This paper examines the perceived ethical values of Malaysian managers. It is based on the opinions of 15 hypothetical ethical/unethical business situations from the 81 managers who agreed to participate in the survey. The findings of this study showed that these Malaysian managers have high ethical values. However 53% of the respondents believed that the ethical standards of today are lower than that of 15 years ago. Apparently, this is related to the existence of many unethical business practices prevalent in (...) the modern business world. The behavior of one's immediate superior is the most important factor in influencing managers to commit unethical practices. The results also indicate only a slight variation among the managers in terms of perceived ethical values by virtue of job position, job specialization, type of business activity or the size of the business organization. (shrink)

Societies are composed of groups that interact. Symbiotic groups are those in which agents complement each other in resources that they have in excess. Symbiotic groups are useful especially when the resources in an environment are distributed unevenly, because they enable agents to trade resources easily. However, for trading to happen successfully, agents in symbiotic groups need to cooperate, i.e., they should be willing to donate resources when appropriate. Similarly, if some agents in a symbiotic group are defectors, they should (...) be identified by others and eliminated from the group for the well-being of the remaining agents. Accordingly, we first study Edmonds’ tag-based model of symbiotic groups to understand the lifespan of symbiotic groups (e.g., why some groups live shorter than others). Then, we enhance Edmonds’ model by adding the capability of reciprocal interactions to agents, thus achieving a hybrid model. We capture reciprocity in three different models and study their effects on the elimination of defectors in symbiotic groups. Our experimental results show that the groups that are built with the proposed hybrid model can eliminate more defectors and earlier than tag-based models. Further, the hybrid approach can generate symbiotic groups more effectively and efficiently. (shrink)

Two years ago in two articles in a thematic issue of this journal the three of us engaged in a critique of principlism. In a subsequent issue, B. Andrew Lustig defended aspects of principlism we had criticized and argued against our own account of morality. Our reply to Lustig's critique is also in two parts, corresponding with his own. Our first part shows how Lustig's criticisms are seriously misdirected. Our second and philosophically more important part picks up on Lustig's challenge (...) to us to show that our account of morality is more adequate than principlism. In particular we show that recognition of morality as public and systematic enables us to provide a far better description of morality than does principlism. This explains why we adopt the label “Dartmouth Descriptivism.”. (shrink)

Little progress has been made in classifying the manuscript tradition of Livy's First Decade since Frigell published his Livianorum Librorum Primae Decadis Emendandae Ratio . This laid the foundations of a serious analysis of the manuscripts, but was hampered by the fact that full evidence was not available at that date. The deficiency was made good by the Oxford editors, who, however, failed to make use of their evidence to explore in detail the inter relation of the manuscripts. Walters indeed (...) disclaims its importance : ‘Further in stemmata-making I decline to go, for “stemmata quid faciunt?” except much stereotyped mischief.’. (shrink)

Plato can claim a preeminent place in the philosophy of education, for two reasons at least. The first is that he started the subject; the second is that he expressed with a force which has not since been surpassed a particular, seemingly authoritarian, view about it. Any liberal has to come to grips with this view, for which ‘Platonism’ is still the most appropriate name; and the first step is to determine more exactly what, in essence, the view is. This (...) paper will not be concerned with the close examination of Plato’s text; that must be left for a book about his moral philosophy that I am working on. I shall say nothing about the quaint details of the educational curriculum in the Republic or the Laws, which have distracted the attention of some commentators from more fundamental problems. What I aim to discuss is the question ‘Can virtue be taught?’, with which Plato introduces the subject in the Meno—the question which more than any other provides the incentive for his entire philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Torture does need to be defined if we are to know exactly what we are seeking to ban; but no single definition will do, because there are many possible ones, and we may want to treat different practices that might be called torture differently. Compare the case of homicide; we do not want to punish manslaughter as severely as murder, and may not want to punish killing in self-defence at all. There are degrees of torture as of murder. Unclarities simply (...) play into the hands of would-be torturers. Downie is unsuccessful in deriving the duty of doctors not to be involved in torture from an analysis of the word `doctor'. It may be contrary to the role-duty of doctors to participate in torture; but there might be other duties which overrode this role-duty. The right approach is to ask what principles for the conduct of doctors have the highest acceptance-utility, or, as Kant might have equivalently put it, what the impartial furtherance of everyone's ends demands. This approach yields the result that torture (suitably defined) should be banned absolutely. It also yields prescriptions for the conduct of doctors where, in spite of them, torture is taking place. (shrink)