Recently, much attention has been paid to ‘rational requirements’ and, especially, to what I call ‘rational requirements of formal coherence as such’. These requirements are satisfied just when our attitudes are formally coherent: for example, when our beliefs do not contradict each other. Nevertheless, these requirements are puzzling. In particular, it is unclear why we should satisfy them. In light of this, I explore the conjecture that there are no requirements of formal coherence. I do so by trying to construct (...) a theory of error for the idea that there are such requirements. (shrink)

Although rituals are believed to lower anxiety, the underlying mechanism of anxiety reduction has not been explained well enough. According to Boyer and Liénard (2006), ritualized behavior decreases the anxiety levels because it swamps working memory. This blocks anxious thoughts’ access to consciousness. As a result, ritualized behavior lowers anxiety temporarily but maintains it in the long run. In the article, I analyze what processes should be engaged in ritualized behavior to bring the aforementioned outcomes. I propose that ritualized behavior (...) has anxiolytic properties if it preoccupies consciousness without placing too many demands on cognitive control. While conscious preoccupation with ritualized behavior should reduce anxiety, cognitive control load related to efforts to concentrate on ritualized behavior may bring immediate paradoxical effects of self-regulation, i.e., anxiety increases. Moreover, since anxiety disrupts attentional control capabilities, ritualized behavior should not be too cognitively demanding if an anxious person is to perform it. (shrink)

The essays in this collection show how law is relevant in both an "instrumental" and a "constitutive" sense, as a tool to accomplish particular purposes and as ...

ABSTRACT In this article, I respond to various interpretations of important aspects of my authored book, Across Black Spaces. I discuss the importance of thinking beyond Eurocentric/western meta‐philosophical assumptions regarding the production of knowledge. I articulate and defend forms of philosophical engagement that trouble sites of white privilege and white power. I highlight the importance of philosophy as a site for engaging issues of existential catastrophe and disaster. And last, I defend the position that African American philosophy is, by its (...) historical development within the context of anti‐Blackness, a collective site of Black opposition and resistance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth about Narrative, Or:How Does Narrative Matter?Ruth Ronen and Efrat BibermanIn the summer of 1898, a sixteen-year-old girl, intelligent and good looking, entered Freud's clinic in Vienna. The girl, whom Freud would call Dora, suffered recurrent attacks of aphonia (inability to speak) and of coughing, attacks that came on and passed off spontaneously. Freud soon discovers that Dora's illness is connected to the love affair her (...) father is having with a Frau K., a family acquaintance, while the lover's husband is courting Dora herself. In analyzing the history of Dora, Freud unfolds the course of events that brought Dora to the clinic and produces her case by means of a fragmentary discourse consisting of Dora's speech, her dreams and thoughts as revealed to Freud while the analysis was going on. The psychoanalytic discourse yet also consists of Freud's own reports and interpretations of Dora's dreams, actions and speech and of his overall understanding of her case, an understanding that undergoes a few radical changes during the analysis. When Dora decides to leave the treatment three months later, which is much too soon in Freud's view, Freud interprets her act as an act of vengeance against himself, repeating her neurotic reactions to the romantic complexity she recounted through the person of Freud. However, when Freud learns later that Dora got married and has overcome her hysterical sicknesses, he re-reads her second dream as announcing that Dora was about to tear herself free from her father (from Mr. K. she tore herself free through an act of vengeance) and "had been reclaimed once more by the realities of life."1How has the narration of the case of Dora by herself and by Freud, changed her situation from a hysterical subject who suffers from severe symptoms, to a subject "able to be reclaimed by the realities of life"? [End Page 118] How has Dora's spoken words to Freud, and his way of responding and directing her speech, changed her situation so radically? What is the power of narrative in changing or affecting the object of narration? What constitutes the "true story" of a subject and how is it affected by the narrative modes by which the story is presented? Can narrative change the facts of the matter narrated? In this paper, as part of the attempt to define the constitutive power of narrative, a power that cannot yet reduce the constituted subject to an effect of discourse (Dora after psychoanalysis surely cannot be viewed as a construct of discourse, yet is so different from what she was prior to analysis), we will examine these questions as addressed in two, apparently diverse, contexts: that of analytic aesthetics and that of psychoanalytic thought. We will show that these two perspectives tackle similar problems regarding narrativity yet choose to solve them in ways that raise important questions regarding the effects of narrative.IIt is a widely spread opinion about narrative that it creates its own world in the act of telling, that "the structures of narrative impose some kind of barrier between language and fact; rather than being directly 'mirrored', the facts, as represented in narrative, are filtered through layers of linguistic artifice."2 The diagnosis that narrative somehow distorts or constructs the events it recounts, that narration changes the modality of what is narrated, is one important implication of the booming interest in narrative in the 1980s and 90s. To understand how such an implication was drawn, requires that the nature of the interest in narrative is more closely qualified as part of the growing attention paid to the pervasiveness of narrative in discourses traditionally considered to lie outside the domain of narrative rendering, and to the naturalness of narrative presentation in extra-literary contexts. These pervasiveness and naturalness of narrative were often interpreted as reflecting the literariness or fictionality of discourses that officially claim to be committed to reality and truth.Yet, how did it come about that the discovery of narrative elements in a wide variety of contexts was interpreted as entailing the fictionalizing of these discursive contexts? As narrative entails the imposition of structure on... (shrink)

