A financial crisis of 2008 showed a global meaning of ethical dimension of the credit institution because lack of financial subjects’ responsibility is regarded as one of the causes of the world breakdown. The author attempts to reconstruct the role of credit in the society and economy, especially an evolution of its ethical aspects is analysed. It is aimed to catch and understand the phenomenon of responsibility for the effects of this institution activity which proved dramatic more and more often (...) both for individuals and for the whole society. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discern the crux of SME sector social responsibility in developing countries. An attempt is made to identify, empirically, the ethical standards subscribed to by small firms in Poland and to compare them with the standards of small firms in the UK. The methodology of empirical analysis of the ethical standards of Polish entrepreneurs running small businesses was modelled on Laura Spence’s research on the priorities, practices and ethics of small firms in the UK. (...) This analysis has revealed certain similarities and significant differences in the way CSR is perceived by Polish and British entrepreneurs. British entrepreneurs manifest a higher degree of awareness with regard to the issue of social responsibility and are more strongly motivated by their external environment to take up social responsibility issues than Polish ones. (shrink)

The paper examines the moral choices of consumers from the perspective of virtue ethics. The paper starts with an outline of consumption ethics in the context of a critique of consumerism assuming a lack of consumer autonomy. I dispute the latter assumption, which leads me to consider the consumer as a moral agent and focus on the role that specific dispositions of character can play in consumer choices. The question of subjective or situational conditioning of consumer choices is answered by (...) acknowledging the basic freedom of decision, albeit limited, concerning not individual acts but the possibility of choosing the style of consumption. The next step is an attempt to build a model of consumer excellence. It is constituted by the virtues of prudence, activity, and environmental responsibility. In the last part of the paper, the structure of these virtues is analyzed and their in-depth interpretation offered. (shrink)

Self-regulation initiatives are undertaken by many lobbing circles in various countries. The key element of those initiatives are codes of ethics including a postulated model of lobbying activities, a specific pattern of ethical standards of lobbying. The aim of the article is a reconstruction of this pattern on the basis of the analysis of eight codes representing American, Polish, British, European and German lobbying. The analysis leads to the following conclusions. An axiological base of the lobbyist profession is created by (...) such values as honesty, reliability, integrity, trust, professionalism, civil responsibility, openness, transparency, loyalty, respect, courtesy. Norms included in the codes are concentrated on the following issues: legality, transparency of actions, care of reputation and dignity of profession, avoiding corruption, conflict o f interest, customer relationship, duties toward society, public relations. A weak element of lobbying self-regulation is a system of norm execution. (shrink)

The idea of Corporate Social Responsibility is a priority for the European economy because CSR is promoted by the European Commission as an instrument of European strategy for sustainable development. The paper presents the basic assumptions of this strategy. Although the debate on the European shape of CSR was initiated almost ten years ago some important questions are still under discussion. The paper considers some of them.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ethical side of whistleblowing and to identify the main dilemmas generated by its practice. In the first part, the social dimension of whistleblowing has been outlined, and the defining features of reporting misconduct internally have been identified through contrasting them with those of external whistleblowing. This is followed by an attempt at an ethical evaluation of whistleblowing. The second part of this paper has been devoted to the analysis of two important (...) questions raised by the consideration of whistleblowing as a managerial instrument. Should whistleblowing be rewarded financially? Is whistleblowing not only an employee’s right, but also duty? (shrink)

Our claim in this paper is that not being identified as the data source might cause harm to a person or group. Therefore, in some cases the default of anonymisation should be replaced by a careful deliberation, together with research subjects, of how to handle the issues of identification and confidentiality. Our prime example in this article is community participatory research and similar endeavours on indigenous groups. The theme, content and aim of the research, and the question of how to (...) handle property rights and ownership of research results, as well as who should be in charge of the research process, including the process of creating anonymity, should all be answered, before anonymity is accepted. (shrink)

A reductive theory of collective intentionality would imply that the ‘official’ intentions of an oppressive political authority cannot be constructed from the intentions of individuals when they follow the authority's rules. This makes it difficult to explain the unraveling of official group plans through time in a seemingly consistent fashion, and the corresponding source of coercion. A non-reductive theory, on the other hand, cannot capture whether the actions of individuals in an oppressive society are free or coerced, so long as (...) a manifest institutional structure and rules are in place. I put forward a hybrid account of group intentionality that is capable of articulating why oppressive political power is illegitimate, which comes down to the official and individual intentions in joint group actions diverging in such a way that individuals are not governed on the basis of dependent reasons. (shrink)

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER OF HIS BOOK Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, Robert Pasnau takes a position in a longstanding debate concerning the metaphysical status and the epistemological role of sensible forms in Aquinas’s theory of cognition. His main claim is that Aquinas was a materialist about sensation and developed “a theory of the sort that a modern materialist could love.”.

