Three global developments situate the context of this investigation: the increasing use of social media by organizations and their employees, the burgeoning presence of social media policies, and the heightened focus on corporate social responsibility. In this study the intersection of these trends is examined through a content analysis of 112 publicly available social media policies from the largest corporations in the world. The extent to which social media policies facilitate and/or constrain the communicative sensibilities and values associated with contemporary (...) notions of CSR is considered. Overall, findings indicate that a large majority of policies, regardless of sector or national headquarters, increasingly inhibit communicative tenets of contemporary CSR and thereby diminish employee negotiation and participation in the social responsibilities of corporations. Moreover, policies generally enact organizational communication practices that are contrary to international CSR guidelines. Findings suggest that social media policies represent a relatively unrecognized development in the institutionalization of CSR communicative norms and practices that call into question the promising affordances of social media for the inclusion of various voices in the public negotiation of what constitutes corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

In the last decade, the familiar problem of the regress of reasons has returned to prominent consideration in epistemology. And with the return of the problem, evaluation of the options available for its solution is begun anew. Reason’s regress problem, roughly put, is that if one has good reasons to believe something, one must have good reason to hold those reasons are good. And for those reasons, one must have further reasons to hold they are good, and so a regress (...) of reasons looms. In this new study, Aikin presents a full case for infinitism as a response to the problem of the regress of reasons. Infinitism is the view that one must have a non-terminating chain of reasons in order to be justified. The most defensible form of infinitism, he argues, is that of a mixed theory – that is, epistemic infinitism must be consistent with and integrate other solutions to the regress problem. (shrink)

Deep disagreements are disagreements wherein the dialectical conditions for fruitful argumentative exchange do not obtain. One view from within these disagreements is that the other side has been duped or is so deeply ignorant of and complacent with some illusion, there is no hope for exchange. The Dark Enlightenment's critique of liberal democracy and progressive politics (which gave rise to the alt‐right movement) proceeds on this premise, calling their critical philosophy ‘the red pill’ and terming the opposition's program ‘the Cathedral’. (...) Despite the depth of their disagreement with progressives, there is evidence for an optimistic program of critical dialogue in this instance of deep disagreement. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

An examination of the history and arguments behind W.K. Clifford and William James's landmark essays and subsequent impact on the importance of knowledge-based evidence.

In this paper, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions on team based tasks in order for a selection criterion applied to individuals to produce optimal teams. We assume only that individuals have types and that a team’s performance depends on its size and the type composition of its members. We first derive the selection principle which states that if a selection criterion exists, it must rank types by homogeneous team performance, the performance of a team consisting only of that type. (...) We then prove that a selection criterion exists if and only if replacing the team’s lowest ranked type, as measured by homogeneous team performance, with a higher ranked type increases team performance. Finally, we show that the replace the lowest ranked property rules out most common types of team complementarities, including benefits to diverse types and types that fill structural holes. (shrink)

My objective in this paper is to compare two philosophical problems, the problem of the criterion and the problem of deep disagreement, and note a core similarity which explains why many proposed solutions to these problems seem to fail along similar lines. From this observation, I propose a kind of skeptical solution to the problem of deep disagreement, and this skeptical program has consequences for the problem as it manifests in political epistemology and metaphilosophy.

The dominance of capitalism, through the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, is maintained as an illusion through the use of four main strategies. In order to obtain the consent of the population, mass schooling tends to produce graduates who accept this illusion because they are vulnerable to these strategies and cannot imagine a post-capitalist world. However, through education, people can better appreciate the problematic reality of unbridled capitalism, such as the degradation of the global ecosystem. It is argued here that programs (...) which are designed to address these problems, such as Education for Sustainable Development, are dependent upon citizens developing a critical consciousness. This consciousness is firstly able to confront the four strategies maintaining capitalism’s dominance. It is argued that an education which engages with spiritual ideals and values regarding how a good life is understood in an aspirational sense, enables people to engage with the dominance of capitalism and to envision other possibilities for society in which capitalism is harnessed to serve the greater public good. This requires education’s ontology – as the character of students – to critically read the world, imagine possibilities which can constitute a good life, and are courageous to enact the social actions required to make these ideals a reality. This is made possible by an education which returns to the spiritual roots of ideals. (shrink)

