Today's sweatshops violate our notions of justice, yet they continue to flourish. This is so because we have not settled on criteria that would allow us to condemn and do away with them and because the poor working conditions in certain places are preferable to the alternative of no job at all. In this paper, we examine these phenomena. We consider the definitional dilemmas posed by sweatshops by routing a standard definition of sweatshops through the precepts put forward in the (...) literature on justice and virtue ethics. We conclude that fixing on definitions is pointless and misleading and that we are better off looking at whether or not a workplace violates the basic human rights of workers and whether or not the working conditions there cohere with situations on which we have already rendered judgments. In the end, we suggest guidelines for businesses that operate in the global workplace to help them avoid charges of running sweatshops. These recommendations account for the harsh living conditions in certain developing and emerging countries as well as the norms of societies in developed countries. (shrink)

We examine the Spiritual Exercises developed by St. Ignatius Loyola for the purpose of informing the structure of reflection as a tool in business ethics. At present, reflection in business is used to clarify moods, expectations, theories of use, and defining moments. We suggest here that Ignatius' Exercises, which focus on ends, engage the emotions and imagination, use role modeling, and require a response, might be useful as a model for reflection in business.

This article surveys western business ethics' recent history to show how this ethic has neglected recently its religious traditions and become construed more narrowly as an applied philosophy and social science. It argues that this narrowness has confused business ethics' role in business education and helped to weaken the distinctiveness of certain institutions of higher education. It then suggests ways that western business ethics might become more integrated, interesting, and autonomous as an academic discipline by incorporating its key religious traditions.

Introduction to a collection of articles originally presented at a February 2001 conference hosted by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University.

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the (...) interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account. Key Words: common ground; dialogue; dialogue routines; language comprehension; language production; monitoring; perception-behavior link. (shrink)

Worldwide, antibiotic use is increasing, but many infections against which antibiotics are applied are not even caused by bacteria. Over‐the‐counter and internet sales preclude physician oversight. Regional differences, between and within countries highlight many potential factors influencing antibiotic use. Taking a systems perspective that considers pharmaceutical commodity chains, we examine antibiotic overuse from the vantage point of both sides of the therapeutic relationship. We examine patterns and expectations of practitioners and patients, institutional policies and pressures, the business strategies of pharmaceutical (...) companies and distributors, and cultural drivers of variation. Solutions to improve antibiotic stewardship include practitioners taking greater responsibility for their antibiotic prescribing, increasing the role of caregivers as diagnosticians rather than medicine providers, improving their communication to patients about antibiotic treatment consequences, lessening the economic influences on prescribing, and identifying antibiotic alternatives. (shrink)

This study investigates the relation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud in China. We document a significantly negative correlation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud using data on publicly traded firms between 2005 and 2010. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that firms penalize CEOs for fraud by lowering their pay. We also find that CEO compensation is lower in firms that commit more severe frauds. Panel data fixed effects and propensity score methods are used to demonstrate these effects. (...) Our results also indicate that corporate governance mechanisms influence the magnitude of punishment. We find that CEOs of privately controlled firms, firms that split the posts of CEO and chairman, and CEOs of firms located in developed regions suffer larger compensation penalties for committing financial fraud. Finally, we show that CEOs at firms that commit fraud are more likely to be replaced compared to those at non-fraud firms. (shrink)

This book offers ways to overcome problems that arise when voters, politicians, and bureaucrats pursue selfish interests rather than the general interest in their political behavior. It combines previously published ideas about charging people the costs of their political actions and selling insurance against unfavorable political outcomes, with new ideas about competing legislatures and incentives for generating efficient political outcomes. The book includes new are discussed, as well as a proposed constitution and its rationale.

Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.

Linguistic interaction between two people is the fundamental form of communication, yet almost all research in language use focuses on isolated speakers and listeners. In this innovative work, Garrod and Pickering extend the scope of psycholinguistics beyond individuals by introducing communication as a social activity. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, philosophical and sociological research, they expand their theory that alignment across individuals is the basis of communication, through the model of a 'shared workspace account'. In this workspace, interlocutors are actors who (...) jointly manipulate and control the interaction and develop similar representations of both language and social context, in order to achieve communicative success. The book also explores dialogue within groups, technologies, as well as the role of culture more generally. Providing a new understanding of cognitive representation, this trailblazing work will be highly influential in the fields of linguistics, psychology and cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

An introduction is presented to a special section on scholar Quentin Skinner and his article "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas".

