Goal-setting has become a popular and effective motivational tool, utilized by practitioners and substantiated with decades of empirical research. However, the potential for goal-setting to enhance performance may come at the cost of ethical behavior. I propose a theoretical model linking attributes of goals and goal-setting practices to unethical behavior through two psychological mechanisms – ethical recognition and moral disengagement; and addressing the moderating role of individual differences (e.g., goal-commitment and conscientiousness), as well as the broader organizational ethical context.

With massive corruption uncovered in numerous recent corporate scandals, investigating psychological processes underlying unethical behavior among employees has become a critical area of research for organizational scientists. This article seeks to explain why people engage in deceptive and fraudulent activities by focusing on the use of moral-disengagement tactics or rationalizations to justify egregious actions at work. In addition, participation in goal-setting is argued to attenuate the relationship between moral disengagement and unethical behavior. Across two studies, a lab simulation and field (...) survey, a measure of moral disengagement was developed for use with working adults. The hypothesized main and interactive effects of moral disengagement, participation, and unethical behavior were tested and largely confirmed. (shrink)

Adam Naruszewicz - the court poet of the last king of Poland was born on 20th October 1733 in Polesie. He studied at Villinus University and in Lyon. Thanks to Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski he established a very close friendship with Stanisław August Poniatowski. In the course of time he started to bring out his political opinions and put some of his plans into practice. He edited Zabawy Przyjemne i Pożyteczne - the first Polish literary magazine. Franciszek Bohomolec printed (...) his main works in Dzieła. However, the first publications has already been issued in Zabawy Przyjemne i Pożyteczne. As far as literary writing is concerned, Adam Naruszewicz gave his undivided attention to contemporary situation. It was difficulties in the country and on the King’s court that inspired Naruszewicz to express his opinions in public. The resources of contemporary political situation, particularly the times of Barski Confederation, the First Partition of Poland and the dissolution of Delegation Representatives were found between 1768—1775 in Poniatowski’s royal collection. The above events, in Adam Naruszewicz’s poems, are presented in the following order: The Barski and Radom Confederation, the abduction of the King and the Frist Partition of Poland. The plots are very important in poet’s life. The writer perceives and comments on the subject touching various areas. Above all, patriotism and love to the Country are the most important issues in Naruszewicz’s works. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling the information (...) gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

The descriptions and theoretical laws scientists write down when they model a system are often false of any real system. And yet we commonly talk as if there were objects that satisfy the scientists’ assumptions and as if we may learn about their properties. Many attempt to make sense of this by taking the scientists’ descriptions and theoretical laws to define abstract or fictional entities. In this paper, I propose an alternative account of theoretical modelling that draws upon Kendall Walton’s (...) ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I argue that this account allows us to understand theoretical modelling without positing any object of which scientists’ modelling assumptions are true. (shrink)

Quite likely the most sacrosanct principle in epistemology, it is near-universally accepted that knowledge is factive: knowing that p entails p. Recently, however, Bricker, Buckwalter, and Turri have all argued that we can and often do know approximations that are strictly speaking false. My goal with this paper is to advance this nascent non-factive project in two key ways. First, I provide a critical review of these recent arguments against the factivity of knowledge, allowing us to observe that elements of (...) these arguments mutually reinforce respective weaknesses, thereby offering the non-factive project a much stronger foundation than when these arguments were isolated. Next, I argue tentatively in favor of Bricker’s truthlikeness framework over the representational adequacy account favored by Buckwalter and Turri. Taken together, while none of this constitutes a knock-down argument against factivity, it does allow us to quiet some of the more immediate worries surrounding the non-factive project. (shrink)

