This paper argues how boards of directors of three Icelandic oil companies were kept in the dark while the companies were collaborating in illegal competitive behaviour. The paper offers a unique view into a situation where information or lack thereof has played a key part in corporate governance, exploring the relationship between management and the board of directors and how information filtering can go wrong to the extent that vital information does not reach the board. The paper is based on (...) a case study of the illegal collaboration of the oil companies. It furthermore surveys the literature on information flow and information asymmetry for explanations of what happened in the case of the Icelandic oil companies. (shrink)

This article focuses on critical realist analysis of concrete processes of structure formation and realization of structural propensity. It aims to explain the reasons for the rise and fall of the neoliberal regime in Iceland that led to the extreme expansion of the Icelandic financial system and its crisis. The article argues that the neoliberal regime was actively constructed by economic and political actors within the framework of the particular structural characteristics of Iceland. It claims that rigid structural conditions due (...) to the very small size of the economy and severe problem of oligopoly undermined the neoliberal utopia of perfect market competition. In order to develop this argument, the paper observes how power elites actively affect public opinion and establish their hegemonic position in the political system. (shrink)

Stefan Jonsson uses three monumental works of art to build a provocative history of popular revolt: Jacques-Louis David's _The Tennis Court Oath_ (1791), James Ensor's _Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889_ (1888), and Alfredo Jaar's _They Loved It So Much, the Revolution_ (1989). Addressing, respectively, the French Revolution of 1789, Belgium's proletarian messianism in the 1880s, and the worldwide rebellions and revolutions of 1968, these canonical images not only depict an alternative view of history but offer a new understanding (...) of the relationship between art and politics and the revolutionary nature of true democracy. Drawing on examples from literature, politics, philosophy, and other works of art, Jonsson carefully constructs his portrait, revealing surprising parallels between the political representation of "the people" in government and their aesthetic representation in painting. Both essentially "frame" the people, Jonsson argues, defining them as elites or masses, responsible citizens or angry mobs. Yet in the aesthetic fantasies of David, Ensor, and Jaar, Jonsson finds a different understanding of democracy-one in which human collectives break the frame and enter the picture. Connecting the achievements and failures of past revolutions to current political issues, Jonsson then situates our present moment in a long historical drama of popular unrest, making his book both a cultural history and a contemporary discussion about the fate of democracy in our globalized world. (shrink)

The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal (...) autonomy and, in turn, undermines libertarian arguments against state paternalism appealing to autonomy and personal choice. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for (...) the emergence of textualism: In a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (Ntotal = 5495) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an easily identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers and judges. (shrink)

Ever since I first saw a dance performance I have wondered why it is that I am sometimes fascinated and touched by some people moving about on a stage, while at other times it leaves me completely indifferent. I will argue that an answer to this question has to be searched for in the way sensory stimuli are processed in the brain. After all, all our actions, perceptions and feelings are mediated and controlled by the brain. The thoughts and feelings (...) evoked by a dance performance are no exception and thus they too have a neural substrate in the brain. (shrink)

Many prominent bioethicists have recently raised the question of the possibility of moral status enhancement. In this paper I discuss the arguments advanced by Nicholas Agar for the possible existence of the postpersons. I argue that in spite of the many limitations and shortcomings of Agar’s account, there are no conclusive reasons to rule out the possibility of moral status enhancement. However, if post-persons are as they are described by Agar, the fact of their possibility is less interesting and ethically (...) relevant than it might seem. Most importantly, the account of post-persons given by Agar is rather an outcome of some implausible assumptions. I propose that Agar conflates the ethical with the scientific and dismisses the importance of phenomenology in framing our ethical outlook. Also, he seems to follow the assumption made by many utilitarian ethicists that such features as sentience and cognitive capacities have some universal relevance. This accounts for the delusion that we can view our moral attitudes from the point of view of the Universe. (shrink)