Ritual behaviors of some form exist in every society known to anthropologists. Despite this universality, we have little understanding of how ritual behavior varies within populations or across the lifespan, nor the determinants of this variation. Here we test hypotheses derived from life history theory by using behavioral observations and oral interview data concerning participant variation in Fijian kava-drinking ceremonies. We predicted that substantial variation in the frequency and duration of participation would result from (1) trade-offs with reproduction (...) and (2) the intrinsic status differences between ritual participants. We demonstrate that when controlling for household composition, men with young offspring participated less frequently and exhibited greater variance in their time spent at ceremonies than men without young children. However, men with a larger number of total dependents in their household participated more frequently than those with fewer. Moreover, we found that men’s ascribed rank, level of education, and reliance on wage labor all significantly predict their frequency of attendance. We also found that the number of dependents a man has in his household is positively correlated with total food production, and the amount of kava he cultivates. In general, these results suggest that ritual participation is part of an important strategy employed by Fijian men for both achieving status and developing social alliances. Variation in participation in kava ceremonies by Fijian men therefore reflects the constraints of their current life history condition and their inherited rank. (shrink)

Drawing on institutional and signaling theories, this study examines how environmental corporate social responsibility affects firm performance in a dysfunctional institutional environment. We extend the ECSR literature by suggesting that ECSR indirectly influences firm performance through the mediating effects of business and political legitimacy. Based on a dataset of 238 firms in China, we find that ECSR affects business and political legitimacy followed by firm performance. Moreover, legal incompleteness weakens and legal inefficiency strengthens the effects of ECSR on business and (...) political legitimacy. (shrink)

This study investigates the effect of each component of CEO compensation, including cash-based component (salary and bonus), equity-based component (stock grant and stock option), and other perks on disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) information of global firms. The study uses 2SLS IV estimation method and a sample of 580 US-based firms in a seven-year period. The study finds that equity-based remuneration has a significant and positive impact on a firm's CSR disclosure while CEO salary, bonus, and other perquisites have (...) significant detrimental effects on CSR disclosure. The paper indicates that a CEO's motivation for CSR reporting might arise from stock grant and option; meanwhile, salary, bonus and other perks could demotivate the CEO in this regard. Our findings offer insight into designing CEO compensation packages to meet shareholders' interests and stakeholders' expectations for a sustainable business. (shrink)

Creationism and evolutionism are taken to typify a fundamental opposition among the diverse beliefs about creation to be found in the United Kingdom and the United States. A comparison between the two types and the two countries suggests that people may be more concerned about the credibility and consequences of belief in an alternative account of our origins than about the actual method by which we were created. Examples of concern include interpretations of the Bible, ethical implications, and the epistemological (...) standings of revelation and/or science that are thought to follow from acceptance of a particular belief concerning how we got here. (shrink)

Perceived integrity of managers affects employee attitudes. Yet its impact on employee behavior and organizational performance is unknown. Addressing this gap, we examine the effect of perceived integrity in leadership on both subjective firm performance and objective employee productivity. Applying dynamic capabilities theory, we propose that perceived integrity in leadership may not only directly affect the outcome variables but also moderate the effect of the firm’s multiple-strategy implementation on outcome variables. We test the hypotheses using multiple informants from a transitional (...) economy with an ineffective legal and incomplete institutional environment, which could seriously challenge the leader’s commitment to integrity. As hypothesized, perceived integrity is associated with manager’s perception of firm performance directly and objective employee productivity through its moderating role in the firm’s implementation process of dual strategies. The results illustrate that perceived integrity in leadership plays as an important driver for employee productivity in dual-strategy and non-strategy firms. We provide detailed discussions about the integrity challenge and call for additional future research on this topic. (shrink)

