Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 5, Page 606-626, November 2019.

Interventions that are designed to stem plagiarism do not always override the motivation of individuals to cheat and, therefore, may not diminish misconduct. To inform more effective approaches, we conducted a systematic review to clarify the psychological causes of plagiarism. This review of 83 empirical papers showed that a specific blend of circumstances may foster plagiarism: an emphasis on competition and success rather than development and cooperation coupled with impaired resilience, limited confidence, impulsive tendencies, and biased cognitions. Fortunately, whenever students (...) feel their life and studies align to their future aspirations, many of these circumstances tend to dissipate. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship among ethical philosophy, thinking style, and managerial ethical decision-making. Based on the premise that business ethics is a function of culture and time, we attempt to explore two important questions as to whether the national differences in managerial ethical philosophies remain over time and whether the relationship between thinking style and ethical decision-making is consistent across different national contexts. We conducted a survey on Korean managers’ ethical decision-making and thinking style and made a cross-cultural, cross-temporal (...) comparison with the results presented by previous studies that surveyed Korean and US managers with the same questionnaire at different points in time. Our analysis revealed that Korean managers have become more reliant on rule utilitarianism for ethical decision-making over the last two decades, which is dominantly used by US managers, corroborating our convergence hypothesis built on social contracts theory. However, as opposed to previous research, we found that managers with a balanced linear and nonlinear thinking style do not necessarily make more ethical decisions compared to those with a predominantly linear or nonlinear thinking style. This study contributes to international business ethics literature by presenting a theoretical framework that may explain the convergence of ethical philosophies employed by managers in different national contexts over time, and that the relationship between thinking style and managerial ethical decision-making may not be universal, but contingent on contextual factors. (shrink)

Biomedical engineering technologies such as brain–machine interfaces and neuroprosthetics are advancements which assist human beings in varied ways. There are exciting yet speculative visions of how the neurosciences and bioengineering may influence human nature. However, these could be preparing a possible pathway towards an enhanced and even posthuman future. This article seeks to investigate several ethical themes and wider questions of enhancement, transhumanism and posthumanism. Four themes of interest are: autonomy, identity, futures, and community. Three larger questions can be asked: (...) will everyone be enhanced? Will we be “human” if we are not, one day, transhuman? Should we be enhanced or not? The article proceeds by concentrating on a widespread and sometimes controversial application: the cochlear implant, an auditory prosthesis implanted into Deaf patients. Cochlear implantation and its reception in both the deaf and hearing communities have a distinctive moral discourse, which can offer surprising insights. The paper begins with several points about the enhancement of human beings, transhumanism’s reach beyond the human, and posthuman aspirations. Next it focuses on cochlear implants on two sides. Firstly, a shorter consideration of what technologies may do to humans in a transhumanist world. Secondly, a deeper analysis of cochlear implantation’s unique socio-political movement, its ethical explanations and cultural experiences linked with pediatric cochlear implantation—and how those wary of being thrust towards posthumanism could marshal such ideas by analogy. As transhumanism approaches, the issues and questions merit continuing intense analysis. (shrink)

The burgeoning literature on global value chains has recast our understanding of how industrial clusters are shaped by their ties to the international economy, but within this context, the role played by corporate social responsibility continues to evolve. New research in the past decade allows us to better understand how CSR is linked to industrial clusters and GVCs. With geographic production and trade patterns in many industries becoming concentrated in the global South, lead firms in GVCs have been under growing (...) pressure to link economic and social upgrading in more integrated forms of CSR. This is leading to a confluence of “private governance”, “social governance”, and “public governance”. This new form of “synergistic governance” is illustrated with evidence from recent studies of GVCs and industrial clusters, as well as advances in theorizing about new patterns of governance in GVCs and clusters. (shrink)

In recent years, the ‘mechanistic view’ has developed as a popular alternative to the ‘semantic view’ concerning the identity of physical computation. However, semanticists have provided powerful arguments that suggest the mechanistic view fails to deliver essential distinctions between paradigmatic computational operations. This article reviews responses on behalf of the mechanist and uses this opportunity to propose a type of pluralism about computational identity. This pluralism contends that there are multiple ‘levels’ of properties and relations pertaining to computation that can (...) inform different kinds of individuation. As such, for the pluralist, there are multiple legitimate ways of classifying computation, depending on the nature of the system in question, and one’s own epistemic priorities. (shrink)

