As a contribution to the continuing debate about tax practitioner ethics, this paper explores the main streams of Western ethical thought that are relevant to tax practitioners’ work, most typically deontology and consequentialism. It then goes on to consider the impact of such ethical influences on the professional ethical codes of conduct that govern tax practitioners’ work, and attempts to unravel the complex work and ethical environment of the practice of tax in terms of tax compliance and tax avoidance. The (...) paper then examines the prior studies on tax practitioners and ethics and the type of dilemmas that practitioners face in the context of their work. The paper proceeds to examine empirically the extent to which tax practitioners take a consequentialist versus a deontological approach in their reasoning about moral dilemmas. This is carried out by an innovative use of the Defining Issues Test. (shrink)
Ethical dilemmas involving tax issues were identified by members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants as posing the most difficult ethical problem for them (Finn et al., Journal of Business Ethics 7(8), pp. 607–609, 1988). The KPMG tax shelter fraud case proves that the tax profession has not gone untainted in the age of numerous accounting and corporate scandals, such as the Enron débâcle (Sikka and Hampton, Accounting Forum 29(3), 325–343, 2005). High-profile scandals serve to highlight the problems (...) caused by differences in ethical judgement among accountants and tax practitioners and the issue of ethics has been brought publicly to the forefront of the profession. Nevertheless, the nature and dimension of ethical issues in tax practice have been largely unexplored (Erard, Journal of Public Economics 52(2), 163–197, 1993; Marshall et al., Journal of Business Ethics 17(12), 1265–1279, 1998; FrecknallHughes, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Leeds, 2002). This research aims to contribute to the debate on ethics in tax practice by reporting interview data on tax practitioners’ perceptions of ethics in the jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom and exploring the link or equation of ethics with risk management. (shrink)
This paper reports on the development of a research instrument designed to explore ethical reasoning in a tax context. This research instrument is a version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT) originally developed by Rest [1979a, Development in Judging Moral Issues (Univer sity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN); 1979b, Defining Issues Test (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)], but adapted to focus specifically on the environment encountered by tax practitioners. The paper explores reasons for developing a context-(and profession-) specific test, (...) and details the manner in which this was undertaken. The study on which it is based aims to compare the reasoning of tax practitioners in the taxspecific context and in the general social context covered by the original DIT, and to compare this with the reasoning of non-specialists in these two contexts. The paper therefore also considers the issues that arise when using such tests to compare reasoning in different domains or to compare groups. The focus on instrument development to measure ethical reasoning in a specific domain will contribute to the literature on research methods in the area of the DIT and will facilitate cross-study comparisons. (shrink)
While much of the empirical accounting literature suggests that, if differences do exist, Big Four employees are more ethical than non-Big Four employees, this trend has not been evident in the recent media coverage of Big Four tax practitioners acting for multinationals accused of aggressive tax avoidance behaviour. However, there has been little exploration in the literature to date specifically of the relationship between firm size and ethics in tax practice. We aim here to address this gap, initially exploring tax (...) practitioners’ perceptions of the impact of firm size on ethics in tax practice using interview data in order to identify the salient issues involved. We then proceed to assess quantitatively whether employer firm size has an impact on the ethical reasoning of tax practitioners, using a tax context-specific adaptation of a well-known and validated psychometric instrument, the Defining Issues Test. (shrink)
How tax practitioners approach ethical dilemmas remains generally unexplored in academic literature. We use here Rest’s original Defining Issues Test (Development in judging moral issues. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979; Moral development. Advances in research and theory. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), combined with a tax context-specific test and in conjunction with a control group of non-tax specialists, to examine tax practitioners’ moral reasoning in a social and tax context. We investigate: (i) the effect of a tax context on (...) issues raised (finding that practitioners generally reason at lower levels than in social scenarios); (ii) whether the profession attracts people who reason at certain levels (finding that it does not); and (iii) whether practitioners are affected by training/socialization in their professional context (finding that that they are). (shrink)