Most business ethics scholars interested in understanding individual moral cognition or reasoning rely on the Defining Issues Test. They typically report that managers and business students exhibit a relatively high percentage of principled moral reasoning when resolving ethical dilemmas. This article applies neurocognitive processes and Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, and its more recent revision, as theoretical foundations to explore whether differences emerge when using a recognition of learning task, such as the DIT or similar instruments, versus a formulation of (...) knowledge task, such as the Moral Judgment Interview or similar instruments, to assess individual moral reasoning. The data show that significantly different levels of moral reasoning are detected when using a recognition-based versus formulation-based moral reasoning instrument. As expected, the recognition-based approach reports an inflated, higher moral reasoning score for subjects compared with using a formulation-based instrument. Implications of these results for understanding an individual’s moral reasoning are discussed. (shrink)

In his edicts, the emperor Aśoka Maurya extols brāhmaṇas, usually alongside ascetics (śramaṇas), as deserving honor and generosity, though he never alludes to their connection with ritual, the central theme of early Brahmanical literature. On the other hand, in Rock Edicts I and IX, he disparages sacrifices, and ceremonies performed by women, advocating instead the practice of ethical virtues. Close attention to the wording of Rock Edict IX shows that Aśoka and the Brahmanical Gṛhyasūtras talk about domestic rites in (...) very similar terms, even describing them with the same adjective (uccāvaca). Both of them note the special role of women as a source of knowledge of such ceremonies, and differ only in how they evalute the value of such ceremonial: Aśoka disparages women’s rites, while some Gṛhyasūtras explicitly validate women as authorities in such matters. A comparison of these sources highlights the distinctive role of the term dhamma in Aśoka’s usage (in contrast to maṅgala (auspicious folk rites), and may provide some guidance for dating the Gṛhyasūtras. The fact that Aśoka does not explicitly connect such rites with the brāhmaṇas suggests that in his experience at least (i.e., in Magadha) Brahmins’ religious authority had nothing to do with domestic ritual. We may conclude that the Vedic canonization of Gṛhya ritual norms was not yet recognized outside of priestly circles, if it had developed yet at all. (shrink)

Varieties of chemical and phase equilibria are controlled by the minimum Gibbs energy principle, according to which the Gibbs energy for a system will have the minimum value at any given temperature and pressure. It is understood that the minimum is with respect to all nonequilibrium states at the same temperature and pressure. The abstract relation between Gibbs energy and the equilibrium constant is deduced from fundamental laws of thermodynamics. However, actual use of this relation calls for the Gibbs energy (...) as a function of concentrations of the chemicals. Since thermodynamics is formulated without any reference to materials, how does one get that relation? This article provides the answer, and in the process shows that application of theory to experiments requires several intermediate layers where theory and experiment commingle. (shrink)

Ethicists frequently suppose that suffering has special moral significance. It is often claimed that a main goal of medicine—perhaps its primary goal—is the alleviation of human suffering. Following Eric Cassell and others, this essay considers suffering understood as the experience of distress—negative emotions—in response to threats to something that one cares about. It examines whether, on this value-based account of suffering, we should accept the claim that suffering has special moral significance. It argues that we should not: suffering does (...) not add significantly to the value of other human interests and rarely changes our moral obligations itself; it merely seems to have strong moral relevance because it often attends to interests that matter. This is because negative emotions themselves have only limited moral significance, which is due to the fact that their primary mental role is to indicate to us the relative importance of non-emotional goods. (shrink)

In China, Buddhism and Taoism are two major religions. Using a sample of 10,363 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market for the period of 2001–2010, I provide strong and robust evidence that religion (i.e., Buddhism and Taoism on the whole) is significantly negatively associated with owner-manager agency costs. In particular, using firm-level religion data measured by the number of religious sites within a radius of certain distance around a listed firm’s registered address, I find that religion is significantly negatively (...) (positively) associated with expense ratio (asset utilization ratio), the positive (reverse) proxy for owner-manager agency costs. This finding is consistent with the following view: religiosity has remarkable effects on the way how an individual thinks and behaves, and thereof can curb managers from unethical business practices. Moreover, my findings suggest that the negative association between religion and owner-manager agency costs is attenuated for firms with strong external monitoring mechanisms such as higher Marketization and high-quality auditors. Furthermore, after separating Buddhism from Taoism, my finding indicates that above conclusions are only available for Buddhism, suggesting that different religions may have asymmetric influence on owner-manager agency costs. Above results are robust to various measures of religiosity and a variety of robustness checks. (shrink)