Developmental psychologists have long argued that the capacity to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions develops across cultures and emerges early in life. Children reliably treat moral transgressions as more wrong, more punishable, independent of structures of authority, and universally applicable. However, previous studies have not yet examined the role of these features in mature moral cognition. Using a battery of adult-appropriate cases (including vehicular and sexual assault, reckless behavior, and violations of etiquette and social contracts) we demonstrate that these features (...) also distinguish moral from conventional transgressions in mature moral cognition. Each hypothesized moral transgressions was treated as strongly and clearly immoral. However, our data suggest that although the majority of hypothesized conventional transgressions also form an obvious cluster, social conventions seem to lie along a continuum that stretches from mere matters of personal preference (e.g., getting tattoos or wearing black shoes with a brown belt) to transgressions that are treated as matters for legitimate social sanction (e.g., violating traffic laws or not paying your taxes). We use these findings to discuss issues of universality, domain-specificity, and the importance of using a well-studied set of moral scenarios to examine clinical populations and the underlying neural architecture of moral cognition. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

This paper examines the antecedents of organizational commitment for adopting corporate environmental responsibility and green practices in the case of the logistics industry in South Korea. Seven hundred and eighty employees and top management from logistics companies were sampled. The data were analyzed using factor analysis, structural equation modeling techniques, and one-way analysis of variance. The results showed that social expectations, organizational support, and stakeholder pressure were the important antecedents for the adoption of corporate environmental responsibility and green practices. In (...) the path analysis, social expectations had the greatest impact on both stakeholder pressure and green practice adoption. Moreover, we found that the higher the job titles were, the more willing they were to adopt green practices. This indicated that the current top management of Korean logistics companies is well aware of being mandated to make a commitment to corporate environmental responsibility and green practices. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of attitude toward piracy on intention to buy pirated CDs using Chinese samples. Attitude toward piracy is measured by a multi-item scale that has been shown to have a consistent factor structure with four distinct components, namely, social cost of piracy, anti-big business attitude, social benefit of dissemination, and ethical belief. Our findings reveal that social benefit of dissemination and anti-big business attitude have a positive relationship with intention to buy pirated CDs while social cost (...) of piracy and ethical belief have a negative relationship. Among these components, ethical belief tends to most strongly predict intention to buy pirated CDs. Demographic variables such as gender and age also help explain the respondents' intention to buy pirated CDs. In addition, those respondents with experience of buying pirated CDs would tend to be more likely to buy pirated CDs than those without such experience. The results are discussed with a view to helping copyright businesses to effectively suppress piracy, and directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

It is generally acknowledged by proponents of ‘new mechanism’ that mechanistic explanation involves adopting a perspective, but there is less agreement on how we should understand this perspective-taking or what its implications are for practising science. This paper examines the perspectival nature of mechanistic explanation through the lens of the ‘mechanistic stance’, which falls somewhere between Dennett’s more familiar physical and design stance. We argue this approach implies three distinct and significant ways in which mechanistic explanation can be interpreted as (...) perspectival: ‘phenomenon perspectivism’, ‘pattern perspectivism’ and ‘hierarchy perspectivism’. We evaluate the strength of the perspective-dependency implied by each of these, and along the way, discuss their significance for wider debates within the new mechanism literature, such as the nature of function attribution and an ontic vs epistemic understanding of explanation. (shrink)

This book provides a sustained and penetrating critique of a wide range of views in modern cognitive science and philosophy of the mind, from Turing's famous test for intelligence in machines to recent work in computational linguistic theory. While discussing many of the key arguments and topics, the authors also develop a distinctive analytic approach. Drawing on the methods of conceptual analysis first elaborated by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the authors seek to show that these methods still have a great deal (...) to offer in the field of the cognitive theory and the philosophy of mind, providing a powerful alternative to many of the positions put forward in the contemporary literature. Amoung the many issues discussed in the book are the following: the Cartesian roots of modern conceptions of mind; Searle's 'Chinese Room' thought experiment; Fodor's 'language of thought' hypothesis; the place of 'folk psychology' in cognitivist thought; and the question of whether any machine may be said to 'think' or 'understand' in the ordinary senses of these words. Wide ranging, up-to-date and forcefully argued, this book represents a major intervention in contemporary debates about the status of cognitive science an the nature of mind. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, psychology, linguistics and computing sciences. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical appraisal of the recent turn in comparative religious ethics to virtue theory; it argues that the specific aspirations of virtue ethicists to make ethics more contextual, interdisciplinary, and practice-centered has in large measure failed to match the rhetoric. I suggest that the focus on the category of the human and practices associated with self-formation along with a methodology grounded in “analogical imagination” has actually poeticized the subject matter into highly abstract textual studies on normative voices (...) within traditions, largely in isolation from considerations of socio-historical context, political and institutional pressures, and the lived ethics of non-elite moral actors. I conclude with some programmatic suggestions for how the field of comparative religious ethics can move forward. (shrink)

Attempting to determine solutions for unethical practices in the field, this research was designed to assess the effectiveness of public relations firms’ ethics statements in decreasing the incidence of malpractice. This study revealed an encouraging finding that practitioners working in firms with ethical parameters were significantly more likely to engage in ethical practices. Moreover, educating public relations practitioners about the content of ethics statement could positively influence their ethical practices. At the same time, this study’s findings suggest further questions for (...) consideration in future scholarship and in the application of ethics statements to practice within the field. (shrink)

The standard versions of predicativism are committed to the following two theses: proper names are count nouns in all their occurrences, and names do not refer to objects but express name-bearing properties. The main motivation for predicativism is to provide a uniform explanation of referential names and predicative names. According to predicativism, predicative names are fundamental and referential names are explained by appealing to a null determiner functioning like “the” or “that.” This paper has two goals. The first is to (...) reject the predicativists’ explanation of the two types of names. I present three syntactic counterexamples to the predicativists’ account of referential names: incorporation, modification, and measure phrase uses. The second goal is to present a novel strategy to explain the two types of names. I propose that referential names are fundamental but that there are null morphemes available for transforming a name into a count noun. (shrink)

Public figures’ transgressions attract considerable media attention and public interest. However, little is understood about the impact of celebrity endorsers’ transgressions on associated brands. Drawing on research on moral reasoning, we posit that consumers are not always motivated to separate judgments of performance from judgments of morality or simply excuse a wrongdoer. We propose that consumers also engage in moral coupling, a distinct moral reasoning process which allows consumers to integrate judgments of performance and judgments of morality. In three studies, (...) we demonstrate that moral coupling is prevalent and has unique predictive utilities in explaining consumers’ evaluation of the transgressor. We also show that transgression type has a significant impact on consumers’ choice of moral reasoning strategy. Finally, we demonstrate that consumers’ support for a brand endorsed by a transgressor is a direct function of moral reasoning choice. Findings suggest that public figure’s immoral behavior and its spillover to an extended brand is contingent on consumers’ moral reasoning choices. (shrink)

This research examines the ethical orientations of students (ethical idealism, ethical relativism and Machiavellianism) towards their attitude to plagiarize. It also examines the moderating effect of religious orientation on the relationship of the independent variables toward students’ attitude towards plagiarism. Data was collected from 160 business diploma and undergraduate students from a local private college and a local public university in Malaysia. Results from the hierarchical regression analysis showed that ethical relativism and Machiavellianism had a positive relationship with students’ attitude (...) towards plagiarism whilst ethical idealism was negatively related to students’ attitude towards plagiarism. Religious orientation was found to have no moderating effect on the relationship between the three independent variables: ethical idealism, ethical relativism and Machiavellianism and the dependent variable, students’ attitude towards plagiarism. (shrink)

Using an international sample of firms from 32 countries, we study the relation between media independence and corporate tax aggressiveness. We measure media independence by the extent of private ownership and competition in the media industry. Using an indicator variable for tax aggressiveness when the firm’s corporate tax avoidance measure is within the top quartile of each country-industry combination, we find strong evidence that media independence is associated with a lower likelihood of tax aggressiveness, after controlling for other institutional determinants, (...) including home-country tax system characteristics. We also find that the effect of media independence is more pronounced when the legal environment is weaker, and when the information environment is less transparent. We contribute to the business ethics literature by documenting the role of independent media as an external monitoring mechanism in constraining corporate tax aggressiveness. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to explore the motivational structures of external whistleblowers involved in the decision to blow the whistle by applying MEC theory and the laddering technique. Using both soft and hard laddering methods, data were collected from 37 Korean external whistleblowers. Results revealed that the means-end chain of external whistleblowers was the hierarchical linkage among two concrete attributes, two functional consequences, and one terminal value. The extant whistleblowing literature has either made assumptions about whistleblowers’ motivations when (...) developing models or has drawn indirect inferences from measures of other variables. Our study is the first with an explicit and empirical focus on whistleblowers’ motivations. The findings provide evidence of the motivational structures of external whistleblowers that consist of a set of complex paths linked by multi-layered motivators. This research will be helpful in designing and reviewing whistleblowing programs for organizations, regulatory agencies, and journalists. (shrink)

cuted actions. It has been applied to several challenge problems in the theory of commonsense knowledge. We study the relationship between this formalism and other work on nonmonotonic reasoning and knowl-.

The graduate course in research ethics in the Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering at the National University of Singapore consists of a semester long mandatory course titled: “Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity.” The course provides students with guiding principles for appropriate conduct in the professional and social settings of scientific research and in making morally weighted and ethically sound decisions when confronted with moral dilemmas. It seeks to enhance understanding and appreciation of the moral reasoning underpinning various rules (...) and legislative constraints associated with research subjects and procedures. Further, students are trained to critically analyse cases and issues associated with scientific misconduct preparing them to act in a responsible and effective manner should they encounter such cases. The diverse background and training of the cohort also provide a unique setting and opportunity for student-initiated collaborative interdisciplinary learning. This article offers a reflective account of the course and some preliminary insights into learning outcomes. (shrink)

According to our data, 38.5 % of S&P 1500 firms have at least one professor on their boards. Given the lack of research examining the roles and effects of academic faculty as members of boards of directors on corporate outcomes, this study investigates whether firms with professor–directors are more likely to exhibit higher corporate social responsibility performance ratings. Results indicate that firms with professor–directors do exhibit higher CSR performance ratings than those without. However, the influence of professor–directors on firm CSR (...) performance ratings depends on their academic background—the positive association between the presence of professor–directors and firm CSR performance ratings is significant only when their academic background is specialized. Finally, this positive association weakens when professor–directors hold an administrative position at their universities. (shrink)

This paper attempts to recast Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream within the larger normative context of the 'Inner Chapters' and early Daoism in terms of its moral significance, particularly in the way that it prescribes how a Daoist should live through the 'significant symbol' of the butterfly. This normative reading of the passage will be contrasted with two recent interpretations of the passage - one by Robert Allinson and the other by Harold Roth - that tend to focus more on the epistemological (...) and mystical concerns of the text. As will be argued, the undue emphasis on the epistemological and mystical significance of the passage not only comes to grief when considered in light of philosophical and textual concerns but also obscures the moral dimensions of the passage that are more congruent with the 'Inner Chapters' as a whole. (shrink)

Whether due to simplicity or hypocrisy, the question of access to patient data for biomedical research is widely seen in the public discourse only from the angle of patient privacy. At the same time, the desire to live and to live without disability is of much higher value to the patients. This goal can only be achieved by extracting research insight from patient data in addition to working on model organisms, something that is well understood by many patients. Yet, most (...) biomedical researchers working outside of clinics and hospitals are denied access to patient records when, at the same time, clinicians who guard the patient data are not optimally prepared for the data’s analysis. Medical data collection is a time- and cost-intensive process that is most of all tedious, with few elements of intellectual and emotional satisfaction on its own. In this process, clinicians and bioinformaticians, each group with their own interests, have to join forces with the goal to generate medical data sets both from clinical trials and from routinely collected electronic health records that are, as much as possible, free from errors and obvious inconsistencies. The data cleansing effort as we have learned during curation of Singaporean clinical trial data is not a trivial task. The introduction of omics and sophisticated imaging modalities into clinical practice that are only partially interpreted in terms of diagnosis and therapy with today’s level of knowledge warrant the creation of clinical databases with full patient history. This opens up opportunities for re-analyses and cross-trial studies at future time points with more sophisticated analyses of the same data, the collection of which is very expensive. (shrink)

D. Lewis proposed the reformed conditional analysis of disposition to handle Martin's influential counterexamples to the simple counterfactual analysis. Some philosophers, however, argue that the mere fact that the reformed conditional analysis of disposition can handle Martin's counterexamples should not be regarded as a reason to prefer the reformed conditional analysis to the simple analysis. In this paper, I argue that the reformed version should be preferred not because it can handle Martin's counterexamples but because there are other counterexamples to (...) the simple conditional analysis. (shrink)

Matrix clauses are tensed in Korean and Japanese, but both languages have coordination constructions where any non-final conjunct may or, in the case of Japanese, must be untensed. Building on analyses of the temporal interpretation of tenseless languages such as Yucatec Maya and Kalaallisut, this article argues that a truly tenseless analysis of the temporal interpretation of these non-final conjuncts is possible once the effects of Aktionsart and the discourse context on temporal interpretation are taken into consideration. The formal semantic (...) analysis developed here is shown to be empirically and conceptually superior to previous analyses, which claim that the temporal interpretation of tenseless non-final conjuncts is determined either by the tense of the final conjunct or by a tense-like restriction introduced by a zero tense morpheme or the coordination marker. The proposed analysis of Korean and Japanese coordination constructions thus provides further evidence that tenseless clauses can be semantically interpreted as such, not just in tenseless languages but even in languages where matrix clauses are otherwise tensed. The article concludes by discussing implications for analyses of cross-linguistic semantic variation. (shrink)

This study examines why individuals who are deeply embedded in the organization may engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior. Drawing from social identity theory and self-affirmation theory, we propose that deeply embedded employees may engage in UPB as a way of promoting or maintaining their status in the organization. We further propose that this positive relationship between organizational embeddedness and UPB, mediated through status perceptions, is stronger for employees working under managers who display low levels of ethical leadership. Using data gathered (...) in a two-wave survey from 224 working adults, the results of the study lend support for the hypothesized relationships and remained significant even after controlling for affective commitment. The study advances our understanding of both contextual and individual factors motivating employees to engage in UPB and the boundary conditions under which UPB can be reduced. (shrink)

The battle over the proper place of mental representation in cognitive science is often portrayed as a clash between realism and eliminativism. But this simple dichotomy belies the variety of different ontological positions available. This article investigates the various stances that one can adopt toward the ontology of mental representation, and in so doing, shows that eliminativism is in fact best understood as two distinct positions: a posteriori eliminativism and a priori eliminativism. Furthermore, I show that a priori eliminativism faces (...) two crippling challenges. I argue that once we put a priori eliminativism aside, determining the ultimate ontological status of representation can be postponed while we assess its utility across different domains of cognitive science—something all remaining positions can agree on. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of some suspected sources of bias on perceptions of public sector corruption. These sources include dependence on two types of media as information sources about corruption: traditional and social media, positive perception of public employees, and social identification with public employees. Data were collected through a face-to-face survey of the general public in South Korea. The sample comprised 472 respondents evenly dispersed across the country. Through regression analysis, we found that dependence on traditional media—but not (...) social media—significantly increased the perceived level of corruption. However, positive perceptions of and social identification with public employees were negatively associated with it, showing that these factors may skew respondents' perceptions of corruption. The results have implications for practitioners and researchers who design, implement, or evaluate anti-corruption policies, suggesting the need for caution when making use of survey results. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEntrepreneurs should act as stewards of entrepreneurial rent. Entrepreneurial rent is the difference between the ex post value of a venture and its ex ante costs. It is the result of competition among buyers and sellers within the market process rather than the sole efforts of the entrepreneur. As a result, entrepreneurs should allocate entrepreneurial rent for the benefit of other market participants rather than consuming it for themselves. The moral obligation to steward entrepreneurial rent is consistent with traditional bases (...) of property rights and the norm of social welfare maximization, and it applies to corporations and their shareholders, as well as individual entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Focusing on the production of lists of evaluative criteria has oversimplified our judgments of qualitative research. On the one hand, aspirations for global criteria applicable to “qualitative” or “interpretive” research have glossed over crucial analytic differences among specific types of inquiry. On the other hand, the methodological concern with appropriate ways of acquiring trustworthy data has led to an overly narrow proceduralism. I suggest that rational evaluations of analytic worth require the delineation of species of analytic tasks and the exercise (...) of genre-appropriate judgments, to determine what constitutes explanatory, interpretive, or explicatory adequacy. I focus on the parameters of judgment for interpretations and explications because their analytic differences have not yet been made distinct in qualitative research. (shrink)

This is a response to the recent essay by Elizabeth M. Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker on “Comparative Religious Ethics as a Field of Study.” I clarify my earlier positions on method and virtue in comparative religious ethics and try to respond to some of the issues that Bucar and Stalnaker raise in regard to my arguments specifically and the field more generally. I argue that while we need not measure the practical impact of scholarly work in comparative religious ethics purely (...) in terms of political or social action, I nevertheless worry that defining the goals of comparative inquiry in terms of the production of bewilderment, intellectual vertigo, or skeptical questions can lead to impressionistic or therapeutic methodological norms. In a similar vein, I refine my earlier position on externalism that acknowledges the impossibility of a purely externalist approach but also notes the desirability of coming to understand others “in their own terms” prior to engaging in the process of transmutation. I also question Bucar and Stalnaker's pessimism about the potential of producing “rigorously convincing ethical theory from the lived experience of regular folk,” suggesting that perhaps we are working with different conceptions of the sociology of knowledge. Finally, I consider whether we are currently in the midst of an epistemological crisis and conclude with some reflections on the rationality of the craft of comparative religious ethics. (shrink)