The central question in Westra's search for an ethic of accounting concerns to whom the accountant owes loyal agency: to the client or to the public interest. The authors argue that the accountant's master has already been defined as the public interest. An ethic of accounting is identified through analysis of the accountant's master and through examination of the accountant's ethical obligations under the Code of Professional Conduct. Potential conflicts between professional and organizational loyalties are analyzed with respect to the (...) real-life problem used by Westra to support her argument. Finally, the implications of government employment of auditors are discussed. (shrink)

Integrity is a critical determinant of the effectiveness of research organizations in terms of producing high quality research and educating the new generation of scientists. A number of responsible conduct of research (RCR) training programs have been developed to address this growing organizational concern. However, in spite of a significant body of research in ethics training, it is still unknown which approach has the highest potential to enhance researchers’ integrity. One of the approaches showing some promise in improving researchers’ integrity (...) has focused on the development of ethical decision-making skills. The current effort proposes a novel curriculum that focuses on broad metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day social and professional practices that have ethical implications for the physical sciences and engineering. This sensemaking training has been implemented in a professional sample of scientists conducting research in electrical engineering, atmospheric and computer sciences at a large multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary, and multi-university research center. A pre-post design was used to assess training effectiveness using scenario-based ethical decision-making measures. The training resulted in enhanced ethical decision-making of researchers in relation to four ethical conduct areas, namely data management, study conduct, professional practices, and business practices. In addition, sensemaking training led to researchers’ preference for decisions involving the application of the broad metacognitive reasoning strategies. Individual trainee and training characteristics were used to explain the study findings. Broad implications of the findings for ethics training development, implementation, and evaluation in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

The education of students and professionals in business ethics is an increasingly important goal on the agenda of business schools and corporations. The present study provides a meta-analysis of 25 previously conducted business ethics instructional programs. The role of criteria, study design, participant characteristics, quality of instruction, instructional content, instructional program characteristics, and characteristics of instructional methods as moderators of the effectiveness of business ethics instruction were examined. Overall, results indicate that business ethics instructional programs have a minimal␣impact on increasing (...) outcomes related to ethical perceptions, behavior, or awareness. However, specific criteria, content, and methodological moderators of effectiveness shed light on potential recommendations for␣improving business ethics instruction. Implications for␣future research and practice in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, (...) and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. (shrink)

Differences across fields and experience levels are frequently considered in discussions of ethical decision making and ethical behavior. In the present study, doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences completed measures of ethical decision making. The effects of field and level of experience with respect to ethical decision making, metacognitive reasoning strategies, social-behavioral responses, and exposure to unethical events were examined. Social and biological scientists performed better than health scientists with respect to ethical decision making. Furthermore, the ethical (...) decision making of health science students decreased as experience increased. Moreover, these effects appeared to be linked to the specific strategies underlying participants' ethical decision making. The implications of these findings for ethical decision making are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to put into context the historical, foundational and philosophical significance of category theory. We use our historical investigation to inform the various category-theoretic foundational debates and to point to some common elements found among those who advocate adopting a foundational stance. We then use these elements to argue for the philosophical position that category theory provides a framework for an algebraic in re interpretation of mathematical structuralism. In each context, what we aim to show (...) is that, whatever the significance of category theory, it need not rely upon any set-theoretic underpinning. (shrink)

Just Business provides the first comprehensive, reasoned framework for resolving questions of business ethics and corporate governance. Innovative, accessible, and global in scope, its powerful Ethical Decision Model can be used to manage the ethical problems of business as they arise in all their complexity and variety. Just Business combines business realism with philosophical rigor, and demonstrates that it is not necessary to emasculate or to adulterate business for business to be ethical. The book benefits from Elaine Sternberg's extensive (...) experience as an academic philosopher, an international investment banker, and head of successful businesses. She is now Principal of a London-headquartered consultancy firm, and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. (shrink)

This article examines the transference of the European Union's equal opportunity directives to the new post-socialist accessor states, most especially to Bulgaria and Romania. Drawing upon 13 interviews in Bulgaria and 12 in Romania with local institutional stakeholders — e.g. trade union deputies, ministry officials — the article shows how politico-ideological differences have bred very different gender sensibilities across Europe, East and West. It further reveals how these disparities have been downplayed, if not wholly ignored in the EU's extension eastward. (...) The study concludes that continued disregard of the historical and cultural specificities of power relations between men and women in the formerly socialist, new EU member states threatens the efficacy of the EU's `gender equality agenda' and more generally, the integrity of the EU as a self-purported democratic body. (shrink)

This is the first volume on category theory for a broad philosophical readership. It is designed to show the interest and significance of category theory for a range of philosophical interests: mathematics, proof theory, computation, cognition, scientific modelling, physics, ontology, the structure of the world.