Does responsible leadership matter when assembling an inclusive supply chain at the Base-of-the-Pyramid? Current literature implicitly assumes that it does not. BOP scholars initially focused on the importance of shaping innovative and disruptive offerings, with radically improved price–performance ratios. Subsequent studies tended to focus on barriers to implementation of large-scale ventures at the BOP. Their common characteristic was the fact that the attributes and roles of the individuals involved were deemed unimportant. If the opportunity was there, provided (...) barriers were removed and the right value proposition was offered, the inclusive venture should take off. We evaluate three cases of leaders who succeeded in building inclusive ventures at the BOP, in contexts marked by institutional voids—where formal markets were weakly structured or nonexistent. Building a viable business under those circumstances entailed two tasks: imagining what is possible and then turning that vision into a reality. We found that, in carrying out those tasks, individuals do matter. Sampled cases show that working with nontraditional partners in inclusive supply chains requires more than aligning material incentives. Our analysis suggests that responsible leadership with a strong ethical foundation can provide powerful leverage to ensure buy-in and commitment from the various actors involved. We show how RL can impact organizations and external stakeholders through positive upward spirals. Our analysis contributes to the literature on BOP and RL by confirming, extending, and challenging existing knowledge. We propose two novel attributes and argue that context matters, influencing how RL is operationalized and defined. Understanding the critical role of RL in the construction of inclusive supply chains adds a critical missing link that sheds light into the micro level of new business creation, development, and consolidation at the BOP. (shrink)

Responsible investment is increasingly prevalent, and both financial and moral concerns can drive such investment. In this article, we investigate how responsible investors of different wealth weigh financial and moral arguments. Prior research on different factors that may codetermine responsible investment behavior yield competing predictions about the influence of personal wealth on investment. We conduct a large-scale natural field experiment on responsible investment, wherein we treat investors with financial, moral, and no arguments. We find that there is a statistically and (...) economically significant difference in responsiveness to financial and moral arguments between investors of different wealth. Specifically, financial arguments are more effective than are moral arguments for high wealth investors but not for low wealth investors, and the effect is particularly high for the wealthiest investors. The findings hold for several different measures of wealth. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the moderating effect of wealth on responsible investment choice. Furthermore, these insights may enable more fine-tuned strategies to stimulate responsible investment among different individual investor segments. (shrink)

My question in this talk is “Does Knowledge Matter?” Before I give you my answer —which is “not in itself,” roughly—I need to explain exactly what the question means. Think of epistemology as studying our beliefs and the process of inquiry by which we arrive at them.1 There will be many ways of sorting our beliefs, in themselves or with reference to the inquiry that led to them. Some of these won’t be particularly interesting. No one much cares (...) whether a particular belief is the product of an inquiry that began on a Tuesday. We do care about whether a belief arose from an inquiry that was wellconducted (whatever that means); it reflects on how good the believer is as a believer. The question is: Should we care whether a belief counts as knowledge? Here I’m thinking of ‘knowledge’ as we intuitively judge it when we’re not thinking about philosophical concerns; including the judgment that (at least many) people make that knowledge is lacking in Gettier cases. So: When we evaluate a belief, should we care whether it’s knowledge, including the avoidance of Gettier cases? Mark Kaplan (1985) has given an argument that we shouldn’t care. Suppose someone has a Gettiered belief; it’s justified and true but fails to amount to knowledge because of a false lemma or some such. Kaplan points out that this can’t lead to any criticism of your methods of inquiry. Ex hypothesi your belief is justified; the conduct of your inquiry was entirely proper. Nor (though Kaplan does not emphasize this point) is your belief erroneous. Kaplan’s conclusion is that the concept of knowledge does not.. (shrink)

Cohn et al. (2019) designed the field experiment about the lost wallets across 40 countries to examine whether people attempt to contact the owners to return the 17,000 wallets. We discussed the design flaw in their experimental settings by reanalyzing the relationship between the rates of wallet return, in the Cohn et al. (2019)’s data, and the percentage of the Internet penetration (over population) as an upper bound of proportion email users. We found that countries with limited access to email (...) have a lower rate of wallets’ return after controlling other factors. Furthermore, we revisited the Abeler et al. (2019)’s aggregated data to study whether the dishonest behaviors in the laboratory could predict the actual honesty behavior or not. It turns out that what happens in the lab makes no sense to our reality. This comment contributes to the extant literature about an experimental designation for honesty studies. (shrink)

