This study proposes two identification cuing factors to understand how corporate social responsibility relates to employees’ identification with their firm. The results reveal that a firm’s CSR initiatives increase employee–company identification. E–C identification, in turn, influences employees’ commitment to their company. However, CSR associations do not directly influence employees’ identification with a firm, but rather influence their identification through perceived external prestige. Compared to CSR associations, CSR participation has a direct influence on E–C identification. On the basis of these findings, (...) it is argued that CSR performance can be an effective way for companies to maintain a positive relationship with their employees. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough the Life-Sustaining Treatment (LST) Decision Act was enforced in 2018 in Korea, data on whether it is well established in actual clinical settings are limited. Hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP) is a common nosocomial infection with high mortality. However, there are limited data on the end-of-life (EOL) decision of patients with HAP. Therefore, we aimed to examine clinical characteristics and outcomes according to the EOL decision for patients with HAP.MethodsThis multicenter study enrolled patients with HAP at 16 referral hospitals retrospectively from (...) January to December 2019. EOL decisions included do-not-resuscitate (DNR), withholding of LST, and withdrawal of LST. Descriptive and Kaplan–Meier curve analyses for survival were performed.ResultsOf 1,131 patients with HAP, 283 deceased patients with EOL decisions (105 cases of DNR, 108 cases of withholding of LST, and 70 cases of withdrawal of LST) were analyzed. The median age was 74 (IQR 63–81) years. The prevalence of solid malignant tumors was high (32.4% vs. 46.3% vs. 54.3%, P = 0.011), and the ICU admission rate was lower (42.9% vs. 35.2% vs. 24.3%, P = 0.042) in the withdrawal group. The prevalence of multidrug-resistant pathogens, impaired consciousness, and cough was significantly lower in the withdrawal group. Kaplan–Meier curve analysis revealed that 30-day and 60-day survival rates were higher in the withdrawal group than in the DNR and withholding groups (log-rank P = 0.021 and 0.018). The survival of the withdrawal group was markedly decreased after 40 days; thus, the withdrawal decision was made around this time. Among patients aged below 80 years, the rates of EOL decisions were not different (P = 0.430); however, mong patients aged over 80 years, the rate of withdrawal was significantly lower than that of DNR and withholding (P = 0.001).ConclusionsAfter the LST Decision Act was enforced in Korea, a DNR order was still common in EOL decisions. Baseline characteristics and outcomes were similar between the DNR and withholding groups; however, differences were observed in the withdrawal group. Withdrawal decisions seemed to be made at the late stage of dying. Therefore, advance care planning for patients with HAP is needed. (shrink)

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future (...) pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but prefer their pleasure to lie in the past, and do not predict that others’ levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible. (shrink)

Popper Proposed the criterion of falsifiability as a solution to the problem of demarcation i.e. of distinguishing science from pseudo-science and not, as many of his contemporaries in the Vienna Circle mistook it to be, a solution to the quite different problem with which they themselves were preoccupied, viz. of providing a criterion of meaning to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless. While the positivists were concerned to damn metaphysics and exalt science, by identifying the empirically verifiable with the meaningful, (...) Popper was concerned to separate science from scientism, to damn astrology and to extol astronomy. In other words his preoccupation belongs not to the philosophy of language but to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

I defend Conciliationism: rationality requires belief revision of epistemic peers who find themselves in disagreement and lack dispute-independent reason to suspect each other of error. (Kelly 2010) argues that Conciliationists are committed to the Uniqueness Thesis: a given body of evidence rationalizes a unique degree of confidence for a given proposition. (Ballantyne & Coffman 2012) cogently critique Kelly's argument and propose an improved version. I contend that their version of the argument is unsound, and I offer some friendly amendments. But (...) I show that even this amended argument threatens only extreme versions of Conciliationism. (shrink)