(1998). The search for universality: A book review by Elaine Englehardt. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 62-64. doi: 10.1207/s15327728jmme1301_7.

Recent semantic approaches to scientific structuralism, aiming to make precise the concept of shared structure between models, formally frame a model as a type of set-structure. This framework is then used to provide a semantic account of (a) the structure of a scientific theory, (b) the applicability of a mathematical theory to a physical theory, and (c) the structural realist’s appeal to the structural continuity between successive physical theories. In this paper, I challenge the idea that, to be so used, (...) the concept of a model and so the concept of shared structure between models must be formally framed within a single unified framework, set-theoretic or other. I first investigate the Bourbaki-inspired assumption that structures are types of set-structured systems and next consider the extent to which this problematic assumption underpins both Suppes’ and recent semantic views of the structure of a scientific theory. I then use this investigation to show that, when it comes to using the concept of shared structure, there is no need to agree with French that “without a formal framework for explicating this concept of ‘structure-similarity’ it remains vague, just as Giere’s concept of similarity between models does ...” (French, 2000, Synthese, 125, pp. 103–120, p. 114). Neither concept is vague; either can be made precise by appealing to the concept of a morphism, but it is the context (and not any set-theoretic type) that determines the appropriate kind of morphism. I make use of French’s (1999, From physics to philosophy (pp. 187–207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) own example from the development of quantum theory to show that, for both Weyl and Wigner’s programmes, it was the context of considering the ‘relevant symmetries’ that determined that the appropriate kind of morphism was the one that preserved the shared Lie-group structure of both the theoretical and phenomenological models. (shrink)

Much has been said about intuitionistic and classical logical systems since Gentzen’s seminal work. Recently, Prawitz and others have been discussing how to put together Gentzen’s systems for classical and intuitionistic logic in a single unified system. We call Prawitz’ proposal the Ecumenical System, following the terminology introduced by Pereira and Rodriguez. In this work we present an Ecumenical sequent calculus, as opposed to the original natural deduction version, and state some proof theoretical properties of the system. We reason that (...) sequent calculi are more amenable to extensive investigation using the tools of proof theory, such as cut-elimination and rule invertibility, hence allowing a full analysis of the notion of Ecumenical entailment. We then present some extensions of the Ecumenical sequent system and show that interesting systems arise when restricting such calculi to specific fragments. This approach of a unified system enabling both classical and intuitionistic features sheds some light not only on the logics themselves, but also on their semantical interpretations as well as on the proof theoretical properties that can arise from combining logical systems. (shrink)

In this re-reading of The Second Sex, the author argues that Beauvoir transgressively employs Sartre’s universal binary categories of Being and Nothingnessin her effort to account for the economic, political, cultural and psychological conditions of women’s situation. In doing so, she challenges Sartre’s theory of radical ontological freedom and concretizes his abstract philosophic voice, thereby avoiding their rationalist and voluntarist implications. Contesting Beauvoir’s feminist critics, who saw her as emotionally and philosophically dependent on Sartre and her work as an amalgam (...) of Sartrean existentialism and feminist insights, the author maintains that Beauvoir had her own independent project – to transform Sartrean existentialism to make it contextually sensitive. Distancing herself from Sartre’s theory of freedom and its valorization of masculine experience and disembodied consciousnesses, Beauvoir’s theory of situational freedom and embodied subjectivity draws her closer to the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Elaine Kuzmeskus retraces historical sâeance sessions and retells firsthand accounts of spirits reaching from beyond the veil so that we, the living, can better understand what happens in these encounters and why.