How do we individuate the senses, what exactly do we do when we do so, and why does it matter? In the following article, I propose a general answer to these related questions based on Franz Brentano's views on the senses. After a short survey of various answers offered in the recent literature on the senses, I distinguish between two major ways of answering this question, causally and descriptively, arguing that only answers giving priority to description and to (...) the classification involved in it are on the right track for a general answer to the related questions. In the second part of the article, I argue that Brentano's descriptive psychology is an attractive candidate for such an answer. His descriptive psychology provides a plausible account of the classification involved in description, in particular regarding the classification of sensory qualities. I close the article by briefly explaining how Brentano spells out the priority of descriptive answers over causal ones. (shrink)

Scholars have long debated whether leader's integrity affects managerial decision making with respect to social responsibility. In this paper, we propose a model in which transformational leadership mediates integrity and corporate social responsibility and examine the relationship between these concepts. A survey of 170 senior managers from 50 organizations was conducted. Results indicate that integrity is a predictor of transformational leadership behavior and that transformational leaders’ behaviors are linked to CSR practices. It was also found that leaders rated with higher (...) integrity are engaged in CSR because they exhibit more transformational leadership behaviors. These findings add to the extant literature by demonstrating that integrity is important as transformational leaders engage more actively on ‘responsible’ behaviors. Practical implications call for an understanding among corporate leaders of the benefits of integrity and how it relates to transformational leadership. Organizations can improve their selection and leadership development processes by focusing on these two dimensions. (shrink)

This paper examines how scientific understanding is enhanced by virtual entities, focusing on the case of the synthetic cell. Comparing it to other virtual entities and environments in science, we argue that the synthetic cell has a virtual dimension, in that it is functionally similar to living cells, though it does not mimic any particular naturally evolved cell (nor is it constructed to do so). In being cell-like at most, the synthetic cell is akin to many other virtual objects (...) as it is selective and only partially implemented. However, there is one important difference: it is constructed by using the same materials and, to some extent, the same kind of processes as its natural counterparts. In contrast to virtual reality, especially to that of digital entities and environments, the details of its implementation is what matters for the scientific understanding generated by the synthetic cell. We conclude by arguing for the close connection between the virtual and the artifactual. (shrink)

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence (...) and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making. (shrink)

Resumo "O candomblé aceita o homossexualismo porque é uma religião que não tem pecado. Não interessa se você seja homem, mulher ou gay. Não importa a opção sexual. (...) Você pode ver. É uma religião de homossexuais". É assim que um filho-de-santo responde a uma pergunta sobre a notável presença de homossexuais iniciados na religião dos orixás. Se comparadas a outras denominações hostis e indiferentes às orientações não-heterossexuais, o candomblé e outras devoções afro-brasileiras são, de fato, mais tolerantes à participação (...) de homossexuais, permitindo-lhes ocupar todos os postos previstos na hierarquia ritual. Embora estejam entre as expressões religiosas que menos discriminam o indivíduo por razões de preferência sexual, percebemos por meio da literatura especializada e de uma pesquisa de campo, realizada na região metropolitana de São Paulo, que os candomblecistas também empregam em seus discursos argumentos ou narrativas míticas, certos princípios e valores seculares articulados à moralidade cristã e que dão sustentação à hierarquia de sexo/gênero - conforme alguns sacerdotes, as categorias homem/mulher e masculino/feminino devem corresponder às expectativas sociais esperadas para cada ser sexuado. Em virtude disso, tratar de homossexualidade nas comunidades-terreiro, ao contrário do que possa parecer, é um tema delicado, restrito e rodeado de tabus. Palavras-chave: Candomblé; Gênero; Sexualidade; Homossexualidade." Candomblé accepts homosexualism because it is a religion where sin does not exist. It does not matter whether you are a man, a woman or gay. Your sexual choice does not matter. [...] You can see it. It is a religion of homosexuals." This is how a filho-de-santo answers a question about the remarkable presence of homosexuals initiated into the orixás ' religion. If compared to other denominations, hostile or indifferent to nonheterosexual orientations, candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions are indeed more tolerant to the participation of homosexuals, allowing them to hold all positions in the ritual hierarchy. However, based on the literature and on a field research carried out in the São Paulo metropolitan region, we realized that those affiliated to candomblé , although following one of the religions with the lowest degree of prejudice against individuals due to their sexual preference, also employ in their discourse arguments or mythical narratives, secular principles and values articulated with Christian morality, which support the sex/gender hierarchy: according to some priests, man/woman and male/female categories must correspond to the social expectations of each sexual being. Thus, on the contrary, approaching homosexuality in Afro-Brazilian religious communities is a delicate and restricted matter, surrounded by taboos. Key words: Candomblé; Gender; Sexuality; Homosexuality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: People have inferred that our lives are absurd from the supposed fact that nothing we do will matter in a million years. In this article, I critically discuss this argument for absurdity. After explaining how two refutations in the literature fail to undermine the best version of the argument, I produce several considerations that together do take much of the force out of the argument. I conclude by suggesting that these considerations not only refute this argument for absurdity, (...) but also constitute a motivation to be moral.RÉSUMÉ: On a pu déduire que nos vies sont absurdes en supposant que rien de ce que nous faisons n’aura d’importance dans un million d’années. Dans cet article, j’évalue cet argument en faveur de l’absurdité. Après avoir expliqué comment deux réfutations formulées dans la littérature sur le sujet sont impuissants à contrecarrer la meilleure version de cet argument, je formule plusieurs considérations qui concourrent à réduire de beaucoup la force de cet argument. Je conclus en suggérant que ces considérations non seulement réfutent l’argument en faveur de l’absurdité, mais aussi justifient l’agir moral. (shrink)