The global pandemic has intensified the risk of moral distress due to increased demands on already limited human resources and uncertainty of the pandemic’s trajectory. Nurses commonly experience moral distress: a conflict between the morally correct action and what they are required or capable of doing. Effective moral distress interventions are rare. For this reason, our team conducted a multi-phase research study to develop a moral distress intervention for pediatric critical care nurses. In this article, we discuss our multi-phase approach (...) to develop a moral distress intervention—proactive, interdisciplinary meeting. Our proposed intervention is a sequential compilation of empirical work couched within a relational ethics lens thus should point to enhanced potential for intervention effectiveness. (shrink)

The straw man fallacy consists in inappropriately constructing or selecting weak versions of the opposition’s arguments. We will survey the three forms of straw men recognized in the literature, the straw, weak, and hollow man. We will then make the case that there are examples of inappropriately reconstructing stronger versions of the opposition’s arguments. Such cases we will call iron man fallacies. The difference between appropriate and inappropriate iron manning clarifies the limits of the virtue of open-mindedness.

In this paper, I will argue for a complex of three theses. First, that the problem of deep disagreement is an instance of the regress problem of justification. Second, that the problem of deep disagreement, as a regress problem, depends on a dialecticality requirement for arguments. Third, that the dialecticality requirement is plausible and defensible.

Pragmatism’s naturalism is inconsistent with the phenomenological tradition’s anti-naturalism. This poses a problem for the methodological consistency of phenomenological work in the pragmatist tradition. Solutions such as phenomenologizing naturalism or naturalizing phenomenology have been proposed, but they fail. As a consequence, pragmatists and other naturalists must answer the phenomenological tradition’s criticisms of naturalism.

This research examines the most important historical, political, economic, social, cultural, and religious factors before, during, and after the reign of Communism in Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 2021 and their effect on the extreme increase in atheism and decrease in Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, in the present-day Czech Republic. It devotes special attention to the role of the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii) and the changing policies of the Holy See vis-à-vis this Church, examining these policies' impact on the continuing (...) decline of Roman Catholicism in the Czech Republic after the collapse of Communism. The article also deals with Pope Pius XII's Secret Mandates of 1948-1950, the Second Vatican Council, and the Holy See's Ostpolitik. Scholars, who previously relied only on the views of the Czechs, blame the unprecedented drop in Christianity, the near-total destruction of the Catholic Church, and the rise in atheism on the Czechoslovak communist government's four decades of totalitarianism. Although the increase in atheism and decrease in Christianity were substantial during the era of Communism from 1948 to 1989, our data indicate that the decline in Christianity, particularly the historically predominating Roman Catholicism, did not commence with the 1948 communist coup d’état but traces its origins to the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the conclusion of WWI and the establishment of Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918. What's more, this research shows that the most significant and unprecedented steep deterioration of the Christian Faith, namely Roman Catholicism, did not occur during the era of Communism but only after the Czechoslovak communist government collapsed in 1989. This massive decay did not happen even during the most extraordinary communist persecution of the Catholic Church during the era of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. This research further finds that the Holy See's ill-advised policies and systematic, sustained, and prevalent failures in leadership, guidance, and teachings are responsible for the near destruction of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the end destruction of the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii), in the Czech and Slovak Republics after the fall of Communism. These failures furthermore contributed to the Czech Republic, the historical lands of Bohemia and Moravia that once were in the center of Christendom, degenerating into the most atheist country in Europe and the world today. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...) inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a study that investigated the roles that religiosity and ones money ethic play in determining consumer attitudes/beliefs in various situations regarding questionable consumer practices. One dimension of religiosity – intrinsic religiousness – was studied. Four separate dimensions of a money ethic scale were initially examined, but only one was used in the final analyses. Results indicated that both intrinsic religiousness and one’s money ethic were significant determinants of most types of consumer ethical beliefs.