How do people respond to others' accidental behaviors? Reward and punishment for accidents might be depend on the actor's intentions, or instead on the unintended outcomes she brings about. Yet, existing paradigms in experimental economics do not include the possibility of accidental monetary allocations. We explore the balance of outcomes and intentions in a two-player economic game where monetary allocations are made with a "trembling hand": that is, intentions and outcomes are sometimes mismatched. Player 1 allocates $10 between herself and (...) Player 2 by rolling one of three dice. One die has a high probability of a selfish outcome, another has a high probability of a fair outcome, and the third has a high probability of a generous outcome. Based on Player 1's choice of die, Player 2 can infer her intentions. However, any of the three die can yield any of the three possible outcomes. Player 2 is given the opportunity to respond to Player 1's allocation by adding to or subtracting from Player 1's payoff. We find that Player 2's responses are influenced substantially by the accidental outcome of Player 1's roll of the die. Comparison to control conditions suggests that in contexts where the allocation is at least partially under the control of Player 1, Player 2 will punish Player 1 accountable for unintentional negative outcomes. In addition, Player 2's responses are influenced by Player 1's intention. However, Player 2 tends to modulate his responses substantially more for selfish intentions than for generous intentions. This novel economic game provides new insight into the psychological mechanisms underlying social preferences for fairness and retribution. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a critical map of toleration as it is displayed in contemporary democracy. It does so by presenting three conceptions of toleration to which current practices of toleration can be traced, and, precisely, these are the standard notion, the political conception based on the neutrality principle, and toleration as recognition. The author argues that the latter is the appropriate conception to address the politically relevant issues of toleration arising in pluralistic democracy, while the first is adequate (...) only for social relations. In order to illustrate this argument, she presents a case of a contested and never solved request for a place of worship by the Muslims of Vercelli which represents an example of a very restricted and minimal interpretation of the standard notion, labeled ‘disrespectful tolerance’. The case is meant to show that unacceptable forms of toleration are still practised, and that the standard notion, here interpreted in the most minimal and negative way, is inappropriate for democratic politics. (shrink)

Although the moral foundations of voting rights regulations have been the subject of widespread scrutiny, there is one aspect of the debate which has gone largely unquestioned and is currently accepted in every state’s actual voting rights regulations. This is the requirement of prior residence, which stipulates that immigrants are granted the right to vote only once they have lived in the host country for a certain period of time. It is this requirement I call into question in this paper. (...) Taking up the most plausible justifications for this requirement, I aim to put substantial pressure on its moral acceptability by arguing that it is not directly grounded by any of the principles that are currently defended as a means to determine the demos, nor a proxy for some other morally relevant feature, nor a warrantor for abilities held to be significant for the right to vote. (shrink)

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the “mainstreaming” of intersectionality in (white-dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now-famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how—by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of “race” and “sex” tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness—antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying (...) Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of “intersectionality” that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio-legal reproduction of hierarchical power. (shrink)

Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings - noticing things that matter, ignoring those that don't - is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us. This is the first book in years to explore just how our attention can be influenced by time, and how our own perception of time can be influenced by what we attend to.

What is the nature of the underlying representations and mechanisms which allow very young children to acquire the words and structures of their native language? Our research looks especially at children between the ages of 3-5 when language acquisition still proceeds rapidly and uses multiple methodologies, including act-out tasks, truth value judgment tasks, and elicited imitation and production tasks.

In this "New Era of Responsibility," Bernasek's message is both essential and urgent. The Economics of Integrity is a book for our times.

The concepts of disease, illness and sickness capture fundamentally different aspects of phenomena related to human ailments and healthcare. The philosophy and theory of medicine are making manifold efforts to capture the essence and normative implications of these concepts. In parallel, socio-empirical studies on patients’ understanding of their situation have yielded a comprehensive body of knowledge regarding subjective perspectives on health-related statuses. Although both scientific fields provide varied valuable insights, they have not been strongly linked to each other. Therefore, the (...) article aims to scrutinise the normative-ethical implications of patient perspectives in building a bridge to the empirical ethics debates. Three potential fields of tension between the illness and the disease perspective are presented. Consequently, findings from empirical research examining patient perspectives on illness are displayed and the practical implications and associated ethical issues which arise are discussed. This leads to the conclusion that an explicit and elaborate empirical-ethical methodology is needed to deal appropriately with the complex interaction between patients’ views and the medico-professional view of disease. Kon’s four-stage model of normative-empirical collaboration is then applied against the background of empirical data on patient perceptions. Starting from this exemplary approach, the article suggests employing empirical-ethical frameworks for further research on the conceptual and normative issues, as they help to integrate perspectives from the philosophy of medicine with socio-empirical research. The combination of theoretical and empirical perspectives suggested contributes to a more nuanced discussion of the normative impact of patients’ actual understanding of illness. Further empirical research in this area would profit from explicitly considering potential ethical issues to avoid naturalistic fallacies or crypto-normative conclusions that may compromise healthcare practice. Vice versa, medico-theoretical debates could be enriched by integrating subjective views of those people who are immediately affected. (shrink)

This book offers original essays by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation.