Current literature on ethical leadership and unethical leadership reflects a Western-based private sector perspective, pointing toward a compliance-oriented understanding of ethical and unethical leadership. As today’s executives increasingly have to ethically lead across different cultures and sectors, it becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture how ethical and unethical leadership is perceived in the Western and Eastern cultural cluster and the private and the public/social sector. Addressing this issue, the present study aims to identify cross-cultural and cross-sectoral commonalities (...) and differences in international executives’ perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership. Findings from in-depth interviews (N = 36) with executives from Western and Eastern cultures working in the private or the public/social sector reveal collectively held perceptions of ethical leadership (including leader honesty, integrity, concern for responsibility/sustainability, and people orientation) and of unethical leadership (referring to leader dishonesty, corruption, egocentrism, and manipulation). Results indicate limited support for a compliance-oriented perspective on ethical and unethical leadership but yield a much greater trend toward a value-oriented perspective. Concrete practice examples illustrate these different perspectives. Cultural and sectoral particularities of executive perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership are discussed. (shrink)

Business ethics and firm economic performance have traditionally often been regarded as mutually exclusive ends. We challenge this “either-or” belief and analyze when and how ethical firm leadership and firm performance may harmonize well. In extension of earlier research on ethical leadership and performance at the individual and team level, we study the context–dependency of the organization level relationship between CEO ethical leadership and firm performance. We propose a moderated mediation model of the link between CEO ethical leadership and firm (...) performance, identifying mediating and moderating variables unique to the organization-level of analysis. CEO ethical leadership is argued to work through organizational ethical culture which promotes firm performance under the condition that there is a strong corporate ethics program in place. Results from a multisource cross-sectional study, in which we surveyed 145 participants from 32 organizations and validated organizational performance ratings by objective performance data, showed support for our conceptual model. (shrink)

The book draws heavily on unparalleled access to the archives of Astrid Kirchherr and includes photographs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Kirchherr's former fiance, Stuart Sutcliffe, as well as other key protagonists in ...

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language -exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions (...) within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission’s report ‘‘Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously’’ to ask how legitimate these efforts to ‘‘democratize’’ scientific expertise really are. While the report borrows (...) from deliberative democrats’ normative accounts of legitimacy, the authors identify a tension between the principles for legitimate rule prescribed by deliberative democratic theory and the report’s celebration of diversity and dissent. While this inconsistency suggests that the legitimacy of deliberative governance arrangements is justified on empirical rather than normative grounds, it remains an open question whether studies of science and technology offer enough empirical support for such a justification. In this article, the authors address this pressing question and propose three possible responses. (shrink)

The Bewys van den waren Godsdienst and De veritate religionis Christianae originated against the background of Grotius’s familiarity with classical literature. To understand the innovative impact of these writings, the historical method applied must be considered. Grotius did not rely on authorities, but was compiling historical witnesses for the three religions. The availability and visibility of the witness reports are regularly referred to in the text. Thus, history and classical historians enter the picture. Interestingly, this cannot be separated from the (...) debate about the methods to be used in geography, a matter that gains importance as the difference between Bewys and De veritate is nowhere as visible as in the geographical references. The generous sprinkling of place names from different continents contributes to the poem’s factual character. The place names in the Bewys derive from the Dutch sea trade and can be found in the travel reports of the time. This is elucidated by two examples: the island Waygat in the Artic, and the coast of Mina in the Gulf of Guinea. In De veritate, however, all such references are removed. In their stead appear examples from ancient topography, to be annotated in the 1640 edition with ample quotations from Pliny, Strabo, Josephus and others. (shrink)

The mainstream literature on corporate governance is based on the premise of conflicts of interest in a competitive game played by variously defined stakeholders and thus builds explicitly and/or implicitly on masculinist ethical theories. This article argues that insights from feminist ethics, and in particular ethics of care, can provide a different, yet relevant, lens through which to study corporate governance. Based on feminist ethical theories, the article conceptualises a governance model that is different from the current normative orthodoxy.

BackgroundThe public’s attitudes to conscientious objection are likely to influence political decisions about CO and trust towards healthcare systems and providers. Few studies examine the pub...

“Ethics” is used as a label for a new kind of expertise in the field of science and technology. At the same time, it is not clear what ethical expertise consists in and what its political status in modern democracies can be. Starting from the “participatory turn” in recent social research and policy, we will argue that bioethical reasoning has to include public views of and attitudes towards biomedicine. We will sketch the outlines of a bioethical conception of “public understanding (...) of ethics,” addressing three different issues: the methodological relevance of moral questions and problems raised by lay persons in everyday life regarding biomedicine and technology, the normative relevance of such lay moralities for the justification of ethical decisions, and the necessity of public deliberation in this context. Finally, we draw conclusions in view of the concepts and methods such a conception of “public understanding of ethics” should employ. (shrink)

This paper reads Carlos Soto Román’s “Chile Project: [Re-classified],” a documentary poem that remediates declassified state documents as an ambivalent form of witnessing bureaucracy and state viol...

This paper studies the effects of social comparison on risk taking behavior. In our theoretical framework, decision makers evaluate the consequences of their choices relative to both their own and their peers’ conditions. We test experimentally whether the position in the social ranking affects risk attitudes. Subjects interact in a simulated workplace environment where they perform a work task, receive possibly different wages, and then undertake a risky decision that may produce an extra gain. We find that social comparison matters (...) for risk attitudes. Subjects are more risk averse in the presence of small social gain than social loss. In addition, risk aversion is decreasing in the size of the social gain. (shrink)

Im Zuge einer Änderung des Arzneimittelgesetzes im November 2016 hat der Deutsche Bundestag beschlossen, dass gruppennützige Arzneimittelforschung mit nicht-einwilligungsfähigen Erwachsenen unter bestimmten Bedingungen erlaubt sein soll. Das entsprechende Gesetz wird voraussichtlich im Jahr 2020 in Kraft treten. Das ethische Problem dieser Forschung besteht darin, dass Personen, die nicht in der Lage sind, ihre Einwilligung in die Forschung zu erteilen, nicht vom medizinischen Fortschritt ausgeschlossen werden sollen. Der Gesetzgeber hat versucht, diesen Konflikt zu lösen, indem er die Zulässigkeit der gruppennützigen Forschung (...) mit nicht-einwilligungsfähigen Erwachsenen an die Voraussetzung geknüpft hat, dass Studienteilnehmer ihre Einwilligung zuvor in einer Probandenverfügung erteilen. Der Beitrag hat das Ziel, die neue Regelung zur gruppennützigen Forschung mit nicht-einwilligungsfähigen Erwachsenen aus ethischer Sicht zu bewerten. Die Frage, ob die Gesetzesänderung weitere Forschung ermöglichen wird, hängt wesentlich davon ab, ob man mit Blick auf Studien, die sowohl eigennützige als auch gruppennützige Maßnahmen umfassen, eine Gesamtbetrachtung oder eine Einzelbetrachtung dieser Studien vorzieht. In unserem Beitrag argumentieren wir für eine Einzelbetrachtung. Es wird weiterhin die Auffassung vertreten, dass die im Gesetzgebungsverfahren vorgeschlagene Probandenverfügung die Selbstbestimmung der Patienten fördern kann, wenn sie mit Blick auf die mit der Teilnahme verbundenen Eingriffe ein Mindestmaß an Bestimmtheit erreicht.Zusammenfassend wird die Auffassung vertreten, dass gruppennützige Forschung mit nicht-einwilligungsfähigen Erwachsenen trotz der genannten Bedenken unter bestimmten Bedingungen ethisch zulässig sein kann. In der Gesamtabwägung erscheint dabei die eindeutige Definition und strenge Beachtung der Bedingungen der EU-Verordnung 536/2014 mit Blick auf einen ethisch gerechtfertigten Einbezug von nicht-einwilligungsfähigen Erwachsenen in gruppennützige Forschung als besonders bedeutsam. (shrink)

Subliminal perception occurs when prime stimuli that participants claim not to be aware of nevertheless influence subsequent processing of a target. This claim, however, critically depends on correct methods to assess prime awareness. Typically, d9 (‘‘d prime’’) tasks administered after a priming task are used to establish that people are unable to discriminate between different primes. Here, we show that such d9 tasks are influenced by the nature of the target, by attentional factors, and by the delay between stimulus presentation (...) and response. Our results suggest that the standard d9 task is not a straightforward measure of prime visibility. We discuss the implications of our findings for subliminal perception research. (shrink)

Legal systems can be metaphorically taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures. The ancient world has given us at least three literary loci that display the self-disruptive significance of this kind of metaphor if assumed as a practical guideline in the attempt to steer human experience. The first such loci can be traced in biblical Eden; the second one in the Phaeacian garden described in Homer’s Odyssey; the third in the stories of the first and second mythical Athens included in Plato’s (...) Timaeus and Republic. In all these tales, human beings ineluctably end up straying across the semantic-spatial borders which certain categories and rules have given them to encompass their experience. All these literary loci offer both a semio-cognitive and a constitutional lesson for lawyers and sovereigns. My intention is to exploit these lessons to show that the most relevant limit of legal systems, if taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures, consists precisely in their inability to constitutively limit themselves and their semiotic borders. This inaptitude is due, in my view, to the semiotic ‘exceedance’ of the phrastic, or descriptive parts of legal rules even more than the semantic vagueness of the values underlying their legitimacy. Any attempt to define the semantic and spatial boundaries of human experience by means of verbal enunciations implies the use of categorical schemes to define the legitimate and/or forbidden behaviors. But categorical schemes, in turn, comprise boundaries that draw protean verges between the inside and the outside of each category. The categorical ‘inside’ compellingly tends to exceed its borders so as to protrude out toward what is outside the category. In turn, the ‘outside’ shows, more often than not, continuities with the axiological/teleological patterns underpinning the semantic boundaries of legal rules. Any attempt to limit the competence/extension of law, if taken in its semantic/spatial significance, would seem to unveil what law could or should be, but is not. Relying on the above literary loci, I will try to demonstrate that this apparently contradictory implication is inherent in the dialectic between equality/universality and difference/plurality that makes up categorization itself, and thereby the semiotic prerequisites to considering any legal rule. (shrink)

Putting laypeople in an active role as direct expert contributors in the design of service robots becomes more and more prominent in the research fields of human–robot interaction and social robotics. Currently, though, HRI is caught in a dilemma of how to create meaningful service robots for human social environments, combining expectations shaped by popular media with technology readiness. We recapitulate traditional stakeholder involvement, including two cases in which new intelligent robots were conceptualized and realized for close interaction with humans. (...) Thereby, we show how the robot narrative together with aspects of power balancing stakeholders, such as hardware constraints and missing perspectives beyond primary users, and the adaptivity of robots through machine learning that creates unpredictability, pose specific challenges for participatory design processes in HRI. We conclude with thoughts on a way forward for the HRI community in developing a culture of participation that considers humans when conceptualizing, building, and using robots. (shrink)

Although the main responsibility for informed consent of medical procedures rests with doctors, nurses’ roles are also important, especially as patient advocates. Nurses’ preparation for this role in settings with a hierarchical and communal culture has received little attention. We explored the views of hospital managers and nurses regarding the roles of nurses in informed consent and factors influencing these roles. We conducted a qualitative study in a private, multispecialty hospital in Indonesia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven managers. Two (...) rounds of focus group discussions with nurses (n = 27) were conducted. Constant comparative approach was used in the analysis. Nurses can act as manager, witness, information giver, and advocate in the informed consent process. These roles are influenced by nurses’ preparedness, hospital culture and policy, patients’ understanding, family involvement, and cost-related issues. In preparation for these tasks, nurses should acquire communication skills, clinical knowledge, and legal and ethical knowledge. (shrink)