This article presents the results of a study that investigated the role that religiosity plays in determining consumer attitudes/beliefs regarding various questionable consumer practices. Additionally, other personal factors were examined including idealism, relativism, consumer alienation and selected demographics such as income and age. All of these constructs were examined as antecedents of consumer ethical beliefs. The results of a post hoc analysis indicated that religiosity was a significant determinate of both idealism and relativism, and since idealism and relativism determine consumer (...) ethical beliefs, religiosity is a significant indirect determinate of consumer ethical beliefs. (shrink)

Research indicates that the well‐being and productivity of over 100 million people in the global workforce may be compromised by posttraumatic stress (PTS). Given that work‐related experiences are often the source of the trauma that leads to PTS, and that PTS due to any cause can interfere with employees’ job performance, organizations would do well to consider the antecedents and consequences of PTS. This review of research—primarily within fields adjacent to business—on the types, antecedents, consequences, and organizational implications of PTS (...) is presented to advance inquiry within the field of business. The definition of PTS requires attention to the new classification of complex posttraumatic stress disorder that can result from threats that are not life‐threatening such as bullying and sexual harassment. PTS antecedents include organizational and extraorganizational traumas, and risk and resilience factors. Absenteeism, impaired cognitive functioning, strained relationships, and growth are among the consequences of PTS. Organizations can assist through disaster planning, empathetic leaders, mental health literacy initiatives, and employee assistance programs. Many research questions arise that, when answered, will allow organizations to better understand how they can improve employee productivity and well‐being by attending to PTS. (shrink)

In 1949 Culliton noted that "... religion has something to offer business" (Culliton, 1949, p. 265). While religion definitely does have something to offer business, especially business ethics, it is only recently that empirical research linking religiosity and business ethics has been conducted. Indeed, religiosity affords a background, against which the ethical nature of business, including marketing and consumer behavior, can be interpreted. This article offers a descriptive, rather than normative, perspective in reviewing articles linking religion to business and consumer (...) ethics. The main objective of the article being both to present some of the most significant empirical findings to date and also to encourage researchers to pursue further research in this relatively under researched area. (shrink)

This two country study examines the effect of corporate ethical values and enforcement of a code of ethics on perceptions of the role of ethics in the overall success of the firm. Additionally, the impact of organizational commitment and of individual variables such as ethical idealism and relativism was examined. The rationale for examining the perceived importance of the role of ethics in this manner is to determine the extent to which the organization itself can influence employee perceptions regarding ethics (...) and social responsibility. Results indicate that all of the variables tested, except relativism, impacted upon one’s perceptions of the importance of ethics and social responsibility. Perceptions of the importance of ethics and social responsibility also varied depending upon country of residence with the U.S. sample having somewhat higher perceptions concerning the importance of ethics and social responsibility than their counterparts in Spain. Furthermore, when comparing the two samples, the U.S. sample had significantly higher corporate ethical values, greater enforcement of ethical codes, less organizational commitment and both lower idealism and relativism. (shrink)

This book analyses the straw man fallacy and its deployment in philosophical reasoning. While commonly invoked in both academic dialogue and public discourse, it has not until now received the attention it deserves as a rhetorical device. Scott Aikin and John Casey propose that straw manning essentially consists in expressing distorted representations of one's critical interlocutor. To this end, the straw man comprises three dialectical forms, and not only the one that is usually suggested: the straw man, the weak (...) man and the hollow man. Moreover, they demonstrate that straw manning is unique among fallacies as it has no particular logical form in itself, because it is an instance of inappropriate meta-argument, or argument about arguments. They discuss the importance of the onlooking audience to the successful deployment of the straw man, reasoning that the existence of an audience complicates the dialectical boundaries of argument. Providing a lively, provocative and thorough analysis of the straw man fallacy, this book will appeal to postgraduates and researchers alike, working in a range of fields including fallacies, rhetoric, argumentation theory and informal logic. (shrink)