In various places we have defended the position that a new human organism, that is, an individual member of the human species, comes to be at fertilization, the union of the spermatozoon and the oocyte. This individual organism, during the ordinary course of embryological development, remains the same individual and does not undergo any further substantial change, unless monozygotic twinning, or some form of chimerism occurs. Recently, in this Journal Jason Morris has challenged our position, claiming that recent findings in (...) reproductive and stem cell biology have falsified our view. He objects to our claim that a discernible substantial change occurs at conception, giving rise to the existence of a new individual of the human species. In addition, he objects to our claim that the embryo is an individual, a unified whole that persists through various changes, and thus something other than a mere aggregate of cells. Morris raises a number of objections to these claims. However, we will show that his arguments overlook key data and confuse biological, metaphysical, and ethical questions. As a result, his attempts to rebut our arguments fail. (shrink)

Andrew McGonigal presents some interesting data concerning truth in serial fictions.1 Such data has been taken by McGonigal, Cameron and Caplan to motivate some form of contextualism or relativism. I argue, however, that many of these approaches are problematic, and that all are under-motivated as the data can be explained in a standard invariantist semantic framework given some independently plausible principles.

Nanotechnologies are enabling technologies which rely on the manipulation of matter on the scale of billionths of a metre. It has been argued that scientific uncertainties surrounding nanotechnologies and the inability of regulatory agencies to keep up with industry developments mean that voluntary regulation will play a part in the development of nanotechnologies. The development of technological applications based on nanoscale science is now increasingly seen as a potential test case for new models of regulation based on future-oriented responsibility, lifecycle (...) risk management, and upstream public engagement. This article outlines findings from a project undertaken in 2008–2009 for the UK Government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) by BRASS at Cardiff University, involving an in-depth survey both of current corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in the UK nanotechnologies industry, and of attitudes to particular stakeholder issues within the industry. The article analyses the results to give an account of the nature of corporate social performance (CSP) within the industry, together with the particular model of CSR operating therein (‘do no harm’ versus ‘positive social force’). It is argued that the nature of emerging technologies requires businesses to adopt particular visions of CSR in order to address stakeholder issues, and that the nanotechnologies industry presents specific obstacles and opportunities in this regard. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Timaeus, Plato explicitly defines time as “the moving image of eternity”. This proposition affirms actually that time reflects the eternal that embodies the rational and lawful principle – namely the logos of proportionality – in the motion and change of visible objects in the universe. In other words,time determines the principle that every mutable being must follow to participate in the rational and nomological order of existence; the absolute logos which is given by God is hence intrinsic to (...) time. This idea of time is echoed by the theories of Augustine and Husserl. Both philosophers inherited some of Plato’s metaphysical views, and each of them developed a distinctive theory of the relations between Being, time, and the absolute logos. This paper attempts to compare their theories and to defend the following claim: Augustine fo-cuses on the immutable representation of time which is regarded as the image or reflection of God’s absolute logos, and explains temporal phenome... (shrink)

Traditionally, historians have taken it for granted that Britain’s National Physical Laboratory was created as the result of demands from a “professional” body of university-based physicists for a state-funded scientific institution. Yet paying detailed attention to the history of the NPL’s originating institution, Kew Observatory, shows that the story is not so clear-cut. Starting in the 1850s, Kew Observatory was partly a center for testing meteorological instruments and other scientific equipment in return for fees. Long after the 1850s, the observatory (...) was run by self-funded devotees of science. Paid university physicists only assumed a dominant role on its governing committee in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, by which time instrument-testing was already the observatory’s main role. This paper argues that the rise of the university physicists – together with the desire of some of these physicists for a national institution that tested electrical standards – can only partially explain the origins of the NPL, and that Kew was in some ways a national physical laboratory before there were many physics teaching posts in British universities. This paper is a case study that illustrates a need to reassess the importance of university physicists in shaping British science at the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This essay explores the correlation between shu 恕 and ren 仁 in Confucius’ teachings and its broader implications concerning the role of the golden rule. It first shows that whereas the golden rule is premised on equality between agent and recipient, Confucius’ correlation of shu with ren aims mainly at establishing a more solid foundation for the hierarchy-specific duty of the ruler to care for the ruled. It thus reveals that this conflict arises from the golden rule’s incompatibility with asymmetrical (...) relationships, a long-standing issue concerning its validity as a moral axiom. It then addresses this conflict by demonstrating that the golden rule can effectively function in conformity with humanity even in asymmetrical relationships by way of inducing an agent’s viewpoint to shift from existing sociopolitical asymmetry to one-to-one human equality. On this basis, lastly, it examines the concurrence of the ideas of shu, human nature, and ren in ancient China. (shrink)