From the perspective of gender theory, the intersections among gender, class, and race make it difficult, if not impossible, to assign political issues and identities to just one social movement. Instead, the negotiation of movement ownership of issues and identities occurs through interaction among social movements, including interactions that create denial and distance. This article takes the interaction of labor organizing and feminism as the lens for studying movement interaction at three levels: opportunity structure, organizing practices, and framing ideas. Using (...) a case study of a strike of day care workers in West Berlin in the winter of 1989-90, it contrasts inclusive and exclusive forms of solidarity and their consequences for organizational practices. This particular strike received little support from either feminists or the labor movement and eventually failed, an outcome that can be seen as reflecting the weakness of structural and organizational supports for frames favoring inclusive solidarity. (shrink)

In the asymptotic safety paradigm, a quantum field theory reaches a regime with quantum scale invariance in the ultraviolet, which is described by an interacting fixed point of the Renormalization Group. Compelling hints for the viability of asymptotic safety in quantum gravity exist, mainly obtained from applications of the functional Renormalization Group. The impact of asymptotically safe quantum fluctuations of gravity at and beyond the Planck scale could at the same time induce an ultraviolet completion for the Standard Model of (...) particle physics with high predictive power. (shrink)

Die neuen Entwicklungen in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte der letzten 20 Jahre sind inzwischen auch fuer die Untersuchung der antiken Wissenschaften fruchtbar gemacht worden.

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational (...) perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions. (shrink)

Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I call ordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, (...) the expressivist can explain the semantic properties of normative sentences in terms of the logical properties of that attitude. Expressivism's problems with capturing the logical relations among normative sentences can be reduced to the familiar, more tractable problem of explaining certain coherence constraints on preferences. Particular attention is given to the interpretation of wide-scope negation. The proposed solution is also extended to other types of embedded contexts—most notably, disjunctions. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore and discuss the use of the concept of being affected in biomedical decision making processes in Germany. The corresponding German term ‘Betroffenheit’ characterizes on the one hand a relation between a state of affairs and a person and on the other an emotional reaction that involves feelings like concern and empathy with the suffering of others. An example for the increasing relevance of being affected is the postulation of the participation of people with disabilities and (...) chronic or acute diseases in the discourse, as partly realized in the German National Ethics Council or the Federal Joint Committee. Nevertheless, not only on the political level, the resistance against the participation of affected people is still strong; the academic debate seems to be cross-grained, too. Against this background, we explore the meaning and argumentative role of the concept of being affected as it is used by affected and lay people themselves. Our analysis is based on four focus group discussions in which lay people, patients and relatives of patients discuss their attitudes towards biomedical interventions such as organ transplantation and genetic testing. This setting allows for a comparison of how affected and non-affected people are concerned and deliberate about medical opportunities, but also of how they position themselves as being affected or non-affected with respect to (scientific) knowledge and morality. On this basis, we discuss the normative relevance of being affected for the justification of political participation. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. (...) Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached), while giving them a uniform type of analysis. The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice. (shrink)

Stein Tibetan 724 was earlier identified as a list of virtues of the Buddha Amitābha. A new reading of the document and identification of its Chinese source allow its re-identification instead as a list of the virtues of invoking the Buddha Amitābha in a loud voice. The article offers a corrected transcription of the manuscript, presents and examines possible sources, and suggests the most plausible proximate original for the Tibetan translation, briefly exploring the practice of loud invocation as a Buddhist (...) practice in medieval Dunhuang. (shrink)