Classical pragmatism is committed to the thought that philosophy must be relevant to ordinary life. This commitment is frequently employed critically: to show that some idea is irrelevant to ordinary life is to prove it to be expendable. But the commitment is also constructive: pragmatists must strive to make their positive views relevant. Accordingly, one would expect the classical pragmatists to have fixed their attention on ethics, since this is the area of philosophy most attuned to everyday problems. Although ethics (...) was among Dewey’s persistent interests, Peirce wrote almost nothing on the subject, and James wrote very little. But what James did write exerts considerable influence on contemporary pragmatists, many of whom make frequent appeals to the dual components of James’s ethics, pluralism and meliorism. In this paper, we will pose three challenges to Jamesian ethics. As James’s ethics is unique, we begin with a sketch of his view. (shrink)

This essay summarizes the research program developed in our new book, Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement (Routledge, 2014). Humans naturally want to know and to take themselves as having reason on their side. Additionally, many people take democracy to be a uniquely proper mode of political arrangement. There is an old tension between reason and democracy, however, and it was first articulated by Plato. Plato’s concern about democracy was that it detached political decision (...) from reason. Epistemic democrats attempt to show how the two can be re-attached. What is necessary is to couple the core democratic liberties with norms of rational exchange. Thus epistemology and argument provides a basis for democratic politics. Why We Argue (And How We Should) makes a case for the connection and develops a toolkit for maintaining it. (shrink)

The straw man fallacy consists in inappropriately constructing or selecting weak versions of the opposition's arguments. We will survey the three forms of straw men recognized in the literature, the straw, weak, and hollow man. We will then make the case that there are examples of inappropriately reconstructing stronger versions of the opposition's arguments. Such cases we will call iron man fallacies.

This study examined the effect of various antecedent variables on marketers’ perceptions of the role of ethics and socialresponsibility in the overall success of the firm. Variables examined included Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (i.e., power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, masculinity, and Confucian dynamism), as well as corporate ethical values and enforcement ofan ethics code. Additionally, individual variables such as ethical idealism and relativism were included. Results indicated that most ofthese variables impacted marketers’ perceptions of the importance of ethics and social responsibility, (...) although to varying degrees. (shrink)

For anyone approaching the Encheiridion of Epictetus for the first time, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding a complex philosophical text. Including a full translation and clear explanatory commentaries, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' introduces readers to a hugely influential work of Stoic philosophy. Scott Aikin and William O. Stephens unravel the core themes of Stoic ethics found within this ancient handbook. Focusing on the core themes of self-control, seeing things as they are, living according to nature, owning one's roles (...) and fulfilling the responsibilities that those roles entail, the authors elucidate the extremely challenging ideas in Epictetus's brisk chapters. Divided into five distinct parts, this book provides readers with: -/- - A new translation of the Encheiridion by William O. Stephens. - A new introduction to ancient Stoicism, its system of concepts, and the ancient figures who shaped it. - A fresh treatment of the notorious and counter-intuitive 'Stoic paradoxes'. - An accessible overview of the origin and historical context of the Encheiridion. - Detailed commentaries on each chapter of the Encheiridion that clarify its recurring themes and highlight their interconnections. - Careful attention to the presentation of the arguments embedded in Epictetus's aphoristic style. - A thoughtful discussion of serious criticisms of Epictetus's Stoicism and replies to these objections. -/- Written with clarity and authority, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' provides a foundation from which readers can understand this important text and engage with the fundamental questions of Stoic philosophy and ethics. This guide will aid teachers of Epictetus, students encountering Stoicism for the first time, and readers seeking a greater understanding of Stoic ethics. (shrink)