A common sentiment among anti-sex-robot scholars is the apprehension that sex robots will normalize and perpetuate sexual violence towards humans. In this new chapter within the feminist sex war, the authors of this article tend to agree with anti-sex-robot concerns and seek to further identify potential harms of sex robots. However, instead of characterizing the harm in terms of what the robots represent and symbolize, we are primarily interested in the internal state of the user and the type of relationship (...) that will emerge between human users and sex robots, which we argue is an unprecedented sexual relation. Unlike other comparable sex products and services, sex robots occupy a liminal space between being perceived as both a sexual property and agent, oscillating based on the preferences and convenience of the user. We argue that this oscillation that enables human–sex robot intimacy requires self-deception, which in turn entails individual moral responsibility. Thus, we articulate a novel virtue-based approach of examining human–robot intimacy that focuses on cultivating erotic flourishing. We conclude that people have a moral responsibility to exhibit self-awareness within the dynamics of their intimate relationship with sex robots and the (contradictory) beliefs required to maintain such intimacy. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, Victor and Cullen’s (Adm Sci Q 33:101–125, 1988 ) typology of ethical climates has been employed by many academics in research on issues of ethical climates. However, little is known about how managerial practices such as communication and empowerment influence ethical climates, especially from a functional perspective. The current study used a survey of employees from Taiwan’s top 100 patent-owning companies to examine how communication and empowerment affect organizational ethical climates. The results confirm the relationship (...) between these two managerial practices and organizational ethical climates. We discuss our results and their implications for both future academic research and practice. (shrink)

This book explores Dostoevsky as a political thinker from his religious and philosophical foundation to nineteenth-century European politics and how themes that he had examined are still relevant for us today.

For the first time, the revised Common Rule specifies that public health surveillance activities are not research. This article reviews the historical development of the public health surveillance exclusion and implications for other foundational public health practices.

This study examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility -related information and the value of financial analysts’ stock recommendations. The information environment in which analysts operate in is affected by CSR-related reports that companies voluntarily issue as well as information that becomes available through third-party analysis and rating institutions. We find an inverse relationship between the value of both upgrade and downgrade revisions and the supply of CSR-related information compiled by third-party institutions, suggesting that CSR-related data are associated with a (...) richer information environment that makes it more challenging for analysts to issue informative recommendations, thereby mitigating their contribution to the price discovery process. We further find that the value of analysts’ recommendation revisions is lower for companies that voluntarily issue CSR-related reports compared to those that do not make such disclosures and that the overall effect of CSR on the informativeness of analysts is stronger in the recent years. Our findings have implications for the evolution of CSR reporting as the incorporation of CSR-related information into market prices legitimizes the relevance of such reports. Furthermore, these findings contribute to our understanding of the role and value of information intermediaries in changing information environments. (shrink)

This article examines Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ecological theory to explore inherent tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions concerning human agency in Anthropocene discourse. Contra most commentators, I argue that Chakrabarty’s account of the Anthropocene remains neither modernistic nor posthumanistic per se because his view of the human turns out to be consistently inconsistent. Chakrabarty apparently advances an anti-anthropocentric and posthumanist explanation of the climate crisis by shifting his focus from the ‘species’ to the ‘planet’. However, his account of the planet remains within the (...) modernistic paradigm that privileges progress, rationality, and human agency because he tacitly embraces the narrative of enlightenment, or transition from ignorance to knowledge, when describing a passage from the global to the planetary. Chakrabarty’s narrative of enlightenment thus epitomizes the remains of anthropocentrism in Anthropocene discourse, registering the extent to which it retains beliefs in human agency, rationality, and singularity. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive commentary on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, the earliest surviving full scale epic poem from ancient Rome.

This experimental study extends prior capital market and environmental accounting research by utilizing the theoretical underpinnings of legitimation through impression management, source credibility bias, perceived trust, and ideology in assessing the influence of discretionary environmental accounting narratives on jurors’ punitive damage award assessments. We utilize mock jurors as environmental stakeholders and find that: jurors in a court case involving corporate environmental malfeasance assess lower punitive damage awards against a firm that provides discretionary disclosure on its website regarding future abatement and (...) control narratives, environmental sensitivity of the firm’s industry moderates the negative relationship between the discretionary disclosure and jurors’ punitive damage award assessments, and juror’s perceived trust toward firm management mediates the prior moderation effect. Further, juror political ideology is found to affect the punitive damage award assessments, with liberal jurors levying comparatively higher awards than conservative jurors. (shrink)

Despite the considerable attention given to Spinoza’s account of affectivity, especially in recent years, scant attention has been paid to the distinction between action and passion, or to the problems which it presents internally and externally. This essay offers a clarification and defense of Spinoza’s account of action and passion. A second theme is the behavioristic nature of Spinoza’s account of human affectivity. Despite the bad press which behaviorism is receiving these days, I argue that the behavioristic aspects of Spinoza’s (...) account are defensible. (shrink)

In this article I describe the development of my collaboration with the textile artist Susie Freeman in the production of the visual arts project Pharmacopoeia. Over the last 3 years we have created a body of work that aims to provide information about common medical treatments in a way that engages the public imagination. The work is dominated by the use of active pharmaceuticals, both pills and capsules, which are incorporated into dramatic fabrics by a process known as pocket knitting. (...) These fabrics are then made into clothing and accessories, making their individual messages easier to ‘read’. The work aims to encourage people to think about their own medical and pharmacological history, and to reflect on their relationship with commonly prescribed drugs. It also reveals how dependent our society is on pharmaceuticals, how ambivalent we feel about them and yet how casually we use them. (shrink)

This Article uses a history of the push for job security in the United States during the late 20th century to assess New Private Law (NPL) theory. The history recounts the rise and fall of common law and statutory approaches to replacing at-will employment with termination for just cause only. Applying NPL theory to that history, the Article argues that NPL theorists’ current approach to defining their topic of study and distinguishing it from public law is inconsistent within and across (...) theories. NPL theorists seek to carve out an area of law where interpersonal morality trumps legal economists’ goal of collective welfare maximization. That conceptual project depends on a coherent and consistent approach to distinguishing private from public law. Ultimately, the Article argues, NPL theorists face a more fundamental problem, however. Regardless of how one categorizes the events in this history, it shows that the common law-derived interpersonal morality at the heart of NPL theory may not strengthen worker protections in the ways at least some of its theorists hope. (shrink)

I argue that Spinoza’s account of appetition, and its application to human sexuality, is more original than many commentators suggest; and that it offers resolutions to several puzzles in the philosophy of sex. The paper first situates these puzzles in contemporary debates, offers a detailed analysis of Spinoza’s remarks on love in general and sexual love in particular, and concludes with some of the normative consequences which Spinoza attempts to derive from these.

Robert C. Scharff has written what we might call, after Nietzsche, a timely meditation. It is timely in that it is aimed at our particular time , and it is a meditation on timeliness, on what it means to do philosophy within time and history . These two topics meet in his depiction of our time as one that is either not fully aware of or that actively suppresses its own timeliness, its own determination by its time and historical context, (...) due largely to analytic philosophy’s remaining caught in the vestigial grips of positivism and the dominance of science. We may be “After Positivism,” but we are not wholly past positivism. Scharff considers this ahistorical approach untenable because, as he informs us in the book’s second sentence, all meditations are timely: time and historical context inescapably determine how and what we meditate on, especially the attempts to escape them.Scharff identifies our place in history as “after posi .. (shrink)