China does not have a federalist system of government. Nevertheless, with deepening reform and openness, China's political system in terms of central–local relations is functioning more and more like federalism. Federalism as a functioning system in China has been understudied. This paper defines the political system existing in China as defacto federalism, and attempts to explore the sources and dynamics of this defacto federalism. China's defacto federalism was mainly driven by two related factors, i.e. decentralization and globalization. This paper argues (...) that while economic decentralization in the 1980s led to the formation of defacto federalism, globalization since the 1990s has accelerated this process and generated increasingly high pressure on the Chinese leadership to institutionalize existing defacto federalism. (shrink)

Reforms in post-Mao China have led to the rise of social movements and collective action. The FalunGong movement, a semi-religious movement, in particular has caught worldwide attention. Indeed, social protests have become a norm in China.

Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure.

Quantum cognition research applies abstract, mathematical principles of quantum theory to inquiries in cognitive science. It differs fundamentally from alternative speculations about quantum brain processes. This topic presents new developments within this research program. In the introduction to this topic, we try to answer three questions: Why apply quantum concepts to human cognition? How is quantum cognitive modeling different from traditional cognitive modeling? What cognitive processes have been modeled using a quantum account? In addition, a brief introduction to quantum probability (...) theory and a concrete example is provided to illustrate how a quantum cognitive model can be developed to explain paradoxical empirical findings in psychological literature. (shrink)

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is (...) that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model explains how individual action contributes to structural change, justifies demands for action from each particular agent, specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice. (shrink)

Question order effects are commonly observed in self-report measures of judgment and attitude. This article develops a quantum question order model (the QQ model) to account for four types of question order effects observed in literature. First, the postulates of the QQ model are presented. Second, an a priori, parameter-free, and precise prediction, called the QQ equality, is derived from these mathematical principles, and six empirical data sets are used to test the prediction. Third, a new index is derived from (...) the model to measure similarity between questions. Fourth, we show that in contrast to the QQ model, Bayesian and Markov models do not generally satisfy the QQ equality and thus cannot account for the reported empirical data that support this equality. Finally, we describe the conditions under which order effects are predicted to occur, and we review a broader range of findings that are encompassed by these very same quantum principles. We conclude that quantum probability theory, initially invented to explain order effects on measurements in physics, appears to be a powerful natural explanation for order effects of self-report measures in social and behavioral sciences, too. (shrink)

Recent research has uncovered the dark side of creativity by finding that creative individuals are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. However, we argue that not all creative individuals make trouble. Using moral self-regulation theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we examine individuals’ moral identity as a boundary condition and moral disengagement as a mediating mechanism to explain when and how individual creativity is associated with workplace deviant behavior. We conducted two field studies using multi-source data to test our (...) hypotheses. In Study 1, the results indicated that creativity positively predicted moral disengagement for those low in moral identity. In Study 2 with multi-wave data, we replicated the finding that moral identity moderated the effect of creativity on moral disengagement in Study 1 and further revealed that moral disengagement mediated the interactive effects of creativity and moral identity on workplace deviant behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young’s influential Social Connections Model of responsibility offers a compelling approach to theorizing structural injustice. However, the precise nature of the kind of responsibility modelled by the SCM, along with its relationship to the liability model, has remained unclear. I offer a reading of Young that takes the difference between the liability model and the SCM to be an instance of a more longstanding distinction in the literature on moral responsibility: attributability vs. accountability. I show that interpreting the (...) SCM as a conception of accountability resolves a number of objections, while also highlighting the SCM’s distinctive stance on the relationship between ethics and politics. (shrink)

Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether it is caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as ‘yellow (...) fever’, to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racial social meanings. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them. This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which (...) people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias. (shrink)

Squirrel search algorithm is a new biological-inspired optimization algorithm, which has been proved to be more effective for solving unimodal, multimodal, and multidimensional optimization problems. However, similar to other swarm intelligence-based algorithms, SSA also has its own disadvantages. In order to get better global convergence ability, an improved version of SSA called ISSA is proposed in this paper. Firstly, an adaptive strategy of predator presence probability is proposed to balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. Secondly, a normal (...) cloud model is introduced to describe the randomness and fuzziness of the foraging behavior of flying squirrels. Thirdly, a selection strategy between successive positions is incorporated to preserve the best position of flying squirrel individuals. Finally, in order to enhance the local search ability of the algorithm, a dimensional search enhancement strategy is utilized. 32 benchmark functions including unimodal, multimodal, and CEC 2014 functions are used to test the global search ability of the proposed ISSA. Experimental test results indicate that ISSA provides competitive performance compared with the basic SSA and other four well-known state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. (shrink)

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the (...) back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street. (shrink)