In this paper the author analyzes the recent history of the concept of matter by examining two criteria, in-principle-observability and noncompositeness, for use of the term 'elementary particle'. Arguing that how these criteria are employed sheds light on a change in what matter means, the author draws three conclusions. Since the seventeenth century, in-principle-observability has undergone a progressive devaluation, if not abandonment, in favor of the criterion of theoretical simplicity. As a consequence, the concept of matter has (...) undergone a "third phase" of dematerialization. Finally, the current concept of matter reveals a dilemma: if alleged elementary particles are verified through observation, they are composite and hence not elementary; if they are elementary, they are in-principle-unobservable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 436-443 [Access article in PDF] How Does Love Make the Ugly Beautiful? Amihud Gilead IT IS OBVIOUS TO SEE how greatly Gideon loves his wife, who is physically quite an ugly old lady. Nothing about her physical appearance or gait seems beautiful, at least to the extent of what meets your eye. Physically, she seems not to be considered beautiful at all. Still, (...) Gideon is quite sure that his beloved wife is the most beautiful woman in the entire world. He cannot fathom why other people do not realize that obvious truth: Mira is a real, fascinating, unique beauty. "But, dear Gideon," says one of his friends, "you cannot deny a very simple fact, Mira is a most beautiful person, and it is a great fortune to know her, all the more to know her intimately. Still, physically judging, she is not beautiful at all. It is an undeniable, objective fact." Gideon's answer does not fail in its directness: "Well, those who are blind to her physical, actual beauty, should discover it. Like the Michelangeloean sculptors, who must reveal and disclose the sculpture hidden in the marble, those people should expose and realize her physical, actual beauty." For Gideon, beauty, physical or mental, is an objective matter, which should be discovered, not invented. For him, beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, but it lies there waiting to be uncovered and revealed to the world. For Gideon, those whose eyes meet Mira's ugliness are not ready or fit to remove the superfluity that covers her beauty, whether mental or physical. Removing all that is superfluous in the marble is necessary to give birth to the sculpture. Like a midwife, the artistic gaze gives birth, and this gaze is not just the property of customary artists, but also of lovers. To love means to reveal, to create or discover beauty. [End Page 436]I believe that William Butler Yeats put this in the most adequate words: "All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." The lover's gaze exposes such a beauty, even as regards the husband of the woman that the poet loved for so many years but in vain: "This other man I had dreamed / A drunken, vainglorious lout. / He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart, / Yet I number him in the song; / He, too, has been changed in his turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born" ("Easter, 1916"). The artistic, poetic gaze redeems the "direct object" of his love, but also redeems what is so ugly, like the "drunken, vainglorious lout," about her. After all, her decision to maintain her miserable marriage instead of accepting the poet's love, is quite ugly or contemptuous, to say the least, in the eyes of the poet-lover. But this is the strength of his poetic, artistic revelation: to give birth even to the hidden beauty of that vainglorious lout who, unfortunately, happened to be her husband. All the more so, to reveal the real beauty of the loved woman, "the loveliest woman born" ("A Prayer for my Daughter"). Another gaze, by those who do not love her or were indifferent to her, could not realize her beauty at all, physically as well as mentally.Yet others believe that we can love somebody who is physically ugly, even the "ugliest woman born"—as a person she may be considered "the loveliest woman born." I would like to challenge this commonplace. In the eyes of the artist-lover she is physically beautiful, no matter how ugly or lacking in beauty she may be in the eyes of others looking at her indifferently, as though nothing has happened, there is nothing to stay with, and nothing has left its impression. Indeed, Gideon's love reveals that Mira is physically beautiful no less than mentally. Her gaze, gait, even clumsiness, all her physical "flaws," and other attributes are considered beautiful in his eyes as a lover-artist. To be more precise, all of her traits are so considered. The... (shrink)

