Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued that to evaluate the funniness of a joke based on the consideration of whether it is morally appropriate to feel amused commits the “moralistic fallacy.” We offer a new and empirically informed reply. We argue that there is a way to take morality into consideration without committing this fallacy, that is, it is legitimate to say that for some people, witty but immoral jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral. In (...) our account, one has an intramural moral reason not to feel amused if one focuses on the moral feature itself of a joke rather than the moral consequence implied in one’s reaction to the joke. When one judges a joke as not funny because of the intramural moral reason, one is in a negative emotional state with high arousal, for example, moral disgust or anger. This state is psychologically incompatible with amusement. That one has an intramural reason not to feel amused thus implies that one does not have a reason to feel amused. Moral consideration thus plays an indirect and appropriate role in the evaluation of the funniness of a joke. (shrink)

Cognitive diagnostic models show great promise in language assessment for providing rich diagnostic information. The lack of a full understanding of second language listening subskills made model selection difficult. In search of optimal CDM that could provide a better understanding of L2 listening subskills and facilitate accurate classification, this study carried a two-layer model selection. At the test level, A-CDM, LLM, and R-RUM had an acceptable and comparable model fit, suggesting mixed inter-attribute relationships of L2 listening subskills. At the item (...) level, Mixed-CDMs were selected and confirmed the existence of mixed relationships. Mixed-CDMs had better model and person fit than G-DNIA. In addition to statistical approaches, the content analysis provided theoretical evidence to confirm and amend the item-level CDMs. It was found that semantic completeness pertaining to the attributes and item features may influence the attribute relationships. Inexplicable attribute conflicts could be a signal of suboptimal model choice. Sample size and the number of multi-attribute items should be taken into account in L2 listening cognitive diagnostic modeling studies. This study provides useful insights into the model selection and the underlying cognitive process for L2 listening tests. (shrink)

Background: Truth-telling toward terminally ill patients is a challenging ethical issue in healthcare practice. However, there are no existing ethical guidelines or frameworks provided for Chinese nurses in relation to decision-making on truth-telling of terminal illness and the role of nurses thus is not explicit when encountering this issue. Objectives: The intention of this paper is to provide ethical guidelines or strategies with regards to decision-making on truth-telling of terminal illness for Chinese nurses. Methods: This paper initially present a case (...) scenario and then critically discuss the ethical issue in association with ethical principles and philosophical theories. Instead of focusing on attitudes toward truth disclosure, it aims to provide strategies regarding this issue for nurses. It highlights and discusses some of the relevant ethical assumptions around the perceived role of nurses in healthcare settings by focusing on nursing ethical virtues, nursing codes of ethics, and philosophical perspectives. And Confucian culture is discussed to explicate that deontology does not consider family-oriented care in China. Conclusion: Treating each family individually to explore the family’s beliefs and values on this issue is essential in healthcare practice and nurses should tailor their own approach to individual needs regarding truth-telling in different situations. Moreover, the Chinese Code of Ethics should be modified to be more specific and applicable. Finally, a narrative ethics approach should be applied and teamwork between nurses, physicians and families should be established to support cancer patients and to ensure their autonomy and hope. Ethical considerations: This paper was approved by the Ethics Committee of The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University. The authors have obtained consent to use the case study and it has been anonymised to preserve the patient's confidentiality. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of appreciation. I argue that appreciation is an epistemic emotion in which the subject grasps the object in an affective way. The “grasping” and “feeling” components implies that in appreciation, we make sense of the object by having cognitive control over it, are motivated to maintain the valuable epistemic state of understanding, and experience the “aha” or “eureka” moment. This account offers a unified account of the many types of appreciation, including the aesthetic, (...) the moral, and the epistemic. In all these cases, appreciation requires some other first-order emotions as prerequisite. (shrink)

[English abstract] In his last metaethical statement, Parfit revisits his earlier arguments for non-metaphysical normative non-naturalism , and points to the possibility of convergence between his view and Railton's non-analytical normative naturalism. I examine the basis of this convergence claim and find it unpersuasive, mainly because if their views converge on the same position, Parfit's non-natural norms exist only as predicates. In order to avoid this consequence, he needs to present a reason for believing in the existence of normative properties (...) . There is an indispensability argument implicit in his text, with concepts of sui generis normative ground and necessity at its centre. I discuss their main features and present problems besetting these concepts. (shrink)