This paper reports on the development of a research instrument designed to explore ethical reasoning in a tax context. This research instrument is a version of the Defining Issues Test originally developed by Rest [1979a, Development in Judging Moral Issues ; 1979b, Defining Issues Test ], but adapted to focus specifically on the environment encountered by tax practitioners. The paper explores reasons for developing a context- specific test, and details the manner in which this was undertaken. The study on which (...) it is based aims to compare the reasoning of tax practitioners in the taxspecific context and in the general social context covered by the original DIT, and to compare this with the reasoning of non-specialists in these two contexts. The paper therefore also considers the issues that arise when using such tests to compare reasoning in different domains or to compare groups. The focus on instrument development to measure ethical reasoning in a specific domain will contribute to the literature on research methods in the area of the DIT and will facilitate cross-study comparisons. (shrink)
This article questions the value of photographs of violence and suffering. Taking Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois’ anthology Violence in War and Peace as a point of departure and return, it will explore the significance of the inclusion of images of explicit violence when they readily acknowledge they risk both indifference and voyeuristic interest. Key to my analysis is the centrality of the body to the images. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois are wary of reducing questions of violence to bodily (...) suffering, but the admission of so many images of physical violation undercuts their critique of the primacy of the physical in our accounts of violence. The use of the body as a brute signifier of violence is deeply problematic, not least because it is tied to questions of race. Ultimately, it is argued, they attempt, unconsciously, to fix the nature of violence – which they deem slippery because it is irrefutably social – in the body. (shrink)
This paper discusses a new edition of Callimachus' Aitia by Annette Harder and a monograph, Callimachus in Context, by Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens. A focus is common to both works, the edition no less than the monograph, which tackles the poem on what Harder calls the micro-, macro- and meso-levels, in order, not only to establish readings, explicate Realien and clarify detail, but also to explore literary techniques, structure and the degree to which the poem reflects the society (...) and culture in which it was written. Recent interpretations have seen catalogue technique and organization as fundamental to the Aitia's poetics, and the review considers aspects of both the poem's structure and its contemporaneity – as well as the limitations of an excessively Alexandria-centric approach. (shrink)
[Michael Tye] Externalism about thought contents has received enormous attention in the philosophical literature over the past fifteen years or so, and it is now the established view. There has been very little discussion, however, of whether memory contents are themselves susceptible to an externalist treatment. In this paper, I argue that anyone who is sympathetic to Twin Earth thought experiments for externalism with respect to certain thoughts should endorse externalism with respect to certain memories. /// [Jane Heal] Tye (...) claims that an externalist should say that memory content invoking natural kind concepts floats free of the setting where the memory is laid down and is at later times determined by the context in which the memory is revived. His argument assumes the existence of 'slow switching' of the meaning of natural kind terms when a person is transported from Earth to Twin Earth. But proper understanding of natural kind terms suggests that slow switching (contrary to what is often presupposed) is likely never to be completed. Hence the situation of a person unknowingly transported to Twin Earth is not that his memories switch content but rather that he gets two natural kinds confused. (shrink)
Can we understand other minds ‘from the inside’? What would this mean? There is an attraction which many have felt in the idea that creatures with minds, people , invite a kind of understanding which inanimate objects such as rocks, plants and machines, do not invite and that it is appropriate to seek to understand them ‘from the inside’. What I hope to do in this paper is to introduce and defend one version of the so-called ‘simulation’ approach to our (...) grasp and use of psychological concepts, a version which gives central importance to the idea of shared rationality, and in so doing to tease out and defend one strand in the complex of ideas which finds expression in this mysterious phrase. (shrink)
The theory of personal identity should illuminate and be illuminated by the theory of personality, of which it is a part. I believe that Locke's theory succeeds in this more than that of any other great philosopher, and the modifications which it may need are not fundamental ones. The problems raised by Butler and Flew can be made to disappear.
Machine generated contents note: -- PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND INTRODUCTION * Introduction * PART II: ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TEXTS * Pygmalion as allegory for transformational adult learning: Ovid, Shaw and Hughes * Educating Rita and Oleanna * The Winter's Tale * PART III: BIOGRAPHICAL DATA * Interview with Joe * Interview with Jane * Interview with Sarah * SECTION IV: AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL DATA * Interview with Lilian * Autobiographical Writing * Final thoughts.
