: To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals’ responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation and a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to assess the Selected-Effects Etiological Theory of biological function, according to which a trait has a function F if and only if it has been selected for F. First, I argue that this approach should be understood as describing the paradigm case of functions, rather than as establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for function possession. I contend that, interpreted in this way, the selected-effects approach can explain two central properties of functions and can satisfactorily (...) address some recent counterexamples. This reading, however, shows that there is only a partial overlap between biological functions and selected effects, so the former cannot be reduced to the latter. Finally, I maintain that this result is still compatible with a naturalistic theory of function that appeals to some evolutionary process. (shrink)

In this volume, three aspects are examined: a) normal subjects, where new findings on spatial behavior are described. b) brain-lesioned subjects, where the ...

In this paper a model for barrecursion is presented. It has as a novelty that it contains discontinuous functionals. The model is based on a concept called strong majorizability. This concept is a modification of Howard's majorizability notion; see [T, p. 456].

This paper explains how the current architecture of the pharmaceutical markets has created a misalignment of financial incentives and public health that is a central cause of harmful practices. It explores three possible solutions to address that misalignment: taxes, increased financial penalties, and drug pricing based on value. Each proposal could help to partly realign financial incentives and public health. However, because of the limits of each proposal, there is no easy solution to fixing the problem of financial incentives.

This paper explores the nature of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and competitiveness. We start with the commonly held view that firm competitiveness is defined by the market. That is, the question of what are the critical competitiveness factors is answered by looking at how companies and financial analysts describe and evaluate a firm. To analyze this, we review the current state of the art on the relationship between CSR and competitiveness. Second, CSR criteria used by financial analysts (...) is identified and compared with company valuation methods. Third, the results of a multi-stakeholder dialogue on CSR and competitiveness of the European financial sector are presented. As a conclusion, we argue that CSR and competitiveness relate through a learning and innovation cycle, where corporate values, policies and practices are permanently defined and re-defined. Thus, we propose that learning takes place as CSR is embedded in business processes, and that once it has been integrated, in turn, it generates innovative practices, and finally, competitiveness. At the end of the paper, we propose that CSR in practice consists of managing inherent paradoxes generated by the tension between CSR and business policies. (shrink)

To mitigate risk, should companies signal a broad range of environmental, social, and governance initiatives or instead focus on only a few ESG issues? Drawing on signaling theory, we propose that a broad array of ESG initiatives generates not only signal consistency but also accelerating signal costs. Our empirical results support the resultant hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship between ESG scope and equity risk. In addition, this U-shaped curve seems to become steeper when firms face multiple media-reported ESG controversies. Overall, (...) our study qualifies the conventional wisdom that firms can reduce equity risk by attending to a wide variety of stakeholders and highlights the moderating impact of the firm’s media environment. (shrink)

Across the management, social science, and business ethics literatures, and in much of the philosophy literature, trust is characterized as a disposition to act given epistemic states—beliefs and/or expectations about others and about the risks involved. This characterization of trust is best thought of as epistemological because epistemic states distinguish trust from other dispositions. The epistemological characterization of trust is the amoral one referred to in the title of this paper, and we argue that this characterization is conceptually inadequate. We (...) outline and defend an alternative conception of trust as a moral phenomenon: when A trusts B to do something, A invites B to acknowledge and accept an obligation; when B accepts the invitation, B takes on an obligation; in that way trust creates an obligation. We conclude with an application, drawing out the difference between the epistemological conception of trust and our own in the context of Ghoshal et al.'s (Sloan Management Review 40:9—20, 1995, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4:75—91, 2005) critique of transaction cost theories of the firm. (shrink)

Neurocognitive models (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) have helped to characterize how listeners incrementally derive meaning from vocal expressions of emotion in spoken language, what neural mechanisms are involved at different processing stages, and their relative time course. But how can these insights be applied to communicative situations in which prosody serves a predominantly interpersonal function? This comment examines recent data highlighting the dynamic interplay of prosody and language, when vocal attributes serve the sociopragmatic goals of the speaker or reveal (...) interpersonal information that listeners use to construct a mental representation of what is being communicated. Our comment serves as a beacon to researchers interested in how the neurocognitive system “makes sense” of socioemotive aspects of prosody. (shrink)

Introduction L’analyse des temporalités de l’action constitue une entrée pertinente pour aborder les rapports sociaux de domination. À sa manière, la revue Temporalités a perpétué cette tradition des sciences sociales qui observent les inégalités et les différenciations sociales, analysent leurs logiques, en insistant sur les relations étroites entre temporalités et pouvoir. Mais les articles de Temporalités, à l’exception d’un dossier sur les temps sexués de l’activité (Bess..