This study focuses on the reliability and validation of the Chinese version of the Moral Attentiveness Scale. Factor analysis confirmed that the scale includes two factors: perceptual moral attentiveness and reflective moral attentiveness. Moral attentiveness is negatively correlated with normlessness and positively associated with internalization and symbolization, moral identity, and other academic dishonesty behaviors. Reflective moral attentiveness moderated the relationship between formalism and unethical decision making. All results showed that the Chinese version of the Moral Attentiveness Scale has satisfactory psychometric (...) properties and is a valid and reliable measurement of moral attentiveness in the Chinese population. (shrink)

Compensation rules for patent infringement greatly affect patent quality, which is closely related to R & D investments. In this study, A duopoly game model was developed to analyze innovative factories’ R&D investment and patent licensing behavior, as well as the strategic choices of potential infringers under different compensation rules for patent infringement. Furthermore, a comparative analysis was conducted to analyze the patent quality under different scenarios, ultimately finalizing an optimal sequence rule for patent infringement compensation. The results show that (...) patent quality is influenced by the invention height of patent and R&D efficiency, while the amount of patent infringement compensation has a great effect on potential infringement behavior. Patent quality can be effectively improved if the court adopts a proper sequence rule for patent infringement compensation according to the market circumstances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RusselL on Chinese Civilization 23 RUSSELL ON CHINESE CIVILIZATIONI Yu DONG Ph}losophy / McMaster University Hamilton, Ont., Canada L8s 4K1 1 I am indebted to Nicholas Griffin for his valuable comments and encouragement. I thank Marty Fairbairn and Perer Lovrick for many corrections in the paper. I am also greatly indebred to Ken Blackwell for his helpful criticisms and suggesrions. • (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 20. (...) 3 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeron: Princeton U. P.), p. 173· B ertrand Russell arrived in China with Dora Black in October 1920. World War I had deepened his disillusionment with both the capitalist system and Western civilization in general. Seeking a socialist solution, he had visited Soviet Union just a few months before. But he had found that the Communist state there presented an unappealing alternative to the capitalist West in that it treated its citizens as slaves. The sad mood in which he "set out for China to seek a new hope"2 was described in his The Problem of China, published in 1922 after his nine-month visit: "It was on the Volga, in the. summer of 1920, that I first realized how profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks are attempting to force upon an essentially Asiatic population, just as Japan and the West are doing in China" (p. 18). The 1920S were a time when China, both as a nation and as a civilization, was in deep trouble. Her young people were eagerly looking outside their country to find a way of saving her. Since the 1840 Opium War, the Western Powers had poured into China, which had been a closed society, at least in Karl Popper's sense,3 for more than 3,000 years. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 19I1, China had been thrown into a state of anarchy by feuding warlords. The Great World Powers had both politically and economically dominated China through successive wars with her;4 through demanding indemnities, the cession of territory, fixed tariffs, etc.; and through controlling the corrupt and inept central government and warlords. Meanwhile, China was plagued by famine, piracy, brigandage, incipient rebellion,5 and the failures of various attempts at reform and revolution.6 China was well on the way toward disintegration, divided into "spheres of influence" by Britain, Germany, France, Russia and, especially, Japan. In the 1920S, China was also in the period of the May Fourth Movement-named after a popular student protest on 4 May 1919against foreign imperialism and an impotent Chinese government. It was agitated by the Treaty of Versailles which transferred, at the request ofJapan, the properties and privileges of the German sphere of influence in the Shandong Peninsula to Japan. This movement advocated learning science and adopting democratic principles in order to save China. It is important in Chinese history as a symbol of Chinese awareness of the need for the most profound changes in her tradition. All of these factors constituted the background to Russell's visit to China and thus affected the formation of his distinct view of the problem of China.? The invitation to him was a part of Chinese efforts in seeking methods from the West to save their country. Russell had already been known in China as a great philosopher, not only for his philosophy of logic and science, but also for his views on social problems. Some Chinese had access to his books: Principles ofSocial Reconstruction (1916), Political Ideals (1917), Roads To Freedom (1918), and magazine publication of parts of The Practice and Theory ofBolshevism (1920).8 Considering this background, it is quite understandable why 4 For example, Brirain and France 1856-60, Japan 1894-95, 1914-15. 5 For example, Taiping 1850-65, and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. 6 The revolution of 1911 actually just changed the name of the government, rather than the reality of society. 7 A detailed description of this background as "psychological roots" can be seen in S. P. Odgen, "The Sage in the Inkpot", Modern Arian Studies, 16 (1982): 529-600. 8 For example, Zhang Shenfu, a student originally majoring in mathematics in Beijing University, had read almost all of... (shrink)