This article theoretically proposes and empirically verifies an understudied issue in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature—how moral degradation in a society influences the relationship between BE or CSR and firm performance. Building on strategic choice theory, we propose that both BE and CSR become more important in enhancing business success when the perceived MD is heightened. Our analysis of 300 firms operating in China statistically confirms our hypotheses: first, under high MD, firms’ engagement in CSR results in (...) higher corporate legitimacy and competitive advantage, and second, their adherence to ethical business codes leads to higher corporate legitimacy. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

This essay critiques or engages a wide range of existing works on the ancient and well-contested issue of weakness of will, from a new perspective of comparative philosophy combined with a focus on a largely neglected Davidsonian paradox of irrationality. It aims at revealing the interplay between the descriptive and the normative in the very notion of critical interpretation, as well as a special relation between holding-true and making-true which helps to explain the non-accidentalness of the descriptive coat of the (...) Plato Principle and some of the Mencian paradigmatic tenets. By the same token, it also sheds light on some holistic picture about a certain implicit type of dynamic normativity, which seems evidently applicable to, for example, the Mencius-Xunzi 荀子 dispute on human nature, but scarcely noticed or articulated in contemporary contexts of comparative philosophy. (shrink)

With the high frequency and intensity of worldwide disasters, cause-related marketing campaigns with sudden disasters are becoming increasingly popular. However, little is known about whether and how cause acuteness may influence consumer attitudes. This research aims to extend this research area through investigating the relationship between cause acuteness and consumer attitudes toward the product, as well as its underlying mechanism and boundary conditions. Based on a moral psychology perspective, we propose a theoretical model focusing on the mediating role of moral (...) elevation in influencing consumer attitudes. This model also incorporates product-cause fit and information transparency as moderators underpinning necessary conditions that are likely to lead to positive consumer attitudes. Four empirical studies were conducted to test our model. Our research results reveal that consumers have more positive attitudes toward the product associated with a sudden disaster than with an ongoing tragedy. Furthermore, the positive effect of cause acuteness on consumer attitudes is mediated by enhanced moral elevation, which occurs under the conditions of high product-cause fit and high information transparency. (shrink)

Affected by the Internet, computer, information technology, etc., building a smart city has become a key task of socialist construction work. The smart city has always regarded green and low-carbon development as one of the goals, and the carbon emissions of the auto parts industry cannot be ignored, so we should carry out energy conservation and emission reduction. With the rapid development of the domestic auto parts industry, the number of car ownership has increased dramatically, producing more and more CO2 (...) and waste. Facing the pressure of resources, energy, and environment, the effective and circular operation of the auto parts supply chain under the low-carbon transformation is not only a great challenge, but also a development opportunity. Under the background of carbon emission, this paper establishes a decision-making optimization model of the low-carbon supply chain of auto parts based on carbon emission responsibility sharing and resource sharing. This paper analyzes the optimal decision-making behavior and interaction of suppliers, producers, physical retailers, online retailers, demand markets, and recyclers in the auto parts industry, constructs the economic and environmental objective functions of low-carbon supply chain management, applies variational inequality to analyze the optimal conditions of the whole low-carbon supply chain system, and finally carries out simulation calculation. The research shows that the upstream and downstream auto parts enterprises based on low-carbon competition and cooperation can effectively manage the carbon footprint of the whole supply chain through the sharing of responsibilities and resources among enterprises, so as to reduce the overall carbon emissions of the supply chain system. (shrink)

Whether Husserl is a conceptualist has been heatedly debated among contemporary Husserl scholars. The present article intends to join the debate by asking the question of how, in the Husserlian context, intuitive acts fulfill signitive ones. On the one hand, those who take Husserl to be a conceptualist hold the content-identity theory, arguing that intuitive act and signitive act have the same content, so that the former can fulfill the latter. On the other hand, the non-conceptualists defend the object-identity theory (...) and claim that it is the identity of object of intuitive and signitive act that makes fulfillment possible. On the basis of a careful reading of the sixth investigation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the article proposes a dynamic content-identity theory, in which the identity of content does not mean that intuitive act and signitive act have the identical content accidentally, but rather, in the dynamic fulfillment process, the intuitive act obtains the content that overflows into it from the signitive act, so that the two acts have the identical content. And this article shows how the dynamic content-identity theory places Husserl in the conceptualist camp while avoiding certain difficulties of either plain content-identity theory or object-identity theory. (shrink)

