This paper reviews studies of corporate ethical codes published since 2000 and concludes that codes be can effective instruments for shaping ethical behavior and guiding employee decision-making. Culture and effective communication are key components to a code’s success. If codes are embedded in the culture and embraced by the leaders, they are likely to be successful. Communicating the code’s precepts in an effective way is crucial to its success. Discussion between employees and management is a key component of successful ethical (...) codes. (shrink)

What are the implications of living in a gender system that recognizes “two and only two” genders? For those individuals whose “gender displays” are inappropriate, there can be a variety of consequences, many of them negative. In this article, the author provides an analysis of her experiences as a woman whose appearance often leads to gender misattribution. She discusses the consequences of the gender system for her identity and her interactions. The author also examines Lorber's assertion that “gender bending” actually (...) serves to perpetuate gender categories rather than to break them down, and she suggests how her experiences might contradict Lorber's argument. Using her biography to examine the social construction of gender, she both illustrates and extends theoretical work in this area. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of giving a correct analysis of function statements as they are used in biology. Examples of such statements are (1) The function of the myelin sheath is to insulate the nerve fiber and (2) The function of chlorophyll is to enable photosynthesis to take place. After criticizing analyses of such statements developed by Braithwaite, Nagel and Hempel an analysis is presented by the author. Finally the question of whether function statements are explanations is (...) discussed briefly. (shrink)

The question whether, in the interim, the "socialist morality" allows adequate restraint on revolutionary action, cannot fairly be answered in abstraction from history, in this case our epoch. We submit that the group of projects called corporate "globalization" - imposing free trade, privatization, and dominance of transnational corporations - shapes that epoch. These projects are associated with polarization of wealth, deepening poverty, and an alarming new global U.S. military domination. Using 9/11 as pretext for a "war on terror," this domination (...) backs corporate globalization. If Nazi occupation of France and French occupation of Algeria made Sartre and Beauvoir assign moral primacy to overcoming oppressive systems, then U.S. global occupation should occasion rebirth of that commitment. Parallels among the three occupations are striking. France's turning of colonial and metropolitan working classes against each other is echoed by globalization's pitting of (e.g.) Chinese against Mexican workers in a race to lower wages to get investment. Seducing first-world workers with racial superiority and cheap imports from near-slavery producers once again conceals their thralldom to their own bosses. Nazi and French use of overwhelming force and even torture are re-cycled by the U.S. and its agents, again to hide the vulnerability of their small forces amidst their enemies. (shrink)

The dramatic increase in the number of corporate ethical codes over the past 20 years has been attributed to the Watergate scandal and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ethical codes differ somewhat from profesional codes and mission statements; yet the terms are frequently interchanged and often confused in the literature. Ethical code studies are reviewed in terms of how codes are communicated to employees and whether implications for violating codes are discussed. Most studies use content analysis to determine subjects in (...) codes. Little information is available about how codes are communicated, whether they are accepted and used by employees, and whether they affect employee/corporate behavior. More research on ethical codes is needed to answer some of these questions. (shrink)

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals.In what follows, I examine a notion of desire that, I shall claim, is implicit in Immanuel Kant's theorization of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment.1 At first, this undertaking is likely to seem misguided. After all, Kant grounds his attempt to provide an a priori (...) foundation for judgment on the tripartite distinction between the faculty of cognition, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and the faculty of desire. Only the second of the three pertains to aesthetic judgment; and it... (shrink)

Not much has been written about how the ethics of U.S. business executives are perceived by the American public, yet the perception of integrity is important to both businesses and their investors. This study examines the U.S. public’s perceptions of the ethics of American business executives using Gallup Poll data for the past thirty years. Organizations with unethical executives have trouble attracting investors, customers, and new managerial talent. They suffer lawsuits, market share deterioration, and often prison time for the once-revered (...) leaders. This study also looked at the U.S.’s relative standing on the Corruption Perceptions Index and the Edelman Trust Barometer. Confidence in the ethics of the U.S. business executive remains fairly low on the Gallup Poll surveys and the U.S. has declined on the CPI and Edelman Trust Barometer. (shrink)

Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name “Garbo” and officially registered the change from Greta Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4 December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo, “wood nymph,” suggests the association with otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the Spanish meaning of the word, “animal grace sublimated,” combines the animal passion (...) and spiritual grace that were part of her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo’s life and work the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king. The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo’s initial act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes his own signature.What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks the evidence. In her article “Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars,” Louise Brooks suggests that the popular image of Garbo—the “dumb Swede” transformed by Stiller’s art—was perpetuated by Hollywood executives eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent . “The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director, watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul upon the screen.” Although recent accounts of Garbo’s life and work have advanced beyond the “dumb Swede” publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar, almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative power. “Her contribution,” states Kenneth Tynan, “is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs” . Comparing Garbo to a “watermark in a blank sheet of paper,” David Thomson says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: “She must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it out.” In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the impress of male voyeuristic fantasy. Betsy Erkkila, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet, and a collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Alongside recent world-historical dates such as 11 September 2001, we would place 15 February 2003. On that day, around 10 million people—some estimates are much higher—demonstrated on the streets of the world's cities in opposition to the US war on Iraq, then being merely threatened. Sartre's study of the elements of history in Critique of Dialectical Reason and its unpublished ethical sequel, Morality and History, illuminate, and are illuminated by, the movements that contest today's global system. From the Critique, we'll (...) engage his notions of negative universality as threat of death and the "fusing" of "series" into "groups" as response. From Morality and History, we'll take "integral humanity" as a goal and standard; it seems to us built into the global act of February 15 and into the wider movement of which that day was a moment. After comparing a Sartrean take on February 15 with the famous Habermas-Derrida appeal inspired by that day, we'll close with some reciprocal illuminations between Sartre's theories and Zapatista practice. (shrink)

Read in isolation, H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture is seen to render a settled verdict against the sectarian anticultural type and in favour of the transformative type. But this ignores the interrelated dialectics of movement and institution, withdrawal and identification, accommodation and transformation characteristic of his critical project. It further occludes Niebuhr's variegated treatment and deployment of `the monastic' within his larger corpus, and especially in the lesser-known texts such as The Church Against the World. This essay reconsiders Christ (...) and Culture within this broader critical and textual context. It revisits the question posed in `Back to Benedict?': `It is worthwhile raising the question, therefore, whether Protestantism can and ought to continue to reject the monastic ideal out of hand'. It retrieves the full valence of hermetic, cenobitic, and mendicant forms of asceticism conflated by Niebuhr's equivocal designation of `monasticism'. In so doing, it argues for a mendicant cultural ethic which can account for the full dialectical range of Niebuhr's sectarian and transformative types within the sectarian type itself. (shrink)

Many of our children are poorly prepared to face the challenges of school and growing up in our complex society. The term readiness is misrepresented in the field of education; this book implies a different type of readiness involving a process that can be taught and nurtured within each child. Going beyond what our schools typically assess to determine readiness to attend school, which is often based upon age, this book addresses the synergistic aspects of readiness, learning, and adaptation that (...) allow children to be optimally ready to learning and capable of handing for challenges and transitions. This more holistic and interactive understanding of readiness involves not only the typical physical development, but also psychological aspects including the cognitive, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, and environmental pieces. The goal of this book is to provide the necessary lens through which we can see what is really hindering many children in schools today, along with possible approaches and interventions typically not seen as educational in nature, but what may be just the needed prescription for our ailing youth. (shrink)

This article uses the interpretive work of Dreyfus, Gadamer, Nussbaum and Taylor to explore the natural environment as a shared ecological and social commonality. I focus on the supposition that the natural world possesses intrinsic value and new political structures are needed. I explore how we might better engage with multiple cultures concerning matters at the heart of ecological politics. Political interpretivists offer processes of equal facilitation and maximization that work to include environmental values in democratic thought. Interpretivists differ from (...) earth-based and neo-conservative environmentalists, who dominate modern debates. The differences involve understanding the role of practical reasoning and how humanity interacts with the natural world. Intriguingly, then, interpretivists concur with Deep Ecologists that nature possesses intrinsic value, but do so guided by an ideal of authenticity. (shrink)

This essay argues that the best starting point for discussions of the Principle of Discrimination (PD) is its most basic formulation: In wartime, certain enemy subjects should receive better treatment than others. Other formulations of the PD ? in particular, those centered on the concept of noncombatant immunity ? have sought to identify a single criterion that can be used as the basis for sorting enemy subjects into two (and only two) classes. However, a historical and legal analysis of the (...) principle indicates that three distinct criteria ? the conduct of individuals, their status, and their guilt or innocence ? have all been seen as relevant for determining the appropriate treatment of the enemy. In this essay, I formulate an expanded version of the PD, which calls for the proportionate treatment of enemy subjects based on evaluations of all three of these criteria. (shrink)