“Ethics” is used as a label for a new kind of expertise in the field of science and technology. At the same time, it is not clear what ethical expertise consists in and what its political status in modern democracies can be. Starting from the “participatory turn” in recent social research and policy, we will argue that bioethical reasoning has to include public views of and attitudes towards biomedicine. We will sketch the outlines of a bioethical conception of “public understanding (...) of ethics,” addressing three different issues: (a) the methodological relevance of moral questions and problems raised by lay persons in everyday life regarding biomedicine and technology, (b) the normative relevance of such lay moralities for the justification of ethical decisions, and (c) the necessity of public deliberation in this context. Finally, we draw conclusions in view of the concepts and methods such a conception of “public understanding of ethics” should employ. (shrink)

Due to the socio-demographic change in most developed western countries, elderly populations have been continuously increasing. Therefore, preventive and assistive systems that allow elderly people to independently live in their own homes as long as possible will become an economical if not ethical necessity. These respective technologies are being developed under the term "Ambient Assistive Technologies". The EU-funded AAT-project Ambient Lighting Assistance for an Ageing Population has established the long-term goal to create an adaptive system capable of improving the residential (...) lighting conditions of single living elderly persons also aiming at supporting the preservation of their independence. Results of an earlier survey revealed that the elderly perceived their current lighting situation as satisfactory, whereas interviewers assessed in-house lighting as too dark and risk-laden. The overall results of ALADIN showed a significant increase in well-being from the baseline final testing with the new adaptive lighting system. Positive results for wellbeing and life quality suggest that the outcome effects may be attributed to the introduction of technology as well as to social contacts arising from participating in the study. The technological guidance of the study supervisors, in particular, may have produced a strong social reactivity effect that was first observed in the famous Hawthorne experiments in the 1930s. As older adults seem to benefit both from meaningful social contacts as well as assistive technologies, the question arises how assistive technology can be socially embedded to be able to maximize positive health effects. Therefore ethical guidelines for development and use of new assistive technologies for handicapped/older persons have to be developed and should be discussed with regard to their applicability in the context of AAT. (shrink)

PurposeAlthough the term “responsibility” plays a central role in bioethics and public health, its meaning and implications are often unclear. This paper defends the importance of a more systematic conception of responsibility to improve moral philosophical as well as descriptive analysis.MethodsWe start with a formal analysis of the relational conception of responsibility and its meta-ethical presuppositions. In a brief historical overview, we compare global-collective, professional, personal, and social responsibility. The value of our analytical matrix is illustrated by sorting out the (...) plurality of responsibility models in three cases.ResultsResponsibility is a relational term involving at least seven relata. The analysis of the relata allows distinguishing between individual versus collective agency, retrospective versus prospective direction, and liability versus power relations. Various bioethical ambiguities result from insufficient, implicit, or inappropriate ascriptions of responsibility.ConclusionsA systematic conception of responsibility is an important tool for bioethical reflection. It allows an in-depth understanding and critique of moral claims on a meta-ethical level without presuming one particular normative approach. Considering the concept of responsibility can also help to complement the current bioethical focus on individual autonomy by including the perspectives of other actors, such as family members or social groups. (shrink)

A central understanding in experimental economics is that subjects’ decisions in the lab are independent of history. We test whether this assumption of between-experiment independence is indeed justified. We analyze experiments with an allocation decision and find that participation in previous experiments tends to increase the amount subjects allocate to themselves. Hence, independence between experiments cannot be presumed if subjects participate repeatedly. The finding has implications for the interpretation of previous allocation decision results and deserves attention when running future experiments.