The need for conceptual work in marketing ethics is addressed by examining the five techniques of neutralization as a means for partially explaining unethical behaviors by marketing practitioners. These techniques are often used by individuals to lessen the possible impact of norm-violating behaviors upon their self-concept and their social relationships. Borrowed from the social disorganization and deviance literature, the five techniques of neutralization are: (1) denial of responsibility, (2) denial of injury, (3) denial of victim, (4) condemning the condemners and (...) (5) appeal to higher loyalties. Examples of marketing professionals using each of the five techniques are given, and a conceptual model linking the techniques of neutralization with unethical behavior is presented. Finally, relevant research questions are offered for consideration. (shrink)

It is commonly understood that in its focus on rights and obligations law is centrally concerned with organising responsibility. In defining how obligations are created, in contract or property law, say, or imposed, as in tort, public, or criminal law, law and legal institutions are usually seen as society’s key mode of asserting and defining the content and scope of responsibilities. This book takes the converse view: legal institutions are centrally involved in organising irresponsibility. Particularly with respect to the production (...) of large-scale harms – including extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, or environmental or nuclear devastation – and in opposition to conventional understandings of responsibility in law, morality and politics, the book provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which legal institutions – their practices, concepts, and categories – themselves operate as much to deflect responsibility for harms suffered as they do to acknowledge them. Drawing on a series of case studies from local, national, and global concerns the book analyses how law facilitates dispersals and disavowals of responsibility, and it shows how it does so in consistent and patterned ways. In assessing how this ‘organised irresponsibility’ operates, and what its consequences are for both legal analysis and society generally, a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of law’s methods, operation, and consequences is required. At stake is nothing less than a fundamental re-assessment of the role of modern law in the production and legitimation of human suffering. This innovative and interdisciplinary book provides a sustained challenge to conventional thinking about law and legal institutions. It will be of major interest to those working in law, political and legal theory, sociology and moral philosophy. (shrink)

We are rational creatures, in that we are beings on whom demands of rationality are appropriate. But by our rationality it doesn't follow that we always live up to those demands. In those cases, we fail to be rational, but it is in a way that is different from how rocks, tadpoles, and gum fail to be rational. For them, we use the term ‘arational.’ They don't have the demands, but we do. The demands of rationality bear on us because (...) we have minds that can move us to act, inspire us to create, and bring us to believe in ways that are responsible and directed. My interests here are the demands rationality places on our beliefs. Beliefs aim at the truth, and so one of the demands of being a rational creature with beliefs is that we manage them in a way that is pursuant of the truth. Reasons and reasoning play the primary role in that management – we ought to believe on the basis of good reasons. That is, if you believe something, you think that you're right about the world in some way or another. You believe because you think that something is true. Now, p's truth is different from all ways it could be false, and your being right about p isn't just some arbitrary commitment, one that could just as well have been its negation. This non-arbitrary specificity of beliefs is constituted by the fact that they are held on the basis of reasons. Arguments are our model for how these reasons go – we offer some premises and show how they support a conclusion. Of course, arbitrary premises won't do, so you've got to have some reason for holding them as opposed to some others. Every premise, then, is a conclusion in need of an argument, and for arguments to be acceptable, we've got to do due diligence on the premises. This, however, leads to a disturbing pattern – for every premise we turn into a conclusion, we've got at least one other premise in need of another argument. Pretty soon, even the simplest arguments are going to get very, very complicated. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is the view that human knowledge and understanding are severely limited, compared to that of the divine. The view is deployed as an undercutting defeater for evidential arguments from evil. However, skeptical theism has broader skeptical consequences than those for the argument from evil. The epistemic principles of this skeptical creep are identified and shown to be on the road to global skepticism.

Much has been written about the puzzling aesthetic appeal of horror films that include scenes of brutal, graphic violence. More recently, however, some philosophers have proposed that viewing certain horror films as a source of entertainment is morally problematic because of the impact they might have on our moral psychology. By contrast, Ian Stoner argues that viewing fictional depictions of violence in horror films is not morally problematic because horror films do not present violence in ways that risk damaging the (...) kinds of reactive attitudes required to exhibit a well-functioning moral psychology. In this paper I note some the ways in which Stoner is correct about horror films, yet I argue that he has overstated his case for the permissibility of viewing all instances of horrific violence as entertainment. (shrink)