If a potential person would have a good life if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? In this paper, we argue that both questions should be answered affirmatively. We also explain where prominent arguments to differing conclusions go wrong. Finally, we explore the relevance of our (...) answers to issues in population ethics. (shrink)

This study presents the theoretical apparatus of Foucault's early historical analyses as a version of Kantian criticism. In an initial textual exposition, the author attempts to distill a unified discursive practice from Kant's theoretical writings, arguing for Foucault's proximity to Kant on the basis of this reconstruction, by showing that his studies are modeled on this way of thinking. By recasting it in this framework, an unorthodox version of Foucault's work is generated, one that is at odds with the tendency (...) to emphasize a certain skepticism about the possibility of universal and necessary knowledge in his writings, and to mistake it for irrationalism and a hostility to the practice of theory. By drawing attention to the structural parallel between Foucault's practice and Kantian criticism, this study belies this picture. (shrink)

In order to be able to provide informed, effective and responsive mental health care and to do so in an evidence‐based, collaborative and recovery‐focused way with those who use mental health services, there is a recognition of the need for mental health professionals to possess sophisticated critical thinking capabilities. This article will therefore propose that such capabilities can be productively situated within the context of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the most challenging, innovative and influential (...) thinkers of the 20th century. However, rather than focusing exclusively upon the content of Foucault's work, it will be suggested that it is possible to discern a general methodological approach across that work, a methodological approach that he refers to as “the history of the present.” In doing so, Foucault's history of the present can be understood as a productive, albeit provisional, framework in which to orientate the purpose and process of critical thinking for mental health professionals by emphasizing the need to both historicize and politicize the theoretical perspectives and therapeutic practices that characterize contemporary mental health care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 58-83 [Access article in PDF] Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning Marc Redfield Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that "'the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight" [IC 3], and the intervening (...) years have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as "globalization" operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital--forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations--is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, "the particularism of [nationalism's] contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general" ["Nationalisms" 178]. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative--halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace--accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge "the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity" ["Nationalisms" 177]. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. 2Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of "nationalism" for an emphasis [End Page 58] on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. 3 This valuable body of work has sought to recover the particularity of cultural and socioeconomic circumstance, stressed the fundamental role of racism in colonialist contexts, and noted ways in which nationalist movements draw on or unleash forms of resistance that challenge representationalist politics. The pages that follow, however, remain focused on the nationalist fantasy proper to the discourse of modernity. Cultural critique can only profit from knowing as much as possible about the favored turns of the universal-historicist model, particularly since, as Lloyd and others have emphasized, this model is an aesthetic one that grants a world-historical role to "culture." The state, in a tradition that in its main lines runs from Schiller through Hegel and Matthew Arnold and is still very much alive today, represents the community to itself, thereby giving the community form and in a certain sense giving it an ethical imperative and a future: the state represents "our best self" [Arnold 99, passim], "the archetype of a human being" [Schiller 17], because it signifies the formal unification both of the citizen with the community and of the community with universal humanity. Because this unification is ideal rather than actual, it can be projected as the ethical terminus of history (that is, as the ideal of an accomplished modernity). The state's core mission thus becomes pedagogical: its job is to acculturate its subjects into citizens. The production of a docile citizenry thereby obtains an ethical aura and an aesthetic character, insofar as the artwork and the domain of aesthetic or "cultural" experience generally become... (shrink)

Max Skjönsberg's The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain is a rich, detailed, and nuanced study of eighteenth-century ideas about party politics and the British political contexts that both inspired and were affected by their development. The study is ambitious in scope and extensively researched. With David Hume and Edmund Burke as its principal protagonists, the book is organised chronologically and centered on analyses of writings by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, Hume, (...) John Brown, and Burke to illustrate the centrality of party, as a concept, to political debate in the eighteenth... (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest on the notion of freedom as non-domination, according to which a subject is free to the extent that no agent has the capacity to arbitrarily interfere on his actions. Now, the most common way of interpreting the notion of freedom as non-domination restricts its applicability to cases where particular agents can intentionally and arbitrarily interfere on a subject�s affairs. In this paper, I present an argument which shows that the standard conception (...) of freedom as non-domination is too restrictive, and that this notion can be extended so as to as to ground a critical point of view on economic and social inequalities. (shrink)

Recently published work showed that members of the PAQR protein family are activated by cell membrane rigidity and contribute to our ability to eat a wide variety of diets. Cell membranes are primarily composed of phospholipids containing dietarily obtained fatty acids, which poses a challenge to membrane properties because diets can vary greatly in their fatty acid composition and could impart opposite properties to the cellular membranes. In particular, saturated fatty acids (SFAs) can pack tightly and form rigid membranes (like (...) butter at room temperature) while unsaturated fatty acids (UFAs) form more fluid membranes (like vegetable oils). Proteins of the PAQR protein family, characterized by the presence of seven transmembrane domains and a cytosolic N‐terminus, contribute to membrane homeostasis in bacteria, yeasts, and animals. These proteins respond to membrane rigidity by stimulating fatty acid desaturation and incorporation of UFAs into phospholipids and explain the ability of animals to thrive on diets with widely varied fat composition. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/6ckcvaDdbQg. (shrink)

Throughout his mature writings, Berkeley speaks of minds as substances that underlie or support ideas. After initially flirting with a Humean account, according to which minds are nothing but ‘congeries of Perceptions’, Berkeley went on to claim that a mind is a ‘perceiving, active being... entirely distinct’ from its ideas. Despite his immaterialism, Berkeley retains the traditional category of substance and gives it pride of place in his ontology. Ideas, by contrast, are ‘fleeting and dependent beings’ that must be supported (...) by a mental substance. There is no doubt that Berkeley’s conception of the relationship between minds and ideas is non-traditional, but that fact does not undercut his commitment to the traditional conception of substance. A robust literature has grown up around the thorny issue of reconciling Berkeley’s endorsement of mental substance with his rejection of its material counterpart. (shrink)