Mentioning products or brands on Facebook enables individuals to display an ideal self to others through a form of virtual conspicuous consumption. Drawing on conspicuous donation behaviour literature, we investigate ‘conspicuous virtue signalling’, as conspicuous consumption on Facebook. CVS occurs when an individual mentions a charity on their Facebook profile. We investigate need for uniqueness and attention to social comparison information as antecedents of two types of CVS–self-oriented and other-oriented. We also explore the relationship between CVS and self-esteem, and offline (...) prosocial and unethical behaviour intentions. Data from two studies, a college survey and an adult survey via MTurk, were analysed using structural equation modelling. Results indicate that NFU predicts both forms of CVS, while ATSCI influences both forms of CVS for adults and other-oriented CVS for students. Self-esteem is enhanced by self-oriented CVS. Self-oriented CVS predicts donation intention whereas other-oriented CVS significantly reduces donation intention for both samples. Furthermore, a significant relationship between CVS and purchase intention of counterfeit luxury goods is revealed. Findings provide insights into conspicuous virtue signalling and the relationship between CVS on Facebook and offline behavioural intentions. (shrink)

In Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory, Elaine J. Francis examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the problem of interpreting gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. This problem is important because acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic (...) phenomena and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and corpora of naturally-occurring discourse can help determine the sources of variation in acceptability judgments and narrow down the range of plausible theoretical interpretations. The second is that the interpretation of judgment data depends crucially on one's theoretical commitments and assumptions, especially with respect to the nature of the syntax-semantics interface and the choice of either a categorical or a gradient notion of grammaticality. The theoretical frameworks considered in this book include derivational theories (e.g. Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g. Sign-based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories (e.g. Stochastic Optimality Theory, Decathlon Model), and usage-based approaches. While showing that acceptability judgment data are typically compatible with the assumptions of various theoretical frameworks, Francis argues that some gradient phenomena are best captured within frameworks that permit soft constraints-non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users. (shrink)

This text provides a long-overdue pedagogical commentary on Cicero's "Pro L. Muerna Oratio".

I argue that if we distinguish between ontological realism and semantic realism, then we no longer have to choose between platonism and formalism. If we take category theory as the language of mathematics, then a linguistic analysis of the content and structure of what we say in and about mathematical theories allows us to justify the inclusion of mathematical concepts and theories as legitimate objects of philosophical study. Insofar as this analysis relies on a distinction between ontological and semantic realism, (...) it relies also on an implicit distinction between mathematics as a descriptive science and mathematics as a descriptive discourse. It is this latter distinction which gives rise to the tension between the mathematician qua philosopher. In conclusion, I argue that the tensions between formalism and platonism, indeed between mathematician and philosopher, arise because of an assumption that there is an analogy between mathematical talk and talk in the physical sciences. (shrink)

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristeva's corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual's "aesthetic idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits (...) Kristeva's reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination's allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel's dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a "stuck" existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of "spiritual inoculation" against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection. (shrink)

"--Robert Fagles, translator of Homer's "Iliad" "I finished "Dreaming by the Book" feeling that fundamental aspects of the nature of consciousness had been peeled open and exposed to view."--Stephen M. Kosslyn, author of "Image and Brain".

"--J.M.Coetzee "Here is a writer almost magically summoning up the world through words and ideas, in a new way, and so guiding the reader, lovingly, to receive the treasures and accept the pleasures of this book as naturally as breathing.