Not for the academic value of some of the situational events, often with a comprehensive, decisive, Yan'an new philosophy will the home of its columns. Will establish a new philosophy, a lot of grand strategy is one of the actions in Yan'an. This paper examines a new philosophy will be the basic process, an analysis of its membership and the subsequent effects, assessing its characteristics in the formation of contemporary Chinese culture, the unique role, made ​​a number of issues need (...) to be further explored. This paper shows that the new philosophy will not academics, but the educational organization. It is the ideology of expert training, knowledge and control of legal rights, the implementation of the regulatory action of self-sufficiency and closed culture strategy. New philosophy will be mainly in the construction and maintenance of highly exclusive mode of thinking to make contributions, as the full value of its effect remains to be thorough and reasonable debate. Some situational events, which have been neglected by academics, may be of significant importance. The Yan'an New Philosophy Association is an example. Its establishment was one of the ambitious strategic actions of the CCP in Yan'an. This paper examines the process of the YNPA's establishment, analyses the composition of its membership, assesses its unique effect on the formation of contemporary Chinese ideology, and raises some issues that are in need of further research. This study shows that the YNPA was an educational institution instead of an academic society, and that the experts in ideology it produced had exclusive power in the cultural domain and implemented the party's cultural policies. We can see that the YNPA greatly contributed to the construction and maintenance of a high degree of cultural exclusivity. A full picture of this association, however, requires much more in-depth studies. (shrink)

This study seeks to examine the impact of alumni connections between the evaluators and evaluatees on the results of peer review ratings for the Korean national R&D project and selection success rate. Specifically, this study analyzed the evaluation results of 8,402 research proposal entries submitted between 2007 and 2011 for the “general researchers support project,” all in the Natural Science and Engineering areas and sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea. Each proposal entry was evaluated by three evaluators, and (...) approximately 39 percent of the proposals had at least one evaluator from the same university. The results of this study showed that evaluators have a tendency to give relatively high scores to research proposals submitted by the alumni of the same universities as their alma mater. Also, when an evaluator from the same university as an evaluatee was included in the evaluator group, the results of this study showed that the percentage of entry submissions was higher compared to the contrary. Such results show that in the process of peer review–based research proposal evaluations for national R&D projects, alumni connections have significant influence on evaluation results in South Korea. (shrink)

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold War between the West and the East, came tumbling down. In December 1991, a superpower, the Soviet Union, ceased to exist. In the face of such dazzling and monumental change in the global situation, an American "Kremlinologist" acknowledged, bitterly: "We were wrong; we were all wrong." Indeed, it was perhaps the greatest irony of all.

Simion and Kelp explain the trustworthiness of an AI based on that AI’s disposition to meet its obligations. Roughly speaking, according to Simion and Kelp, an AI is trustworthy regarding its task if and only if that AI is obliged to complete the task and its disposition to complete the task is strong enough. Furthermore, an AI is obliged to complete a task in the case where the task is the AI’s etiological function or design function. This account has a (...) strength in that it can provide a unificatory rationale for the trustworthy-making properties of AIs. According to this account, being explainable, being safe, and being transparent are the trustworthy-making properties of an AI because an AI can fulfill its etiological or design functions in the case where it is explainable, safe, and transparent. This paper shows that though Simion and Kelp’s account has a strength, this account is not satisfactory for two reasons. The first reason is that an AI’s trustworthiness is not determined just by the AI’s disposition to meet obligations, and the second reason is that it is difficult to explain how an AI’s etiological function and design function have to do with that AI’s obligations. To provide a full-fledged account, Simion and Kelp should dismiss these concerns. (shrink)

