This study investigates whether and how the corporate social responsibility (CSR) profile of a company transfers to another company when an executive leaves a firm. We integrate upper echelon and institutional theories, and develop a novel measure of CSR profiles to explore this issue with a longitudinal data set of executive migrations over a 14-year period. We find that migrated executives assimilate elements of their old firms’ CSR profiles into their new firms (i.e., narrowing the distance between the two firms’ (...) CSR profiles), and this is true for both CSR and corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). This relationship is stronger when the migrating executive comes from a bigger firm with better social and financial performance than that of the new firm. We also find that the potential for improvement in CSR profiles in migration holds true for CSiR, but not CSR. Our findings have import for upper echelon theory and the managerial discretion afforded to executives regarding CSR decisions. (shrink)

Does environmental management help foreign firms outperform local firms in emerging economies? While existing research suggests that environmental management may or may not benefit firm performance, the question is particularly under-investigated in the emerging economy context. Using the data on foreign investment into China, this study explores whether foreign firms that are under greater environmental pressure, at home or at the host, outperform comparable local firms in an emerging host country. In making this comparison, we use propensity-score matching and a (...) difference-in-differences approach to handle the problem of endogeneity inherent in comparing the performances of foreign versus local firms. We find empirical support that foreign firms perform better than local firms when they are under high environmental pressure in the emerging host country, and this result is driven by the foreign firms originating from countries with high environmental pressure. (shrink)

Say to the Sun, “Don’t Rise,” and to the Moon, “Don’t Set”: Two Oral Narratives from the Country- side of Maharashtra. Edited and translated by Anne Feldhaus, with Ramdas Atkar and Rajaram Zagade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 632, 3 illus. $99.

Scholars find that political elites are badly polarized over a large range of policy issues, but they tend to agree that the mass public is much more ambivalent. The abortion war in particular is regarded as one in which millions of ambivalent citizens are caught in the crossfire of polarized activists. Yet even abortion activists struggle to escape the very ambivalent sentiments that plague ordinary Americans. These common sentiments even exert a moderating influence on both movements in ways that are (...) consistent with the preferences of the American public. They also suggest that liberalism may be mired in permanent conflict and ambivalence over the scope of basic human rights. (shrink)

We argue that the stakeholder perspective on corporate social responsibility is in the process of being enlarged. Due to the process of institutional isomorphism, corporations are increasingly adopting organizational features designed to promote proactivity over mere reactivity in their stakeholder relationships. We identify two sources of pressure promoting the emergence of the proactive corporation -- stakeholder activism and the recognition of the social embeddedness of the economy. The final section describes four organizational design dimensions being installed by the more proactive (...) corporations today -- cooperation, participation, negotiation, and direct anticipation. (shrink)

Talisse and Maloney seem to think that professors, not ordinary citizens, are the key to a more deliberative democracy. Yet these professors fail to appreciate the reasonableness of the pro‐life activists and thinkers they disagree with. For example, they falsely charge even the most deliberative groups with resurrecting an obsolete debate and framing conversations in a fallacious way. They further place an unreasonable justificatory burden on pro‐life activists and hold them culpable for framing the debate around the ontology of the (...) embryo . In drawing such a hard line between academics and activists, they also miss what has been an unavoidable partnership between academics and social movements in our imperfect deliberative republic. (shrink)

:A normative Bayesian theory of deliberation and judgement requires a procedure for merging the evidence of a collection of agents. In order to provide such a procedure, one needs to ask what the evidence is that grounds Bayesian probabilities. After finding fault with several views on the nature of evidence, it is argued that evidence is whatever is rationally taken for granted. This view is shown to have consequences for an account of merging evidence, and it is argued that standard (...) axioms for merging need to be altered somewhat. (shrink)

Ageism has unfortunately become a salient phenomenon during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, triage decisions based on age have been hotly discussed. In this article, I first defend that, although there are ethical reasons (founded on the principles of benefit and fairness) to consider the age of patients in triage dilemmas, using age as a categorical exclusion is an unjustifiable ageist practice. Then, I argue that ageism during the pandemic has been fueled by media narratives and unfair assumptions which have (...) led to an ethically problematic group homogenization of the older population. Finally, I conclude that an intersectional perspective can shed light on further controversies on ageism and triage in the post-pandemic future. (shrink)

In recent years much effort has gone into the study of languages which strengthen the classical first-order predicate calculus in various ways. This effort has been motivated by the desire to find a language which is(I) strong enough to express interesting properties not expressible by the classical language, but(II) still simple enough to yield interesting general results. Languages investigated include second-order logic, weak second-order logic, ω-logic, languages with generalized quantifiers, and infinitary logic.

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from (...) naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word-learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest. (shrink)

The Recursive Bayesian Net (RBN) formalism was originally developed for modelling nested causal relationships. In this paper we argue that the formalism can also be applied to modelling the hierarchical structure of mechanisms. The resulting network contains quantitative information about probabilities, as well as qualitative information about mechanistic structure and causal relations. Since information about probabilities, mechanisms and causal relations is vital for prediction, explanation and control respectively, an RBN can be applied to all these tasks. We show in particular (...) how a simple two-level RBN can be used to model a mechanism in cancer science. The higher level of our model contains variables at the clinical level, while the lower level maps the structure of the cell's mechanism for apoptosis. (shrink)

Kyburg goes half-way towards objective Bayesianism. He accepts that frequencies constrain rational belief to an interval but stops short of isolating an optimal degree of belief within this interval. I examine the case for going the whole hog.

It was the spring of 2020 when the email came to our inboxes—a memo from our Institutional Review Board informing us that we were approved to begin conducting our pragmatic clinical trial with a wa...

Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country’s borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the (...) panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus. (shrink)

The EBM+ programme is an attempt to improve the way in which present-day evidence-based medicine (EBM) assesses causal claims: according to EBM+, mechanistic studies should be scrutinised alongside association studies. This paper addresses two worries about EBM+: (i) that it is not feasible in practice, and (ii) that it is too malleable, i.e., its results depend on subjective choices that need to be made in order to implement the procedure. Several responses to these two worries are considered and evaluated. The (...) paper also discusses the question of whether we should have confidence in medical interventions, in the light of Stegenga’s arguments for medical nihilism. (shrink)

On April 16, 2007, Cho Seung-Hui used two semiautomatic handguns to kill 32 persons and then himself at Virginia Tech University in the largest campus shooting in U.S. history. Mr. Cho purchased his handguns from a pawnshop and a gun store in Virginia, where under state law a background check was conducted to determine whether he had any disqualifying criminal or mental health history. The paperwork for the background check was completed at the gun store, and the check itself was (...) conducted through an “instant” system facilitated by a toll-free telephone number. The entire transaction took approximately 20 minutes. At no point was Mr. Cho asked why he wished to purchase the guns. And although he had been deemed a potential danger to himself by a state magistrate in 2005 – which should have disqualified his purchase of a gun under federal law – this information never reached those conducting the background check. (shrink)

Principlism is simple. Four intuitive ideas, creating order out of moral chaos, at least categorizing considerations for better deliberation over right and wrong, good and bad, in a modern, plurali...

This paper provides a game-theoretic analysis of contrastive focus, extending insights from recent work on the role of noisy communication in prosodic accent placement to account for focus within sentences, sub-sentential phrases and words. The shared insight behind these models is that languages with prosodic focus marking assign prosodic prominence only within elements which constitute material critical for successful interpretation. We first take care to distinguish the information-structural notion of focus from an ontologically distinct notion of givenness marking, and then (...) outline the core properties of focus. We then introduce a signaling game between a speaker and hearer in which the goal is to transmit semantic content with the smallest signal possible. We apply the Iterated Best Response method of Franke to find equilibrium strategies in this game, where a unique equilibrium strategy in this case picks out the “critical information” of an utterance, which by hypothesis constitutes its focus. We show that iterating this game at different syntactic levels of a sentence makes correct predictions about the role of contrast in determining stress within words and phrases, and can be extended to account for association and second occurrence focus effects. (shrink)

How does one committed to the claims of Christ and a biblical story of redemption live Christianly and navigate the competing worldviews encountered in everyday medical practice? Adopting the practical conceptual framework promoted by Reformed Christian philosopher and theologian Albert Wolters, we argue for an all-encompassing biblical understanding of God’s cosmic redemption plan for the entire creation order in contrast to a more typical sacred/secular duality. We then apply the concepts of structure and direction, drawn from a pretheological understanding of (...) human life drawn from the Scripture, to a semi-fictional case study in discerning Christian faithfulness in everyday mundane aspects of medicine. Our subsequent analysis seeks to render an interpretation of what it means to live life consistent with that worldview when confronted with challenges like those presented in the case. (shrink)

A traditional ethic of medicine asserts that physicians have special obligations to individual patients with whom they have a clinical relationship. Contemporary trends in US healthcare financing like bundled payments seem to threaten traditional conceptions of special obligations of individual physicians to individual patients because their population-based focus sets a tone that seems to emphasise responsibilities for groups of patients by groups of physicians in an organisation. Prior to undertaking a cogent debate about the fate and normative weight of special (...) obligations and a traditional ethic for contemporary healthcare, we need a deeper examination of what the traditional ethic of special obligations really means. Here we offer a conception of ‘doubly distributed’ special obligations. Physicians and similarly minded healing professionals abiding by a traditional ethic have always spread their devotion and attention across multiple patients and have shared responsibilities with physician and non-physician colleagues in much the same way devoted parents have frequently distributed their special obligations across multiple children and across multiple parents. By taking up the extended analogy of parent we argue that doubly distributing special obligations need not contradict the possibility of special obligations in restructured collective forms of healthcare delivery and financing. (shrink)

Preservation and interpolation results are obtained for L ∞ω and sublogics $\mathscr{L} \subseteq L_{\infty\omega}$ such that equivalence in L can be characterized by suitable back-and-forth conditions on sets of partial isomorphisms.

This paper presents a new argument for the Principle of Indifference. This argument can be thought of in two ways: as a pragmatic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold if one is to minimise worst-case expected loss, or as an epistemic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold in order to minimise worst-case expected inaccuracy. The question arises as to which interpretation is preferable. I show that the epistemic argument contradicts Evidentialism and suggest that the relative plausibility (...) of Evidentialism provides grounds to prefer the pragmatic interpretation. If this is right, it extends to a general preference for pragmatic arguments for the Principle of Indifference, and also to a general preference for pragmatic arguments for other norms of Bayesian epistemology. (shrink)

In our experience, public health practitioners seeking to address a health problem often have just two very basic questions about the law: how can I use the law to create new interventions, or improve existing ones, to protect the public’s health; and will the law prevent me from successfully implementing certain interventions? In this way, the law is seen as either an opportunity for intervention to affect a public health problem, or an obstacle to enacting or implementing a desired intervention.In (...) addition, because some public health practitioners may not fully understand the intricacies of a given legal area, some possible obstacles to intervention may be either real or perceived. A real legal obstacle is not necessarily an insurmountable one, but it does have genuine legal force. A perceived obstacle has little, if any, true legal application to a given kind of intervention. (shrink)

Social roles theorists claim that differences between the sexes are of limited consequence. Such misperceptions lead to misunderstanding the important role of sexual selection in explaining phenotypic differences both between species and within humans. Countering these claims, we explain how sexual dimorphism in humans affect expressions of artistic display and patterns of male and female aggression across the ovulatory cycle.

Systems medicine is a promising new paradigm for discovering associations, causal relationships and mechanisms in medicine. But it faces some tough challenges that arise from the use of big data: in particular, the problem of how to integrate evidence and the problem of how to structure the development of models. I argue that objective Bayesian models offer one way of tackling the evidence integration problem. I also offer a general methodology for structuring the development of models, within which the objective (...) Bayesian approach fits rather naturally. (shrink)

This chapter first outlines some of Foucault' s conceptualizations of forms of power, focusing on discipline and biopower. The first section explores the extent to which Foucault understood modern power relations to be constraining limits, inhospitable to freedom. The second section focuses on some of Foucault's general conceptualizations rather than specific historical analyses of power and resistance. The third section follows Foucault's conceptualization of power relations as more expansive and complex than domination. In the final section Foucault's affirmative conceptualization of (...) power relations in the forms of liberty and freedom, not only resistance, comes to light. The section argues that Foucault's theorization and practice of resistance and liberty illustrate that, under contemporary conditions, resistance is the most viable way to practice freedom. Most of Foucault's work on ethical concern for the self focuses on the Classical Greek and Hellenistic eras, as Greek ethics turns power relations on the self. (shrink)

This paper develops connections between objective Bayesian epistemology—which holds that the strengths of an agent’s beliefs should be representable by probabilities, should be calibrated with evidence of empirical probability, and should otherwise be equivocal—and probabilistic logic. After introducing objective Bayesian epistemology over propositional languages, the formalism is extended to handle predicate languages. A rather general probabilistic logic is formulated and then given a natural semantics in terms of objective Bayesian epistemology. The machinery of objective Bayesian nets and objective credal nets (...) is introduced and this machinery is applied to provide a calculus for probabilistic logic that meshes with the objective Bayesian semantics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 207-221.

I. SummaryRuth Boeker's Locke on Persons and Personal Identity is a profound treatment of Locke's views on the nature and identity of human persons. The book is divided roughly into two halves. The first half (Chapters 1–6 and 8) focuses on providing a philosophically sophisticated interpretation of Locke that engages with the most recent secondary literature. Chapter 3, for instance, includes an important contribution to scholarly debates about Locke's sortal-relative account of identity in the Essay II.xxvii.§7–8. Some (the coincidence theorists) (...) have argued that Locke's claim that there are different persistence conditions for a ‘man’ (human animal) and the ‘mass of matter’ that occupies the same spatio-temporal location as the man entails that there are two, coincident material objects. Others (the relative identity theorists) argue that Locke holds that there is ontologically one and only one material object at any spatio-temporal location—a single object that can be attributed different identity conditions when considered under different sortals. (shrink)

We show that several theorems on ordinal bounds in different parts of logic are simple consequences of a basic result in the theory of global inductive definitions.

In our experience, public health practitioners seeking to address a health problem often have just two very basic questions about the law: how can I use the law to create new interventions, or improve existing ones, to protect the public’s health; and will the law prevent me from successfully implementing certain interventions? In this way, the law is seen as either an opportunity for intervention to affect a public health problem, or an obstacle to enacting or implementing a desired intervention.In (...) addition, because some public health practitioners may not fully understand the intricacies of a given legal area, some possible obstacles to intervention may be either real or perceived. A real legal obstacle is not necessarily an insurmountable one, but it does have genuine legal force. A perceived obstacle has little, if any, true legal application to a given kind of intervention. (shrink)

How ought we learn causal relationships? While Popper advocated a hypothetico-deductive logic of causal discovery, inductive accounts are currently in vogue. Many inductive approaches depend on the causal Markov condition as a fundamental assumption. This condition, I maintain, is not universally valid, though it is justifiable as a default assumption. In which case the results of the inductive causal learning procedure must be tested before they can be accepted. This yields a synthesis of the hypothetico-deductive and inductive accounts, which forms (...) the focus of this paper. I discuss the justification of this synthesis and draw an analogy between objective Bayesianism and the account of causal learning presented here. (shrink)