Within the human and social sciences, the analysis of gender is treated as an essential aspect of human behaviour. By contrast, within the church there has been little sustained or disciplined attention to the nature and underlying significance of gender, theological discourse and church policy all too often displaying their ignorance and unexamined assumptions about the crucial issues involved. Elaine Graham attempts a more detailed and critical inquiry into how an analysis of gender can affect policy, practice and discourse (...) with the church. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:More Than Words:Communicating for the Quality of CareElaine HsiehMy first experience as a healthcare interpreter was in the summer of 1998. I just completed the first year of a two-year graduate program in one of the top MA programs for conference interpreters—many of the graduates ended up working at the United Nations and international agencies. Many of my classmates chose to work in top business or government agencies for (...) their summer internships. I wanted to do something different. Something that I may never cross paths with again if I miss the opportunity. So, I chose to work as a healthcare interpreter intern at a large healthcare system. The summer internship was supposed to be a refreshing break from the drudgery of rigorous training to be a conference interpreter at an international level.As a graduate student who has received one year of intensive practicum training, I was proud of my "overqualification." At that time and to this day, the norm for most training programs for professional healthcare interpreters is a 40-hour short course (e.g., Bridging the Gap). With my advanced training and language proficiency, I thought this would be a fun, easy detour in my career development. I was excited to work with real people, no longer trapped in the isolating interpreting booths with headphones in conference rooms.Little did I know that the summer internship would change my life and career trajectory. The first big jolt that challenged my confidence as an interpreter was also one of the first assignments I received. I was taking an elderly man to his first physical therapy session. The man had such severe scoliosis that he was essentially looking backward as he walked forward. As we walked into the clinic, a medical resident saw my patient and jumped up in excitement. With a great smile on his face, he exclaimed, "Wow! This is the worst case I have ever seen." I felt startled. I could see that the patient was unsure about the resident's excitement. Normally, I would just go ahead and interpret what the physician said. I would then introduce the patient to the physician, explain my role as an interpreter (e.g., "I will interpret everything you and the patient say so you understand each other"), and proceed to interpret what other speakers said.However, all my training as an interpreter failed me at that moment. It's not because I was unsure about the linguistic equivalences of the resident's comment in Chinese. Rather, I was unsure how to best convey the information in a faithful, neutral, and accurate way without risking the provider-patient relationship and the quality of care. I explained to the physician, "Hi, my name is Elaine, and I am the healthcare interpreter. I am responsible for helping the patient understand what others are saying." Then, I asked, "How would you like me to interpret what you just said? You appeared very excited." The resident was taken aback, paused for a moment, and said, "Please tell him that I'm very happy to meet him." I interpreted that and proceeded to my regular routines.Another memorable moment took place at the end of a long shift near the end of my summer internship. I was already packing up to head home when I received a call to assist a 90-year-old patient who had just been admitted to a mental health ward after a failed suicide attempt a few hours ago. As an interpreter, I was required to interpret everything in the first-person style. For example, instead of saying, "The patient is sad," I say, "I am sad." Whenever possible, I also embody the speaker's nonverbals, including attitudes and emotions, through my interpretation. During the intake, the physician asked, "From 1 to 10, 1 being the least happy day in your life and 10 being the happiest, what number do you feel right now?" With the emptiest stare and the most soulless voice, the patient said, "If I have never experienced happiness in my life, how [End Page 159] do I know which number to give?" Throughout the hour-long session, I spoke in the... (shrink)

Bioethics conjures images of dramatic healthcare challenges, yet everyday clinical ethics issues unfold regularly. Without sufficient ethical awareness and a relevant working skillset, clinicians can feel ill-equipped to respond to the ethical dimensions of everyday care. Bioethicists were interviewed to identify the essential skills associated with everyday clinical ethics and to identify educational case scenarios to illustrate everyday clinical ethics. Individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of bioethicists. Bioethicists were asked: (1) What are the essential skills required (...) for everyday clinical ethics? And (2) What are potential educational case scenarios to illustrate and teach everyday clinical ethics? Participant interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Twenty-five (25) bioethicists completed interviews (64% female; mean 14.76 years bioethics experience; 80% white). Five categories of general skills and three categories of ethics-specific skills essential for everyday clinical ethics were identified. General skills included: (1) Awareness of Core Values and Self-Reflective Capacity; (2) Perspective-Taking and Empathic Presence; (3) Communication and Relational Skills; (4) Cultural Humility and Respect; and (5) Organizational Understanding and Know-How. Ethics-specific skills included: (1) Ethical Awareness; (2) Ethical Knowledge and Literacy; and (3) Ethical Analysis and Interaction. Collectively, these skills comprise a Toolbox of Everyday Clinical Ethics Skills. Educational case scenarios were identified to promote everyday ethics. Bioethicists identified skills essential to everyday clinical ethics. Educational case scenarios were identified for the purpose of promoting proficiency in this domain. Future research could explore the impact of integrating educational case scenarios on clinicians’ ethical competencies. (shrink)

Chapter Redeeming the Present Elaine Graham What does it mean to do feminist moral philosophy with notions of utopia and transformation as points of..

CHAPTER 1 Neurotransmitter networks Elaine Perry and Allan Young i. Introduction This first chapter sets the scene for subsequent exploration of potential ...