A pesar de que, a grandes rasgos, el análisis marxista del proceso de alienación sigue vigente, ha llegado a perder toda su fuerza revolucionaria. La razón parece encontrarse en que la dinámica del consumo integra y supera a un tiempo las carencias propias de la alienación, complementando el papel de trabajador con el de consumidor. De hecho, es una idea común que en la sociedad de consumo el sujeto se ha liberado de las trabas que limitaban el desarrollo de su (...) personalidad, y que parece tener a toda la industria al servicio de sus deseos. Detrás de este supuesto encontramos una trasformación de fondo de los conceptos de libertad, sujeto y realidad. Pero algunos autores como Z.Baumann han puesto en duda que el consumismo sea un sistema plegado al sujeto y que no sea pertinente hablar de alienación del consumidor. (shrink)

Definite descriptions occurring within the scopes of psychological verbs provide more puzzles than are traditionally acknowledged. This article presents one puzzle that is particularly intriguing.

Logic is widely held to be a normative discipline. Various claims have been offered in support of this view, but they all revolve around the idea that logic is concerned with how one ought to reason. I argue that most of these claims—while perhaps correct—only entail that logic is normative in a way that many, if not all, intellectual disciplines are normative. I also identify some claims whose correctness would make logic normative in a way that sets it apart from (...) other disciplines. I argue that we have no reason think that these claims are correct. In other words, logic is not a distinctively normative discipline. (shrink)

The goal of inquiry in this essay is to ascertain to what extent the Principle of Compositionality – the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its parts and its mode of composition – can be justifiably imposed as a constraint on semantic theories, and thereby provide information about what meanings are. Apart from the introduction and the concluding chapter the thesis is divided into five chapters addressing different questions pertaining to the overarching (...) goal of inquiry. Chapter Two is an attempt to determine whether the Principle of Compositionality is a trivial principle. It is argued that this is not the case in the context of providing the semantics of natural languages since it is an open question whether the best theories that respect available syntactic and semantic data are compositional. Chapter Three and Chapter Four ask whether there are reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is true. It is argued that the three most commonly cited reasons for thinking that correct semantic theories must be compositional – Linguistic Creativity, Productivity and Systematicity – in fact only give us reasons to think that the meaning of complex expressions depend on the meanings of their parts and their modes of composition, but not that the meaning of complex expressions depend ONLY on those factors. Chapter Five asks whether there are any reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is false. It is argued that all the phenomena that have been suggested entail non-compositionality are in fact compatible with some versions of compositionality. Even if this conclusion is reached in this chapter, the conclusion of the previous two chapters entails that we are not justified in imposing the Principle of Compositionality as an adequacy constraint on Semantic theories. Chapter Six explores the ways in which information about what meanings are can be derived by imposing constraints on semantic theories. It is argued that the distinction emphasized in Chapter Three and Chapter Four between depending on and depending ONLY on is of critical importance. It is demonstrated that the informative potential of the Principle of Compositionality goes far beyond that of the principle we are in fact justified in imposing on semantic theories. So not only is it the case that we cannot learn anything about meanings from the justified imposition of the Principle of Compositionality – since we cannot justifiably impose it as a constraint on semantic theories – what we could have learned from it had we been justified in imposing it is very different from what we can learn from the principle that we are justified in imposing. (shrink)

_The Worship and Love of God_ is one of the most unusual writings of Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. A "poetical novel," it dramatizes the Creation and examines the life of Adam and Eve as the first truly united couple. Considered Swedenborg's last work before he embarked on his visionary period, the manuscript was left unfinished by its author and published only after his death. Inge Jonsson, one of the world's leading scholars on Swedenborg's works, offers a scholarly (...) look into a neglected literary achievement. He examines this unique work from the perspective of sources and influences. The literary genre f hexaemeron, ancient and modern philosophy, and scientific discoveries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries come into play in Swedenborg's richly imagined and beautifully articulated world. Yet _The Worship and Love of God _also offers an intriguing glimpse into Swedenborg's future as a biblical exegete and revelator. (shrink)

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular or . Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states (...) in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain. (shrink)