Self-executing treaties like the Salvage Convention 1989 automatically become "the supreme law of the land" in the United States under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.They require no legislation to make them operative but they have the same force and effect as an Article I legislative enactment.The fact that no implementing legislation is needed often leads to the paradoxical result that a self-executing treaty is more easily forgotten, perhaps for the simple reason that such treaties do not always appear (...) in the U.S. Code and so are not always easy to find. Perhaps that is the explanation of the curious fate of the Salvage Convention 1989, which does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Code. There can be no doubt, however, that when the provisions of a treaty prescribe a rule by which private rights may be determined, as the Salvage Convention 1989 does, a court must resort to the treaty for rules of decision, just as it would to a statute. A court may only refer to the law that would govern in the absence of the treaty - in the present context, general maritime law - when the treaty leaves an issue unresolved. In short, it is not acceptable for courts to continue to apply the general maritime law of salvage simply because it is broadly equivalent to the Salvage Convention 1989. Even when the general maritime law and the Salvage Convention 1989 would produce identical results, courts should apply the Salvage Convention 1989 and not the general maritime law. When the general maritime law and the Salvage Convention 1989 would (or even might) produce different results, which may occur quite often, there is no justification for applying the general maritime law. (shrink)

Game-theoretic reasoning pervades economic theory and is used widely in other social and behavioural sciences. An Introduction to Game Theory International Edition, by Martin J. Osborne, presents the main principles of game theory and shows how they can be used to understand economics, social, political, and biological phenomena. The book introduces in an accessible manner the main ideas behind the theory rather than their mathematical expression. All concepts are defined precisely, and logical reasoning is used throughout. The book requires (...) an understanding of basic mathematics but assumes no specific knowledge of economics, political science, or other social or behavioural sciences. Coverage includes the fundamental concepts of strategic games, extensive games with perfect information, and coalitional games; the more advanced subjects of Bayesian games and extensive games with imperfect information; and the topics of repeated games, bargaining theory, evolutionary equilibrium, rationalizability, and maxminimization. The book offers a wide variety of illustrations from the social and behavioural sciences. Each topic features examples that highlight theoretical points and illustrations that demonstrate how the theory may be used. (shrink)

This book explores in detail the relation between ontology and ethics in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, notably the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and, to a lesser extent, the _Notebooks 1914-1916_. Self-contained and requiring no prior knowledge of Wittgenstein's thought, it is the first book-length argument that his views on ethics decisively shaped his ontological and semantic thought. The book's main thesis is twofold. It argues that the ontological theory of the _Tractatus_ is fundamentally dependent on its logical and linguistic doctrines: (...) the tractarian world is the world as it appears in language and thought. It also maintains that this interpretation of the ontology of the _Tractatus_ can be argued for not only on systematic grounds, but also via the contents of the ethical theory that it offers. Wittgenstein's views on ethics presuppose that language and thought are but one way in which we interact with reality. Although detailed studies of Wittgenstein's ontology and ethics exist, this book is the first thorough investigation of the relationship between them. As an introduction to Wittgenstein, it sheds new light on an important aspect of his early thought. (shrink)

This study addresses whether businesses discriminate against employees who smoke, which for the purposes of this study is called smokism. It began with a description of the employers' costs which led to the development of these smoking bans and examined several company policies as a result of these costs. The viewpoints from several perspectives toward these policies and their perceptions about smokers were also reviewed. This was followed by surveying the corporate smoking policies of 76 companies representing 287 employees in (...) the New York City metropolitan, as well as the viewpoints of these employees on these smoking policies. Several laws regarding the rights of smokers and nonsmokers were discussed and along with the company smoking policies described earlier were compared to those firms surveyed. Next, the philosophies of Locke, Kant, Rawls, and Nozick were examined to determine whether the current smoking policies would be deemed just or discriminatory. Conclusions and implications of this research then followed the analysis of these philosophical and legislative findings. (shrink)

From the early nineteenth century, the successful use of fossils in stratigraphy oriented paleontology towards geology. The consequent marginalising of biological objectives was countered in the twentieth century by the rise of ‘Paläobiologie’, first in the German cultural area and only later, as ‘paleobiology’, in the anglophone world. Several kinds of paleobiological research flourished internationally after the Second World War, among them the novel field of ‘paleoecology’. Within this field there were attempts to apply functional morphology to the problematical cases (...) of fossil organisms, for which functions cannot be observed directly. This article describes the origins of the kind of functional inference for fossils that I proposed in 1961 as the method of ‘paradigms’. Here I summarize some of my ‘worked exemplars’, which were intended to show the paradigm method in action. These case-studies were all taken from the paleontologically important phylum of the Brachiopoda, but the method was claimed to have much wider implications for the interpretation of the fossil record in terms of adaptive evolution. This article takes the history of the paradigm method as far as the late 1960s. I hope to trace, in a sequel, its ambivalent fate during the 1970s and beyond, when for example Gould’s critique of ‘the adaptationist programme’ and the rise of computer-based quantitative methods for the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record led to the relative eclipse of functional morphology in paleontology. (shrink)

The interactive-alignment model of dialogue provides an account of dialogue at the level of explanation normally associated with cognitive psychology. We develop our claim that interlocutors align their mental models via priming at many levels of linguistic representation, explicate our notion of automaticity, defend the minimal role of “other modeling,” and discuss the relationship between monologue and dialogue. The account can be applied to social and developmental psychology, and would benefit from computational modeling.

"A shortened version of "From here to infinity" was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as the Reith Lectures 2010, entitled "Scientific horizons""--T.p. verso.