Since its founding in the nineteenth century, social anthropology has been seen as the study of exotic peoples in faraway places. But today more and more anthropologists are dedicating themselves not just to observing but to understanding and helping solve social problems wherever they occur--in international aid organizations, British TV studios, American hospitals, or racist enclaves in Eastern Europe, for example. In Exotic No More , an initiative of the Royal Anthropological Institute, some of today's most respected anthropologists demonstrate, in (...) clear, unpretentious prose, the tremendous contributions that anthropology can make to contemporary society. They cover issues ranging from fundamentalism to forced migration, child labor to crack dealing, human rights to hunger, ethnicity to environmentalism, intellectual property rights to international capitalisms. But Exotic No More is more than a litany of gloom and doom the essays also explore topics usually associated with leisure or "high" culture, including the media, visual arts, tourism, and music. Each author uses specific examples from their fieldwork to illustrate their discussions, and 62 photographs enliven the text. Throughout the book, the contributors highlight anthropology's commitment to taking people seriously on their own terms, paying close attention to what they are saying and doing, and trying to understand how they see the world and why. Sometimes this bottom-up perspective makes the strange familiar, but it can also make the familiar strange, exposing the cultural basis of seemingly "natural" behaviors and challenging us to rethink some of our most cherished ideas--about gender, "free" markets, "race," and "refugees," among many others. Contributors: William O. Beeman Philippe Bourgois John Chernoff E. Valentine Daniel Alex de Waal Judith Ennew James Fairhead Sarah Franklin Michael Gilsenan Faye Ginsburg Alma Gottlieb Christopher Hann Faye V. Harrison Richard Jenkins Melissa Leach Margaret Lock Jeremy MacClancy Jonathan Mazower Ellen Messer A. David Napier Nancy Scheper-HughesJane Schneider Parker Shipton Christopher B. Steiner. (shrink)
R.I.G Hughes offers the first detailed and accessible analysis of the Hilbert-space models used in quantum theory and explains why they are so successful.
Hughes approaches his subjects, as he later did with pertinent issues of the twentieth-century, with both reason and compassion.This edition includes an elegant ...
A general account of modeling in physics is proposed. Modeling is shown to involve three components: denotation, demonstration, and interpretation. Elements of the physical world are denoted by elements of the model; the model possesses an internal dynamic that allows us to demonstrate theoretical conclusions; these in turn need to be interpreted if we are to make predictions. The DDI account can be readily extended in ways that correspond to different aspects of scientific practice.
Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)
This volume succeeds the same authors' well-known An Introduction to Modal Logic and A Companion to Modal Logic. We designate the three books and their authors NIML, IML, CML and H&C respectively. Sadly, George Hughes died partway through the writing of NIML.
Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...
In this paper, I shall be arguing for what I hope is a modern version of a very traditional view, which is that God can explain two very basic phenomena: the first is the existence of the universe as we know it: the second is the particular way in which the universe is organised. I shall also, though briefly, try to counter the view that the totally unwelcome features of our universe make it impossible to reconcile the universe as it (...) is with anything like traditional theistic belief. This project, however, is quite a daunting one. So I would wish to make it clear right at the start that, while I would claim that my views are reasonable, and indeed more reasonable than belief in the denial of these views would be, I still do not hold that it is unreasonable for someone to reject each of the conclusions for which I shall argue. For plainly anyone, whether myself or any opponent, can be both reasonable and mistaken. (shrink)
This article introduces the topic of body and commerce commodification as an effort to return sociological and anthropological thinking to a consideration of bodies as tangible, palpable and real material objects as well as semi-magical and symbolic representations. It argues for an enlarged conception of commodification as encompassing all monetized relations in which human bodies are the token of economic exchanges that are often masked as something else love, pleasure, altruism, kindness.