En el presente artículo nos proponemos describir la racionalidad subyacente a las estrategias de adaptación al cambio ambiental global de los agentes poderosos de la vitivinicultura en Mendoza, Argentina. En términos estrictamente físicos, el Cambio Ambiental Global se presenta como un aumento de las temperaturas promedio a nivel global, las repercusiones de este cambio serán diferentes según sea la zona geográfica del planeta que se considere. En el oasis norte de la Provincia de Mendoza se espera una reducción en los (...) caudales del Río que lo alimenta. Frente a esta situación, los actores poderosos de la vitivinicultura mendocina han optado por estrategias de adaptación tendientes a profundizar la racionalidad instrumental, característica de estos grupos, para hacer frente al cambio ambiental global: obtener aguas en mayor cantidad y calidad a través del traslado de sus explotaciones a zonas de montaña ubicadas aguas arriba del río y búsqueda de mercados internacionales, entre otras. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also (...) whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

Though corporate social responsibility (CSR) is on the agenda of most major corporations, corporate executives still largely support the view that corporations should maximize the returns to their owners. There are two lines of defence for this position. One is the Friedmanian view that maximizing owner returns is the social responsibility of corporations. The other is a position voiced by many executives, that CSR and profits go together. This article argues that the first position is ethically untenable, while the latter (...) is not supported by empirical evidence. The implication is that there may be good reason for firms to deviate from a maxim of profit maximization. (shrink)

In the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate – women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment. Two viewpoints become obvious: women in the South will be affected more by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute more than women. The debates are structured in specific ways in the North and the South and the discussion in the article focuses largely on examples from Sweden and India. The (...) article traces the lineage of the arguments to the women, environment and development discussions, examining how they recur in new forms in climate debates. Questioning assumptions about women's vulnerability and virtuousness, it highlights how a focus on women's vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from inequalities in decision-making. By reiterating statements about poor women in the South and the pro-environmental women of the North, these assumptions reinforce North–South biases. Generalizations about women's vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women's responsibility without corresponding rewards. There is need to contextualise debates on climate change to enable action and to respond effectively to its adverse effects in particular places. -/- . (shrink)

Socioscientific issues receive considerable public attention and there are concerns that people in general are not able or willing to deal with information at odds with what they believe to be true. In this study, we focused on students’ beliefs about two controversial issues: whether consumption of the artificial sweetener aspartame and use of cell phones, respectively, represent any serious health risks. Our aim was to investigate whether students’ trust in the information was related to prior beliefs, the nature of (...) the message, and students’ critical reading strategies. Results showed interactions between prior beliefs about the issues and text condition (risk vs. no risk) on trust in conclusions that indicated a confirmation bias assumption. Additionally, students trusted conclusions ascertaining that there were risks more than conclusions ascertaining that there were no risks. Finally, students’ self-reported use of critical reading strategies implied less trust in both types of conclusions. (shrink)

Peter Unger's puzzle, the problem of the many, is an argument for the conclusion that we are grossly mistaken about what kinds of objects are in our immediate surroundings. But it is not clear what we should make of Unger's argument. There is an epistemic view which says that the argument shows that we don't know which objects are the referents of singular terms in our language. There is a linguistic view which says that Unger's puzzle shows that ordinary singular (...) terms and count nouns are vague. Finally, there is an ontological view which says that the puzzle shows that there are vague objects. ;The epistemic view offers the simplest solution to the problem of the many, but runs foul of a different problem, the problem of vague reference. The problem of vague reference is that given the presuppositions of the epistemic view there are too many too similar objects that might be the reference of a name such as 'Kilimanjaro' for it to be plausible that the name has a determinate reference. The linguistic view, spelled out in terms of semantic indecision and supervaluation, offers the same solution to the problem of the many and to the problem of vague reference. But it leaves no room for de re beliefs about ordinary material object. The ontological view offers a solution to the problem of the many that avoids the problem of vague reference and the problem of de re beliefs. For these reasons it is preferable to the other two. ;However, ontological vagueness has met strong objections. It has been argued that it is a fallacy of verbalism, that it is inconsistent and that once formulated in a consistent way it is not distinguishable from the linguistic view. These objections can be met, but not without cost. To avoid the charge of being inconsistent, friends of the ontological view have to give up the law of excluded middle. ;A positive account of vague parthood has two parts. First, parthood is not primitive but dependent on other primitive facts. The most important of the primitive facts are about to what kinds objects belong and how objects are casually related. Second, sometimes the primitive facts fail do determine of two objects whether one is part of the other. Given a notion of vague parthood, a notion of vague object can be defined roughly in the following way: An object O is vague if there is an object a such that it is indeterminate whether a is part of O. (shrink)