When states are required to compensate victim groups for the historic wrongs they have committed, how should the compensation due be calculated? It seems that alongside the counterfactual world in which the wrongdoing never occurred, we should also consider the counterfactual world in which the wrongdoing has occurred, but the victims have responded to it in a prudent way. Under tort law, the damages a victim can claim are reduced if they are judged to have been contributorily negligent, thereby exacerbating (...) the harm they have suffered. The paper considers four reasons why victim groups could not be expected to respond collectively to injustice in a way that outsiders might judge to be prudent. 1. The wrongdoing has destroyed their capacity to act as a group agent. 2. The wrongdoing has inflicted psychological traumas that lead them to make poor decisions. 3. They would need to violate a moral norm that is deeply embedded in their culture. 4. They would need to adopt policies that risk inflicting severe injustice on an internal minority. In many instances of historic injustice, one or more of these reasons apply. So although in principle victims’ behaviour is relevant when compensation is being calculated, we must be very cautious in using that doctrine to assess real cases. (shrink)

Computer ethics is a relatively young discipline,hence it needs time both for reflection and forexploring alternative ethical standpoints in buildingup its own theoretical framework. Feminist ethics isoffered as one such alternative particularly to informissues of equality and power. We argue that feministethics is not narrowly confined to ‘women's issues’ but is an approach with wider egalitarianapplications. The rise of feminist ethics in relationto feminist theory in general is described and withinthat the work of Gilligan and others on an ‘ethic of (...) care’. We argue for the need to connect theory toempirical evidence. Empirical studies of gender andbusiness and computer ethics are reviewed. We noteconcerns with surveying a student audience, the issueof how far questionnaires and interviews can get tothe heart of ethical beliefs and problems ofperforming statistical analyses of quantitative data.Although we recognize them, our own small surveycannot avoid all these problems. Nevertheless byrefining our scenarios we are able to offer analternative reading of a hacking problem in terms ofan ethic of care thereby pointing a way forward forfuture research in computer ethics inspired byfeminist theory. (shrink)

Should wilderness be understood as primarily untrammeled or primarily natural? In this paper, we examine the conceptual and philosophical roots of untrammeled and natural in the context of the 1964 Wilderness Act and show how in some situations tension can arise between them, leading to a stewardship dilemma and subsequent debate over the future conservation role of wilderness. After showing that this debate is ultimately rooted in a false dichotomy, we offer a conceptual framework that presents managers with the tools (...) necessary to shepherd the wilderness idea through the changing environmental realities of the Anthropocene, and continue to allow wilderness to be both a cornerstone and touchstone for conservation in the 21st century. (shrink)

How did first millennia Indian Buddhists understand the emotions? What are the theoretical resources, methodologies and vocabularies they used to account for emotive phenomena, and how do these relate, if at all, to contemporary philosophy of the emotions? This essay focuses, as a case study, on the notion of ascetic solitude (viveka) presented by the Buddhist thinker and poet Aśvaghoṣa’s (second century CE) in his poetical work the Saundarananda. Approaching Aśvaghoṣa’s work as a lens through which to examine the broader (...) Buddhist philosophical conception of the emotions, it is demonstrated that solitude, far from being conceived as a physical withdrawal from the world (into an interior subjective space), is seen as a mode of engagement with the world, a dynamic and transformative experiential process. This understanding, it is argued, is set within a broader Buddhist philosophical conception of emotions primarily in terms of a shifting evaluative perceptual content. Within the Saundarananda, emotions are akin to “ways of seeing”—a matter of perceptual modes and patterns of salience and what they experientially pick and leave out. Outlining some of the features of this theory that are distinctively Buddhist, this essay join the scholarly critique of the practice of applying readymade contemporary emotive categories to the study of Indian Buddhist texts, and advocate the need to account for these texts as much as possible in their own terms. (shrink)

This text is the introduction to V. Amit & N. B. Salazar, Pacing Mobilities. Timing, Intensity, Tempo & Duration of Human Movements, New York/Oxford, Berghahn, 2020, 202 p. It is also available on Berghahn publisher website.