R.I.G. Hughes presents a series of eight philosophical essays on the theoretical practices of physics. The first two essays examine these practices as they appear in physicists' treatises (e.g. Newton's Principia and Opticks ) and journal articles (by Einstein, Bohm and Pines, Aharonov and Bohm). By treating these publications as texts, Hughes casts the philosopher of science in the role of critic. This premise guides the following 6 essays which deal with various concerns of philosophy of physics such (...) as laws, disunities, models and representation, computer simulation, explanation, and the discourse of physics. (shrink)
Dementia affects millions of people throughout the world. Thinking through Dementia offers a critique of the main models used to understand dementia-the biomedical, neuropsychological, and social constructionist. It discusses clinical issues and cases, together with philosophical work that might help us to better understand and treat this illness.
Moshe Tati, a sanitation worker in Jerusalem, was among the first of more than a thousand mortally sick Israelis who signed up for illicit and clandestine ‘transplant tour’ packages that included: travel to an undisclosed foreign and exotic setting; five-star hotel accommodation; surgery in a private hospital unit; a ‘fresh’ kidney purchased from a perfect stranger trafficked from a third country. Although Tati’s holiday turned into a nightmare and he had to be emergency air-lifted from a rented transplant unit in (...) a private hospital in Adana, Turkey back to Israel, Moshe became a poster-boy of transplant tourism for the next decade. João Cavalcanti was among the first of 38 residents of the slums of Recife recruited by retired military Captain Ivan da Silva and his sidekick Captain Gadddy Tauber to travel to Durban, South Africa to provide a spare kidney to an Israeli transplant tourist in Durban. This article examines the logics and practices through which kidney buyers and kidney sellers, organs brokers, surgeons and their accessories convince themselves that they are engaged in an illegal but still mutually beneficial ‘medical-recreational’ adventure, an ‘extreme medical sport’ of sorts. While life, health and survival motivate ‘transplant tourism’, a euphemism for human trafficking in spare body parts, the freedom to roam, mobility, is an essential feature of transplant tours for kidney buyers and kidney sellers. (shrink)
Hyman (1999, 2006) argues that knowledge is best conceived as a kind of ability: S knows that p iff S can φ for the reason that p. Hyman motivates this thesis by appealing to Gettier cases. I argue that it is counterexampled by a certain kind of Gettier case where the fact that p is a cause of the subject’s belief that p. One can φ for the reason that p even if one does not know that p. So knowledge (...) is not best conceived as an ability of this kind. (shrink)
Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, and the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, (...) inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world. (shrink)
In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant's aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant's account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant's contribution is (...) a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (shrink)
This paper argues that the activist, feminist and pragmatist Jane Addams was an experimental philosopher. To defend this claim, I argue for capacious notions of both philosophical pragmatism and experimental philosophy. I begin in Section 2 with a new defence of Rose and Danks’ [‘In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy’. Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 : 512–32] argument in favour of a broad conception of experimental philosophy. Koopman [‘Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition’. (...) Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 1 : 1–24] argues that many twentieth-century American pragmatists can make important contributions to contemporary experimental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that while this may be true, it is also true that under the broad conception, many of the pragmatists just were experimental philosophers. In Section 4, I argue that as a pragmatist philosopher in her own right, Jane... (shrink)
Transhumanism, the belief that technology can transcend the limitations of the human body and brain, is part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. As such, transhumanism has also inherited the internal tensions and contradictions of the broad Enlightenment tradition. First, the project of Reason is self-erosive and requires irrational validation. Second, although most transhumanists are atheist, their belief in the transcendent power of intelligence generates new theologies. Third, although most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their belief in human perfectibility and governance (...) by reason can validate technocratic authoritarianism. Fourth, transhumanists are divided on the balance between democracy and the market. Fifth, teleological expectations of unstoppable progress are in tension with awareness of the indeterminacy of the future. Sixth, transhumanists are divided between advocates of ethical universalism and ethical relativism. Seventh, the rational materialist denial of discrete persistent selves calls into question the transhumanist project of individual longevity and enhancement. (shrink)