D′ ⊆ D is a normal totality on a Scott domain D if it is upward closed and x ⊓ y ∈ D′ is an equivalence relation on D′. We prove that every topological space can be represented by a domain with norma totality.

This study explores the relationship between people's values, loci of control and pro-environmental behaviours. ‘Locus of control’ refers to the extent to which people attribute control over events in life either to themselves or to external sources beyond their influence: in the former case, the individual is described as having an internal locus of control, and in the latter, an external one. The study hypothesised, and subsequently concluded, that self-transcendent values and internal loci of control were positively related to pro-environmental (...) behaviours, and also that loci of control moderate the link between people's values and behaviour; people with a low degree of self-transcendence values behave pro-environmentally if they have an internal locus of control. (shrink)

A central tenet of contemporary moral psychology is that people typically reject active forms of utilitarian sacrifice. Yet, evidence for secularization and declining empathic concern in recent decades suggests the possibility of systematic change in this attitude. In the present study, we employ hypothetical dilemmas to investigate whether judgments of utilitarian sacrifice are becoming more permissive over time. In a cross-sectional design, age negatively predicted utilitarian moral judgment (Study 1). To examine whether this pattern reflected processes of maturation, we asked (...) a panel to re-evaluate several moral dilemmas after an eight-year interval but observed no overall change (Study 2). In contrast, a more recent age-matched sample revealed greater endorsement of utilitarian sacrifice in a time-lag design (Study 3). Taken together, these results suggest that today’s younger cohorts increasingly endorse a utilitarian resolution of sacrificial moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The ethics of corruption cannot be analysed without simultaneously addressing the legitimacy of public office or entrusted power. This paper introduces a concept of core unethical corruption, defined as violations of distributed ethical obligations for private gain. In other words, it is suggested that what is ethically wrong with corruption is that it entails the violation of certain obligations attributed to agents. By explicitly relating corruption to obligations, this approach helps make ethical sense of the concepts of public office or (...) entrusted power, attending to the question of their legitimacy. Since distributed obligations are implied by a wide range of ethical theories, the concept of core unethical corruption also reflects a (partial) overlapping consensus on the ethics of corruption. (shrink)

The article discusses several epistemological and methodological issues related to the analysis of discourse in general and of educational talk in particular. The theoretical framework provided by conversation analysis (CA) is applied and critically discussed in the analysis of an empirical example of educational talk. Several questions seem pertinent: Can we - as analysts - have direct access to talk "as it actually occurs", independent of any kind of theorizing and predefined categorization? What is the epistemological status of the conversation (...) analytic categories? What are the limitations of applying turn-taking as an analytical category in the study of talk? To what extent can we presume the knowledgeability of the interlocutors as a premise in our analysis? On the background of my own attempts at applying CA in the analysis of educational discourse, I argue for a widening of the perspective from a narrow, empiricist focus on conversational turn-takings and sequential organization of talk, for example in the handling of issues like silences and absences in talk. On the other hand, I also warn against the pitfalls of historicist, abstract social theory; here exemplified with some texts from theorists applying abstract philosophical categories from dialectical and historical materialism like "the law of contradiction" as explanatory tools in the study of situated action. In the study of educational meaning making we should avoid empiricist as well as historicist approaches and explanations. (shrink)