and apps, that are typically used with people with communication disability. In this position paper, we argue for the universal use of augmentative and alternative communication to support person‐centred communication and care for children, regardless of age or potential disability. Clinical examples are shared from three different paediatric care settings where pictorial supports were applied universally. Interviews were conducted with children and adolescents (with and without disabilities), parents and healthcare practitioners, and the principles of universal design were used as a framework to demonstrate how person‐centred communication is supported in paediatric care. (shrink)

We demonstrate that Statistical significance (Chow 1996) includes straw man arguments against (1) effect size, (2) meta-analysis, and (3) Bayesianism. We agree with the author that in experimental designs, H0 “is the effect of chance influences on the data-collection procedure . . . it says nothing about the substantive hypothesis or its logical complement” (Chow 1996, p. 41).

Research on ethical issues within food systems is often human-centric. As a consequence, animal-centric policy debates where regulatory decisions about food are being made tend to be overlooked by food scholars and activists. This absence was notable in the recent debates around Australia’s animal live export industry. Using Foucault’s tools, we explore how ‘food security’ is conceptualised and governed within animal cruelty policy debates about the live export trade. The problem of food security produced in these debates shaped Indonesians as (...) ‘victims’ of food insecurity due to the nation’s inability to produce sufficient quantities of protein. This understanding of the problem reproduced the dominant framing of food security as a problem for developing countries addressed by increasing global food production. The underlying premise uncritically accepted in Australia’s debates on live export trade was that intensive animal agriculture, and Australia’s live export trade specifically, were essential to alleviating global food insecurity. Drawing on our findings, we show how dominant representations of ‘food security’, and related regulatory and technological trajectories, flourish where alliances between animal and food activists, scholarship, and movements are weak. Accordingly, we argue for agri-food scholars to take up opportunities to contribute to the policy discussions about the treatment of animals to effectively expand the kinds of problems, solutions, and strategies of resistance produced in the discourses surrounding food system issues. (shrink)

Journey images deeply inform the way people understand processes of alienation and reconciliation, both with other peoples and with the earth. This essay explores classic journey stories from Cherokee life, South Africa, and China in order to develop an understanding of the different types of journey myths and the way they shape understandings of alienation and reconciliation. People can conflict because they are oriented by very different journey stories or because one party is fundamentally oriented by stories of place. Constructive (...) refashioning of journey myths must appropriate both personal and collective uses of the story and find imaginative ways of reweaving conflicting stories into a new journey myth. (shrink)

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, (...) that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links. Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors (...) We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

You might think a simple “No” would suffice as an answer. But there are features of Kant’s ethics that appear to be strikingly similar to virtue oriented views, so striking that some Kantians themselves have argued that Kant’s ethics in fact shares these features with virtue ethics. In what follows, I will argue against this view, though along the way I will acknowledge the features of Kant’s view that make it appear more like a kind of virtue ethics than it (...) really is. My plan is to first set out the distinctive features of what is nowadays called “virtue ethics”, those features that make it a genuine alternative to other normative theories. I then consider the features Kant’s view might share in common with virtue ethics and the case for saying that it is, therefore, fundamentally the same sort of theory. I follow these two sections with an argument against this position. I want to warn you at the outset, however, that my argument itself will be quite unsurprising, since it is an argument that has been central to the way in which most philosophers have understood Kant’s ethics. Any novelty I can claim here is in my account of what makes virtue ethics a genuine alternative to other normative theories, and my defense of this argument against those, in particular Barbara Herman, who have apparently found the argument unpersuasive. (shrink)