Francis Bacon's experimental philosophy is discussed, and the way in which it not only shapes scientific methodology but also deeply pervades all philosophical and social learning. Bacon draws us in to participate in an experiment with experience. The central driving force is the idea that learning how to learn is necessary in order to know. To meet this requirement, he considers the relation of form and content of pivotal importance, and therefore the selection of the literary form and the form (...) of data inscription is decisive in the construction of a heuristic tool. His inductive method serves a dual purpose: first, the so-called indicative form aims at securing knowledge by a comprehensible procedure that controls and guides hypothetical thinking. Second, the literary forms "fragment" and "aphorism" embody the subjunctive, and invite intellectual openness and even speculation. In this article, special emphasis is put on Bacon's use and justification of the aphorism. Bacon's pervasive experimentalism meets in some sense today's broad adoption of the experimental mode. His philosophy calls for an ontology that is also at work in recent notions of co-action and co-working, or of affordance. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the meaning of `ought', and the distinction between weak necessity modals (`ought', `should') and strong necessity modals (`must', `have to'). I argue that there is nothing specially ``strong'' about strong necessity modals per se: uses of `Must p' predicate the (deontic/epistemic/etc.) necessity of the prejacent p of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent ``weakness'' of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing whether the necessity of the prejacent is verified in the actual world. (...) `Ought p' can be accepted without needing to settle that the relevant considerations (norms, expectations, etc.) that actually apply verify the necessity of p. I call the basic account a modal-past approach to the weak/strong necessity modal distinction (for reasons that become evident). Several ways of implementing the approach in the formal semantics/pragmatics are critically examined. The account systematizes a wide range of linguistic phenomena: it generalizes across flavors of modality; it elucidates a special role that weak necessity modals play in discourse and planning; it captures contrasting logical, expressive, and illocutionary properties of weak and strong necessity modals; and it sheds light on how a notion of `ought' is often expressed in other languages. These phenomena have resisted systematic explanation. In closing I briefly consider how linguistic inquiry into differences among necessity modals may improve theorizing on broader philosophical issues. (shrink)

This paper investigates how inquiry into normative language can improve substantive normative theorizing. First I examine two dimensions along which normative language differs: “strength” and “subjectivity.” Next I show how greater sensitivity to these features of the meaning and use of normative language can illuminate debates about three issues in ethics: the coherence of moral dilemmas, the possibility of supererogatory acts, and the connection between making a normative judgment and being motivated to act accordingly. The paper concludes with several brief (...) reflections on the theoretical utility of the distinction—at least so-called—between “normative” and “non-normative” language and judgment. Clarifying the language we use in normative conversation and theorizing can help us diagnose problems with bad arguments and formulate better motivated questions. This can lead to clearer answers and bring into relief new theoretical possibilities and avenues to explore. (shrink)

The silk production around Naupaktos is better documented than other examples of the silk industry in Byzantine Central Greece, especially in terms of its organisation, industrial layout and technical parameters. However, in comparison with its much better-known Theban counterpart, the Naupactian silk industry remains underexplored in current scholarship. This article focuses on synthesising the information about the industry provided by the surviving writings of John Apokaukos, the metropolitan of Naupaktos c.1200-1232. It also seeks to evaluate how the result of this (...) investigation may complement or revise our current knowledge of the silk industry in Byzantine Central Greece. (shrink)

The moral discourse surrounding end-of-life (EoL) decisions is highly complex, and a comparison of Germany and Israel can highlight the impact of cultural factors. The comparison shows interesting differences in how patient’s autonomy and doctor’s duties are morally and legally related to each other with respect to the withholding and withdrawing of medical treatment in EoL situations. Taking the statements of two national expert ethics committees on EoL in Israel and Germany (and their legal outcome) as an example of this (...) discourse, we describe the similarity of their recommendations and then focus on the differences, including the balancing of ethical principles, what is identified as a problem, what social role professionals play, and the influence of history and religion. The comparison seems to show that Israel is more restrictive in relation to Germany, in contrast with previous bioethical studies in the context of the moral and legal discourse regarding the beginning of life, in which Germany was characterized as far more restrictive. We reflect on the ambivalence of the cultural reasons for this difference and its expression in various dissenting views on passive euthanasia and advance directives, and conclude with a comment on the difficulty in classifying either stance as more or less restrictive. (shrink)