Human tissue and body parts have been used in one way or another for millennia. They have been preserved and displayed, both in museums and public shows. Real human hair is used for wigs, while some artists even use human tissue in their works. Blood, bone marrow, whole organs and a host of other structures and human substances are all transplanted into living persons to treat illness. New life can be created from gametes through in vitro fertilisation , while the (...) creation of cell lines keeps tissue alive indefinitely. These uses create significant challenges for the legal system in the UK. The major challenge for the law is to balance the competing demands of those groups who have vested interests in human tissue—researchers, medical practitioners, patients, families, the community and the police, among many others. It must provide sufficient control to users of tissue, but also take account of the fact that our bodies hold psychological importance for us while we live and, after we die, for those we leave behind. To some degree the law has been successful, but we still lack a comprehensive, coherent approach to the regulation of human tissue. Partially as a reaction to this lack of a comprehensive approach, some commentators have turned to applying the concept of property to human tissue means to achieve regulatory outcomes they support. (shrink)

When it comes to the duty of beneficence, a formidable class of moderate positions holds that morally significant considerations emerge when one's actions are seen as part of a larger series. Agglomeration, according to these moderates, limits the demands of beneficence, thereby avoiding the extremely demanding view forcefully defended by Peter Singer. This idea has much appeal. What morality can demand of people is, it seems, appropriately modulated by how much they have already done or will do. Here we examine (...) a number of recent proposals that appeal to agglomeration. None of them, we argue, succeeds. (shrink)

Consequentialists typically think that the moral quality of one's conduct depends on the difference one makes. But consequentialists may also think that even if one is not making a difference, the moral quality of one's conduct can still be affected by whether one is participating in an endeavour that does make a difference. Derek Parfit discusses this issue – the moral significance of what I call ‘participation’ – in the chapter of Reasons and Persons that he devotes to what (...) he calls ‘moral mathematics’. In my paper, I expose an inconsistency in Parfit's discussion of moral mathematics by showing how it gives conflicting answers to the question of whether participation matters. I conclude by showing how an appreciation of Parfit's error sheds some light on consequentialist thought generally, and on the debate between act- and rule-consequentialists specifically. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that various disputes in ontology have important ramifications and so are worth taking seriously. I employ a criterion according to which whether a dispute matters depends on how integrated it is with the rest of our theoretical projects. Disputes that arise from previous tensions in our theorizing and have additional implications for other issues matter, while insular disputes do not. I apply this criterion in arguing that certain ontological disputes matter; specifically, the disputes (...) over concrete possible worlds and coincident material objects. Finally, I consider how one could show that some ontological disputes do not matter, using a Platonism/nominalism dispute as an example. (shrink)

Material information is a core aspect of a firm's governance and reporting activities. If corporate information is material, then the firm has a responsibility to disclose it. Currently, firms must judge information as material largely based on a confusing set of standard setters’ definitions. I analyze the particular conditions laid out by each standard setter and explain the ethical implications that result from materiality judgments made by firms using these varied standards. Importantly, this analysis underscores that regulators, firms, and researchers (...) alike must consider the impact of these implications on the fiduciary duty and promise‐keeping that firms make as well as the potential for unfairness and financial harm to others’ welfare that could result. (shrink)

It has often been said that the Chinese script is pictorial or ideographic, and that this is one of the reasons why Chinese tend to think more analogically than logically, and why in the past the natural sciences developed to a lesser degree in China than in the West. These are strong claims. They have often been oversimplified and exaggerated, but I think there is something to be said for them. Here I will focus on the first question. I will (...) argue that Chinese characters still have semantic features that create image-like qualities in a wider sense: not mere resemblances between sign and object, but family resemblances in semantic fields. The fact that Chinese is an isolating and monosyllabic language is essential in this. (shrink)

We live in a world of social, political, economic, and religious rupture. Ideologies polarise to fuel confrontation within communities, nations and regions of the world. At this point in the twenty-first century, humanism's focus on reason, ethics and justice offers the potential to rethink and re-engage in new ways. What Is Humanism, and Why Does It Matter? brings together leading humanist thinkers and activists to examine humanism and how it can work in the world. Humanism is often misunderstood. (...) The movement includes both atheists and agnostics, who seek to make ethical sense of the world based on shared human values and a concern for human welfare, happiness and fulfillment. What Is Humanism, and Why Does It Matter? presents an overview and exploration of the meaning and nature of humanism, both as a philosophy and as a way of engaging with the challenges of the world. (shrink)