This paper investigates the effect of the countervailing forces within organizations of formal systems that direct employees toward ethical acts and informal systems that direct employees toward fraudulent behavior. We study the effect of these forces on deception, a key component of fraud. The results provide support for an interactive effect of these formal and informal systems. The effectiveness of formal systems is greater when there is a strong informal “push” to do wrong; conversely, in the absence of a strong (...) push to do wrong, the strength of formal systems has little impact on fraudulent behavior. These results help to explain why the implementation of formal systems within organizations has been met with mixed results and identifies when formal systems designed to promote ethical behavior will be most efficacious. (shrink)

Religion was an important subject of Dilthey's philosophical reflections. In this essay, I examine this largely untouched thematic area, focusing in particular on one period in his career. My thesis is that the core of Dilthey's philosophy of religion is what I call the "immanence thesis." This is a claim that Dilthey employs in interpreting various phenomena of religious life. Dilthey's view is that religious myths and symbols are ways of articulating the immanent "meaning" or "sense" of historical life. This (...) thesis ties various strands in Dilthey's philosophy of religion into a coherent whole. (shrink)

As soon as we attend to the subject, either by asking questions or by making statements about it, we ipso facto make the subject the object of our attention. The question then is whether we can get behind the subject as object and attain the subject as subject. Is the project not self-refuting? For an answer I invoke the parallel case of insight into insight. We cannot imagine the act of insight and so cannot understand it directly, but we can (...) construct symbols of insight, understand them, and thus indirectly achieve some understanding of it. Lonergan made five attempts to achieve insight into insight; the article examines them one by one and applies them to our parallel case in order to conclude that there is a meaningful sense in which we may attain and speak of the subject as subject. (shrink)

Worship is a topic that is rarely considered by philosophers of religion. In a recent paper, Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa challenge this trend by offering an analysis of worship and by considering some difficulties attendant on the claim that worship is obligatory. I argue that their case for there being these difficulties is insufficiently supported. I offer two reasons that a theist might provide for the claim that worship is obligatory: a divine command, and the demands of justice with (...) respect to God's redemption of humanity. I also challenge the soundness of some of the analogies they employ in their argument. (shrink)

As the gap between the need for and supply of human organs continues to widen, the aim of securing additional sources of these “gifts of the body” has become a seemingly overriding moral imperative, one that could—and some argue, should—override the widespread ban on organ markets. As a medical practice, organ transplantation entails the inherent risk that one human being, a donor, will become little more than a means to the end of healing for another human being and that he (...) or she will come to have a purely instrumental value. With the establishment of organ markets, not only will the harms of instrumentalization be a reality—the ends of medicine will be further compromised and confused. (shrink)

F. H. Jacobi , a key figure in the philosophical debates at the close of the eighteenth century in Germany, has long been regarded as an irrationalist for allegedly advocating a blind ‘leap of faith’. The central claim of this essay is that this venerable charge is misplaced. Following a reconstruction of what a charge of irrationalism might amount to, two of Jacobi's most important works, the Spinoza Letters and David Hume , are scrutinized for traces of irrationalism. Far from (...) being an irrationalist, Jacobi is best read as questioning the analytical-geometrical model of rationality popular among his contemporaries, and of proposing a more naturalistic theory of rationality that situates it more firmly in human psychology, the ultimate import of which lies in a reconceptualization of the relation between faith and reason. (shrink)