This study examines the responses of human resource directors and hospitality students to seven different ethical scenarios. Both groups were asked to rate these situations on their ethicality using a Likert-type scale. The directors and students decided that an act of theft was the most unethical, followed by sexual harassment, and an attempt to obtain proprietary information from another company. Expressing racial preferences in terms of servers was fourth. Directors rated all the scenarios ethically lower than did students, indicating that (...) experience and heightened sensitivity to possible litigious situations may have played a role in perceptual differences. (shrink)

Futile treatment. Do not resuscitate. These terms and the thoughts they evoke may be unfamiliar to families with ill children. Similarly, laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, are probably unfamiliar. Yet these terms and laws, and, more important, their implications, are part of a new world of health care into which more families are thrust—the world of wrenching and complicated decisions.Although the number of these situations is increasing and even (...) predictable, the infrastructure of support services for families dealing with these medical decisions for seriously ill children has not been adequately addressed or developed. Parents know that some children are born with or develop serious illnesses and die. Amid absorbing large amounts of new information and interpreting the parameters and implications of what they are learning about their child's condition, families are forced by circumstances to assess—and to act on—their most critical, and perhaps previously unexamined, values. (shrink)

The paper examines connections between ontology and finance. The ontological debates concerning the role of finance are examined between two opposing schools of thought that can be labelled, very broadly, ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘realist’. These two schools of thought have had momentous repercussions in understanding what is a good society. Each school defines Nature in particular ways which can be explored using ontology and philosophical insight. Our theoretical investigation aims to accommodate Nature in community financial deliberations. A positive role for government (...) is advocated to finance environmental infrastructure initiatives. For example, precautionary strategies to address climate change must be funded. New roles for finance and government are proposed to align human relationships with Nature. Environmental precautionary principles must be developed in conjunction with finance theory to maintain decent standards of living for all. Reliance on impersonal market forces will not be enough to save the planet given the power of some over the many in the neoliberal arena. (shrink)

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for the University of Idaho Press Explores contemporary social criticism of agriculture by analyzing assumptions regarding matters such as animal welfare, biotechnology, ethics and human nature. Dr. Lehman carefully investigates the various meanings and criteria of "rational" without presupposing prior knowledge of philosophy, making the material accessible to students, agriculture scientists, and members of the public concerned with agriculture.

Much existing economic theory overlooks ethics. Rather than situating the market and values at separate extremes of a continuum, Ethics and the Market contends that the two are necessarily and intimately related. This volume brings together some of the best work in the social economics tradition, with contributions on the social economy, social capital, identity, ethnicity and development, the household, externalities, international finance, capability, and pedagogy. Proceeding from an examination of the moral implications of markets, the book goes on to (...) explore such themes as the institutional arrangements of social economies, individual and household decision-making, and economic development in a global context. Ethics and the Market illuminates the diverse and dynamic theoretical approaches that are employed in social economics, reflecting on their continuously evolving relationship with neoclassical economics. This book will prove vital reading for students and academics in the fields of Economics, Sociology, Gender Studies, and Public Policy. (shrink)

There is a well-known, superficially plausible argument which says that a game is defined by its rules, so that cheaters in that game can't possibly be winners, or even legitimate participants. The article critically examines this argument and provides counterexamples to its underlying assumptions. -/- ================= This article originally appeared in Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, VIII, 1981, pp. 41-46. It has since been reprinted in Morgan, William and Meier, Klaus, eds, Philosophic Inquiry in Sport, and Vanderwerken, David and (...) Wertz, Spencer, Sport Inside Out. 40 years later, I don't have an uploadable copy, but I don't understand why, if you have a new anthology that includes it, you can't simply generate an archive copy from it or one of the prior publications. Or, just cite the sources where it appears. (shrink)

Today dominative power operates apart from, and exterior to, those state governmentalities that the "body politics" of Stanley Hauerwas disavows as "constantinian" entanglements such as military service, governmental office, and conspicuous expressions of civil religion. This is especially true with respect to those biopolitical modalities David Theo Goldberg names as "racelessness," by which material inequalities are racially correlated, thereby allowing whiteness to mediate life and ration death. If, as Hauerwas contends, radical ecclesiology is indeed a theopolitical alternative to the nation–state's (...) politics of violence, then it must prove itself resistant to such racialized violence. However, inasmuch as the (largely) uncontested fact of ecclesial segregation recapitulates these broader stratifications and exclusions, the church functions as a passive civil religion and itself participates in the politics of "nonviolent violence." Thus, Hauerwas must do something that he has been reluctant to do. He must talk about race and racism more directly, specifying how his ecclesiological theopolitics resists such forms of violence; more importantly, he must demonstrate how actual ecclesial congregations instantiate such resistance. In short, to be truly nonviolent, Hauerwas's body politics must become a politics of bodies. (shrink)