This book reconceives virtue epistemology in light of the conviction that we are essentially social creatures. Virtue is normally thought of as something that allows individuals to accomplish things on their own. Although contemporary ethics is increasingly making room for an inherently social dimension in moral agency, intellectual virtues continue to be seen in terms of the computing potential of a brain taken by itself. Thinking in these terms, however, seriously misconstrues the way in which our individual flourishing hinges on (...) our collective flourishing. Green’s account of virtue epistemology is based on the extended credit view, which conceives of knowledge as an achievement and broadens that focus to include team achievements in addition to individual ones. He argues that this view does a better job than alternatives of answering the many conceptual and empirical challenges for virtue epistemology that have been based on cases of testimony. The view also allows for a nuanced interaction with situationist psychology, dual processing models in cognitive science, and the extended mind literature in philosophy of mind. This framework provides a useful conceptual bridge between individual and group epistemology, and it has novel applications to the epistemology of disagreement, prejudice, and authority. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of dimensions in the reason model found in Horty : 1–33, 2011), Horty and Bench-Capon and Rigoni :133–160, 2015. doi: 10.1007/s10506-015-9166-x). The account is constructed with the purpose of rectifying problems with the approach to incorporating dimensions in Horty, namely, the problems arising from the collapse of the distinction between the reason model and the result model on that approach. Examination of the newly constructed theory revealed that the importance of dimensions in the reason model (...) lies in their ability to establish weighings between reasons/factors of the same polarity. This permits past cases to constrain future cases in ways they could not on the reason model with just factors. The paper then discusses how dimensions might be established from a case base and how dimensions that are incomplete in various aspects might be dealt with in the theory. It closes with comparisons to other work in the literature on AI and Law and suggestions for further improvement of the reason model. (shrink)

Precision testing of the quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the standard model provides some of the most secure knowledge in the history of physics. These tests can also be used to constrain and search for new physics going beyond the standard model. We examine the evidential structure of relationships between theoretical predictions from QED, precision measurements of these phenomena, and the indirect determination of the fine structure constant. We argue that "pure QED" is no longer sufficient to predict the electron's anomalous (...) magnetic moment, and that standard model effects are needed. The details relevant to low-energy QED are robust against future theory change. (shrink)

In this article I argue for rule-based, non-monotonic theories of common law judicial reasoning and improve upon one such theory offered by Horty and Bench-Capon. The improvements reveal some of the interconnections between formal theories of judicial reasoning and traditional issues within jurisprudence regarding the notions of the ratio decidendi and obiter dicta. Though I do not purport to resolve the long-standing jurisprudential issues here, it is beneficial for theorists both of legal philosophy and formalizing legal reasoning to see where (...) the two projects interact. (shrink)

In this paper I formulate Minimal Requirements for Candidate Predictions in quantum field theories, inspired by viewing the standard model as an effective field theory. I then survey standard effective field theory regularization procedures, to see if the vacuum expectation value of energy density ) is a quantity that meets these requirements. The verdict is negative, leading to the conclusion that \ is not a physically significant quantity in the standard model. Rigorous extensions of flat space quantum field theory eliminate (...) \ from their conceptual framework, indicating that it lacks physical significance in the framework of quantum field theory more broadly. This result has consequences for problems in cosmology and quantum gravity, as it suggests that the correct solution to the cosmological constant problem involves a revision of the vacuum concept within quantum field theory. (shrink)

INSTITUTES OF Moral Philosophy. INTRODUCTION. » SECTION I. Of Knoivledge in general. * AL L knowledge is either of particular facts, or of general rules. ...

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey presents a puzzle to which she argues there is no current solution. Lackey's claim is that testimonial knowledge can have something conspicuously wrong with it and still be knowledge. Testimonial knowledge can be ‘deficient’. Given that knowledge is a normative category, that it describes what it is for a belief to go right, there is a puzzle that comes with accounting for how a testimonial belief could be knowledge and yet go wrong in the ways Lackey has in (...) mind. In this paper, I argue that the deficiency is one of teamwork, and that Lackey's puzzle offers one a window into the respect in which testimony is a kind of team achievement. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a new approach to philosophy that incorporates the experimental methodologies of psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology. Experimental philosophers generally maintain that, in addition to traditional philosophical practices, these ways of gathering evidence can be instrumental in shedding light on philosophically important issues. Rather than relying on their own intuitions about specific cases, experimental philosophers perform systematic experiments to determine what intuitions people have about those cases. These intuitions are then used as evidence. In this context, four main (...) approaches to experimental philosophy are introduced, a sample of experimental philosophy’s results is offered, and some of the philosophical importance of those results is explained. (shrink)

In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Experiment 2 suggested that these actor-observer differences are not likely (...) to occur when participants are asked to ?imagine? being an actor. We argue that these results challenge the substantial philosophical and empirical reliance on hypothetical thought examples about intentional action. Our data offer new and necessary methodological avenues for understanding folk intentional action intuitions. (shrink)

Many people are attracted to the idea that plants experience phenomenal conscious states like pain, sensory awareness, or emotions like fear. If true, this would have wide-ranging moral implications for human behavior, including land development, farming, vegetarianism, and more. Determining whether plants have minds relies on the work of both empirical disciplines and philosophy. Epistemology should settle the standards for evidence of other minds, and science should inform our judgment about whether any plants meet those standards. We argue that evidence (...) for other minds comes either from testimony, behavior, anatomy/physiology, or phylogeny. However, none of these provide evidence that plants have conscious mental states. Therefore, we conclude that there is no evidence that plants have minds in the sense relevant for morality. (shrink)

We extend Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) arguments to the question of whether implicit evaluations reflect unconscious attitudes. We argue that correspondence to explicit evaluations fails to meet the criteria of relevance and sensitivity. When awareness is measured adequately and in line with N&S's criteria, there is compelling evidence that people are consciously aware of their implicit evaluations.

I provide an account of precision testing in particle physics that makes a virtue of theory-ladenness in experiments. Combining recent work on the philosophy of experimentation with a broader view of the scientific process allows one to understand that the most precise and secure knowledge produced in a mature science cannot be achieved in a theory-independent fashion. I discuss precision tests of the muon’s magnetic moment and effective field theory as a means to repurpose precision tests for exploratory purposes.

It is commonly claimed that fully virtuous individuals cannot be ignorant and that everyday intuitions support this fact. Others maintain that there are virtues of ignorance and most people recognize them. Both views cannot be correct. We report evidence from three experiments suggesting that ignorance does not rule out folk attributions of virtue. Additionally, results show that many of these judgments can be predicted by one’s emotional stability—a heritable personality trait. We argue that these results are philosophically important for the (...) study of virtue and we discuss some of the ways individual differences may inform and facilitate current debates in ethics. We close with a cautionary argument detailing the risks of discounting some intuitions simply because they are associated with seemingly less desirable personality traits. (shrink)

Appeals to “being on the right side of history” or accusations of being on the wrong side of history are increasingly common on social media, in the media proper, and in the rhetoric of politics. One might well wonder, though, what the value is of invoking history in this manner. Is declaring who is on what side of history merely dramatic shorthand for one's being right and one's opponents wrong? Or is there something more to it than that? In this (...) paper, I argue that an appeal to being on the right side of history is best construed as an invocation of higher-order evidence. I do not deny that there are purely rhetorical, non-evidential uses of the right and wrong side of history, but the phrase can be construed in a more substantive manner. I use work on virtual epistemic elections to model these appeals to history. Zeroing in on the kind of higher-order evidence invoked helps us clarify the criterion for better or worse, more or less convincing appeals to it. (shrink)

Five experiments suggested that everyday free will and moral responsibility judgments about some hypothetical thought examples differed from free will and moral responsibility judgments about the actual world. Experiment 1 (N = 106) showed that free will intuitions about the actual world measured by the FAD-Plus poorly predicted free will intuitions about a hypothetical person performing a determined action (r = .13). Experiments 2–5 replicated this result and found the relations between actual free will judgments and free will judgments about (...) hypothetical determined or fated actions (rs = .22–.35) were much smaller than the differences between them (ηp2 = .2–.55). These results put some pressure on theoretical accounts of everyday intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or (...) reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJames Woodward and John Allman [2007, 2008] and Peter Railton [2014, 2016] argue that our moral intuitions are products of sophisticated rational learning systems. I investigate the implications that this discovery has for intuition-based philosophical methodologies. Instead of vindicating the conservative use of intuitions in philosophy, I argue that what I call the rational learning strategy fails to show philosophers are justified in appealing to their moral intuitions in philosophical arguments without giving reasons why those intuitions are trustworthy. Despite the (...) fact that our intuitions are outputs of surprisingly sophisticated learning mechanisms, we do not have reason to unreflectively trust them when offering arguments in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Science and technology have been integral issues of development cooperation for more than sixty years. Contrary to early efforts’ transfer of established technologies from the West to developing countries, contemporary technology aspirations increasingly articulate and practice the Global South as a live laboratory for technological experimentation. This approach is especially furthered by a group of private foundations and philanthrocapitalists whose endeavors in developing countries are, like their companies, shaped by logics of the individual, the market, and of societal progress through (...) technological innovation and experimentation. This article draws upon critical intellectual thought about the political and social ramifications of technology to reflect on the renascent role of technology in development cooperation. It traces the discourses and practices of philanthrocapitalist organizations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand how their experimentalist technology aspirations influence human life and relations in the Global South. This article argues that this newfound focus on technology in development cooperation may challenge the essence of democracy, reduce participation, and have undesirable consequences for populations in the Global South. (shrink)

Since their discovery, mirror neurons have played a critical role in the interdisciplinary debate over how we come to understand other people, a topic often labelled 'mind-reading'. The philosopher Alvin Goldman argues that mirror neurons provide critical evidence that we come to understand others by simulating them. In this paper, I demonstrate that mirror neurons should be thought of as facilitating the perception of persons but should not be thought of as simulators. Our basic understanding of others does not come (...) from thinking our way into their shoes but rather through seeing into their minds through their pattern behaviour. (shrink)

Abstract:The epistemic approach to liberalism not only clarifies some of the core features of progress-based arguments for liberty. For two reasons it provides grounds for doubting those arguments’ persuasiveness. The first reason emerges from the epistemic liberal explanation of economic recessions and of social regress as necessary consequences of our enjoying the individual liberty to adapt to our circumstances. Precisely because it secures personal choice with respect to the ends of life and the means to pursue them, liberty must be (...) construed as at best necessary for the imperfect and costly realization of the interest individuals may have in personal advancement. Second, and in revealing the underlying logic of the economic and cultural processes that liberty makes possible, epistemic liberalism shows that it is to the notion of complex adaptation that we must look when seeking to evaluate the overall or aggregate results of liberty. Crucially, however, this means rejecting the notion of progress as fit to perform this ethico-historical evaluative role. (shrink)

Models of purgatory tend to come paired with an operative conception of what perfection consists in. In the recent philosophical literature, two models, the satisfaction model and the sanctification model, have been pitted against one another. The former focuses on innocence before the law and makes purgatory out to be a place where a debt of punishment is paid. The latter focuses on moral character and describes purgatory in terms of character formation. If perfection consists in a certain way of (...) being related to God, however, then there is a third model that merits our attention that focuses on relational dynamics. (shrink)

How should the State respond to the different identity-based justice claims made by its citizens? To what extent should majority societies accede to the claims of immigrant groups whose values are so different to, and sometimes in conflict with, their own? Drawing on the work of economist and political theorist Friederich Hayek, the author builds a major critique of contemporary responses to cultural diversity and their underlying principles of justice. Critically examining multicultural, nationalist and liberal egalitarian approaches, the author claims (...) that in their differing ways these schools of thought fail to recognise the proper task of cultural justice. Tebble claims one of the principal tasks of justice is to go beyond the provision of institutions that assume a particular conception of the good, or of an idealised vision of relations between different communities and the values they endorse. Instead, the book emphasises the need for strictly neutral institutions, founded upon the commitment to individual freedom and equality, that permit the discovery of what cultural justice requires. Epistemological Liberalism seeks to defend an 'epistemological' account of liberalism that emphasises social complexity rather than cultural diversity or homogeneity and which, it is claimed, is the most appropriate response to the challenge facing modern, culturally diverse societies. An invaluable contribution to contemporary debates about justice, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of culture and identity, contemporary political theory/philosophy and liberal political theory. (shrink)