This essay differentiates two approaches to understanding the concept of coercion, and argues for the relative merits of the one currently out of fashion. The approach currently dominant in the philosophical literature treats threats as essential to coercion, and understands coercion in terms of the way threats alter the costs and benefits of an agent’s actions; I call this the “pressure” approach. It has largely superseded the “enforcement approach,” which focuses on the powers and actions of the coercer rather than (...) the perspective of the coercee. The enforcement approach identifies coercion with certain uses of the kinds of powers that agents need to accumulate and wield in order to be able to make significant, credible threats. Though there is considerable overlap extensionally in the instances of coercion recognized by the two approaches, the enforcement approach encompasses some uses of power to coerce that do not involve threats . It also circumscribes which threats should be counted as coercive, though notably it provides a picture of coercion that is non-moralized in its essentials. While there may be specific purposes for which a pressure account is to be preferred, I argue that the enforcement approach better describes how coercion works, and elucidates factors that are often tacitly assumed by pressure accounts. It also is more useful for explaining the social and political significance of coercion, and why coercion is thought to have the implications commonly associated with it. In particular, I argue that it helps us understand why uses of coercion are in general a matter of ethical significance, why state authority depends on commanding a monopoly on the right to use coercion, and why being coerced may reasonably provide one a defense against being held responsible for actions one is coerced into taking. (shrink)

Pragmatism is brass tacks philosophy. In fact, it's more than just that, as the pragmatist also holds the view that philosophy ought to be brass tacks philosophy. Pragmatisms are not simply aligned in terms of what solutions they propose for philosophical problems, but they are aligned in terms of how they view philosophical problems and what solutions would be in the first place. In many ways, this metaphilosophical view is the prime mover for pragmatist first-order philosophizing. The pragmatist may enjoin (...) that there is no first philosophy, but for most pragmatists, their metaphilosophy functions as one.1The founding documents of pragmatism, Peirce's "Consequences of Four Incapacities," James's "The Sentiment of... (shrink)

This paper presents the results of a national study of the beliefs and perceptions of small business professionals concerning ethics within their company and business in general. The study examined their views on the relationship between success and ethical conduct as well as the extent and nature of ethical conflicts experienced by the respondents. Some comparisons are made with similar studies that have been conducted in the past. Respondents have the most ethical conflicts with customers and employees, and with regard (...) to honesty in contracts/agreements. Most also believe that ethical standards are lower than they were 10 and 20 years ago, primarily because society's moral standards are lower. Additionally, they believe that the behavior of top management has the most influence on decisions in ethical situations. Finally, consistent with prior studies, they believe that they have the most responsibility to customers, ahead of employees and stockholders. (shrink)

There has been a promising discussion brewing recently about whether there is an ethics of inquiry—that is, a unique set of ethical rules that constrains inquirers specifically in their role as inquirers. Most prominently, Philip Kitcher has proposed that there is indeed an ethics of inquiry. He argues that, given the intellectual climate of many modern societies, certain research programs are likely to encourage further social injustice against members of already disadvantaged groups; in such cases, inquirers are obligated to refrain (...) from that research, regardless of its expected or likely results. Kitcher has in mind scientific research regarding the natural capacities of members of traditionally underprivileged social groups; he thinks that, given the degree of prejudice and discrimination that obtains in many societies, research into the possibility of a biological basis for differences in accomplishment among different races and sexes should be prohibited, even where the proposed research promises to debunk racist and sexist views. (shrink)

Contemporary suicide terrorists from the Middle East are publicly deemed crazed cowards bent on senseless destruction who thrive in poverty and ignorance. Recent research indicates they have no appreciable psychopathology and are as educated and economically well-off as surrounding populations. A first line of defense is to get the communities from which suicide attackers stem to stop the attacks by learning how to minimize the receptivity of mostly ordinary people to recruiting organizations.

The article argues that bribery is wrong because it violates fundamental notion of equality and it undermines the vitality of the institutions affected.

This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and (...) cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. (shrink)