Prior research on corporate misconduct pays extensive attention to single misconduct behaviors. However, little research has addressed recidivism – the repeated behaviors of corporate misconduct. Based on institutional theory and using the context of emerging economies where recidivism plays a considerable role, we propose the path dependency of corporate recidivism and suggest that three influential factors exist: internal preconditioning, inter-organizational imitation, and the prevailing external evaluation. Our event history analysis of 1,036 listed companies in China over the period 2001–2008 statistically (...) confirms our hypotheses. We conclude the paper by outlining the implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, that is, the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight? In this article, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such an ideology have been overlooked. To do (...) so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths—and the two-tier system itself—manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work. (shrink)

This paper explores what insights can be drawn from critical theory to enrich and strengthen Sen’s capability approach in relation to technology and human development. The two theories share some important commonalities: both are concerned with the pursuit of “a good life”; both are normative theories rooted in ethics and meant to make a difference, and both are interested in democracy. The paper provides a brief overview of both schools of thought and their applications to technology and human development. Three (...) areas are identified where critical theory can make a contribution to the capability approach: conceptually, by providing a critical account of individual agency and enriching the concept of technology beyond the simplistic notion of commodities; methodologically, by sensitising towards reification and hegemony of scientific tools, and, finally, by emphasising reflexivity of researchers. (shrink)

With the change of the network communication environment in vehicular ad hoc networks of a smart city, vehicles may encounter security threats such as eavesdropping, positioning, and tracking, so appropriate anonymity protection is required. Based on the certificateless cryptosystem and group signature ideas, this paper proposes a certificateless group signature anonymous authentication scheme for the VANETs of a smart city. In this scheme, it can implement the process of adding, signing, verifying, and revoking group members only by simple multiplication of (...) the elliptic curve and synchronization factor technology, which shortens the length of the signature and improves the efficiency of the signature. From the proofs of correctness and security, we know that it does not only has anonymity and traceability of the group signature scheme but also has unforgeability and forward security. According to the performance verification, this scheme has lower calculation overhead and higher authentication efficiency. (shrink)

This article is designed to form a question-focused cross-cultural dialogue, rather than compare Zhu Xi 朱熹 with Meister Eckhart in general terms. It will start with an analysis of the exegetical/hermeneutical rules that Zhu Xi and Eckhart set up for their own scriptural commentaries. The study of Eckhart will then be extended to Augustine, in order to explore how Eckhart resorts to Augustine in his commentary writings. Having explored Eckhart’s affinity with Augustine regarding their consensus about the multiplicity of literal (...) senses, as well as their emphasis on the renewal or the continuous growth of the meaning of scriptural texts, the discussion will come back to the starting point of this comparative model, and attempt to form a comparison between the two traditions, through the exemplars of Zhu Xi, Eckhart, and Augustine, with a focus on the implications of these hermeneutical rules. (shrink)

A real number x is computable iff it is the limit of an effectively converging computable sequence of rational numbers, and x is left computable iff it is the supremum of a computable sequence of rational numbers. By applying the operations “sup” and “inf” alternately n times to computable sequences of rational numbers we introduce a non-collapsing hierarchy {Σn, Πn, Δn : n ∈ ℕ} of real numbers. We characterize the classes Σ2, Π2 and Δ2 in various ways and give (...) several interesting examples. (shrink)

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. To promote logically consistent representation and classification of statistical entities, we have developed the Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS). OBCS extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO Foundry ontology supported by some 20 communities. Currently, OBCS contains 686 terms, including 381 classes imported from OBI and 147 classes specific to OBCS. The goal of this paper is to present OBCS for community critique and to describe a (...) number of use cases designed to illustrate its potential applications. The OBCS project and source code are available at http://obcs.googlecode.com. (shrink)

Although it is an increasingly popular assumption that leader mindfulness may positively affect leader behaviors and, in turn, employee outcomes, to date, little empirical evidence supports this view. Against this backdrop, the present research seeks to develop and test a serial mediation model of leader mindfulness. Specifically, we propose that leader mindfulness enhances employee performance and that this relationship is explained by increased leader procedural justice enactment and, subsequently, reduced employees’ emotional exhaustion. We conducted three studies to test this model. (...) Study 1 involved employees from a wide range of organizations in the USA. Study 2 used a sample of leaders and employees from China and measured our model variables at three different points in time. Both studies provide consistent support for our hypotheses. Finally, Study 3 involved a laboratory experiment in which 62 senior executives were assigned to either a mindfulness induction or to a control condition. Again, results revealed a significant and positive link between leader mindfulness and leader procedural justice enactment. In sum, these findings expand our understanding of mindfulness to the domain of leadership, a key area of organizational research. Moreover, they complement prior studies by showing that mindfulness dynamics go beyond intrapersonal effects but also influence the attitudes and behaviors of others. We discuss our findings in light of their contributions to the mindfulness, ethics, and leadership literatures and point out implications for practice. (shrink)