One of the most hotly contested debates in Kierkegaard studies concerns his sense of the relationship between faith and reason. Often caricatured as a proponent of irrational fideism, scholarship in recent decades has tried to present a more nuanced account of Kierkegaard’s position. Two likely interpretive options have emerged: supra‐rationalism and anti‐rationalism. On the former view, Kierkegaard believes that while the achievement of faith is beyond the capabilities of reason, there are still ways that reason can aid the maintenance of (...) faith once reason’s limits are recognized. On the latter view, faith is a constant struggle against rationalizing justification, and thus, any attempt to use reason to assist in the maintenance of faith is a mistake. Interestingly, a comparison with Pascal can help one arbitrate between these two responses to the dubious irrationalist reading of Kierkegaard. (shrink)

Surrogates’ decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatments (LSTs) are pervasive. However, the factors influencing surrogates’ decisions to initiate LSTs are relatively unknown. We present evidence from two experiments indicating that some surrogates’ decisions about when to initiate LSTs can be predictably manipulated. Factors that influence surrogate decisions about LSTs include the patient’s cognitive state, the patient’s age, the percentage of doctors not recommending the initiation of LSTs, the percentage of patients in similar situations not wanting LSTs, and default treatment (...) settings. These results suggest that some people may use heuristics when making these important life-and-death decisions. These findings may have important moral implications for improving surrogate decisions about LSTs and reconsidering paternalism. (shrink)

In ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’, Shelly Kagan sketches an account on which both actually being a person and possibly being a person are relevant to one's moral status, labelling this view ‘modal personism’ and supporting its conclusions with appeals to intuitions about a range of marginal cases. I tender a pessimistic response to Kagan's concern about motivating modal personism: that is, of being able to ‘go beyond the mere appeal to brute intuition, eventually offering an account of why modal personhood (...) should matter in the ways we may intuitively think that it does.’. (shrink)

Consider any choice that affects some social policy. A decision that considers evidence will, at its heart, contain some kind of explicit or implicit “because” statement: “We are doing X because the evidence says Y.” But can evidence ever truly speak for itself, in the sense of being reducible to objective utterances that are either correct or in need of correction? Before answering, consider what you'd prefer. Would you rather receive evidence that was free of any value judgments imposed by (...) human actors, that was laden with value judgments that you agree with, or laden with value judgments that you disagree with? The central assertion of this essay is that, throughout policy analysis but especially in assessments of the costs and benefits of regulating versus encouraging new technologies (cost‐benefit analysis, or CBA), the first possibility above is a mirage, and the second and third are self‐contradictory. Instead, we are overwhelmingly confronted with a fourth possibility: we receive evidence that appears to be (or is deliberately touted as) value neutral but is suffused with hidden value judgments.In the second part of this essay, entitled “A Guided Tour through Inevitable Value Judgments,” I identify in a systematic way approximately sixty‐five value judgments that are routinely (in some cases, invariably) made in CBA, but that are kept hidden. For each judgment, I discuss its genesis as it is most commonly invoked in CBA, explain how it is hidden in plain sight, and offer one or more value judgments that could be made instead of or in addition to the conventional one. The alternative judgments highlight the width of the spectrum of reasonable conclusions an analyst could reach merely by substituting other judgments for the ones currently embedded.Bringing hidden value judgments to light is doubly valuable. First, it allows discussion to ensue on a level playing field; instead of conclusory statements about what the evidence says, transparency permits statements taking the form of “when channeled through these value judgments, the evidence says this.” Perhaps more importantly, transparency about value judgments permits participants in the discussions to offer interpretations of evidence contingent on there being different value judgments chosen at one or more points in the analysis, interpretations that may suggest that alternative course(s) of action are preferable to the one being championed. (shrink)