Article aims to explore Augustine's "two cities" theory. First, a brief discussion of the "City of God" writing background and the main structure; Secondly, in both religious and secular aspects of life on the analysis of the "City of God" on the "two cities" of the main points; again, three perspectives of the "two cities" theory of history and ideological background. Although the "two cities" doctrine embodies a form with two points tend to think, but both different from the ontological (...) dualism and the dualism of body and soul, but also avoids the complex social reality for too absolute two points. The focus of this study is Augustine's doctrine of the "Two Cities." The first part treats the background and the structure of the City of God. In the second and the third part, the essay examines both the religious and the temporal aspect of this doctrine. Finally, the historical and intellectual background of the doctrine is discussed. The author argues that even though the doctrine of the "Two Cities" manifests a dualistic tendency in the thought of Augustine, it can hardly be labeled as a dualism. (shrink)

This article has the purpose of examining the commentation that Sung-ho Yi Ik and Da-san Jung Yak-yong developed of Sa-chil Debate (사칠논쟁) Which was a philosophical debate in Chosun Dynasty. Sa-chil Debate began from Toe-gye Yi Whang and Ko-bong Gi Dae-sung and soon as a result of Yul-gok Yi Yi and Woo-gae Sung Hon repeating the debate, It appeared as a kind of philosophical theme. After that, Yul-gok and Toe-gye's students formed a kind of school. They also made the debate (...) extended and the theory more sophisticated by criticizing a counterpart's argument on base of ideologizing their teacher's theory. About 200 years after Toe-gye died, Sung-ho Yi Ik was born and after about 250 years, Da-san Jung Yak-yong was born. Both they experienced a western naturalscience and a catholic theory as Silhak Scholars (실학자). Therefore their this kind of interpretation about Sung-li Debate must be offering a deeply interesting investigation to us. In conclusion, Sung-ho advocated Toe-gye's theory at all, adding more explanation to it and Da-san evaluated all of Toe-gye's and Yul-gok's theory to be right because their theories have a unique logicality of making a sense. Sung-ho stood on a Shilhak view point gave up a organic cosmology ofSung-li theory which has a continuity to cosmology and moral theory, arguing Sa-chil-Li bal-Yil-lo Theory (四七理發一路說) by understanding Sa-chil Debate based on only moral perspective. Even though Da-san also said Yang-si Theory (兩是論) that both their theories are all right, he argued that Toe-gye's theory is much more important in the aspect of moral practice owing to his religious opinion by a catholic affect. By the way, Sung-ho supplemented and explained Toe-gye's theory, but he had not a sufficient logic and was not objective because of his leaning into advocating Toe-gye's theory much further. Da-san had an advantage of evaluating both Toe-gye's and Yul-gok's theory to be all right, but came to argue an insufficient philosophy on account of its simplicity. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a model capturing the effects of ethics institutionalization on employee experiences in work life and overall life satisfaction. It was hypothesized that explicit ethics institutionalization has a positive effect on implicit ethics institutionalization, which in turn enhances employee experiences in work life. It was also hypothesized that employee work life experiences have a positive effect on overall life satisfaction and happiness, moderated by work–family life conflict. Data were collected though a (...) survey of marketing managers in Italy. The data provide good but partial support for the model. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundTo investigate the factors related to approval after review by an Institutional Review Board, the structure equation model was used to analyze the latent variables ‘investigators’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘review process’ for 221 proposals submitted to our IRB.MethodsThe vulnerability factor included vulnerable cases, and studies that involved drug tests and genetic analyses. The principal investigator factor included the license level of the PI and whether they belonged to our institution. The review factor included administration time, total review time, and revision frequency. (...) The revision frequency and total review time influenced the efficiency of review.ResultsThe latent variable of reviewing was the most important factor mediating the PIs and vulnerability to IRB review approval. The local PIs moderated with genetic study and revision frequency had an impact on the review process and mediated non-approval.ConclusionsBetter guidance of the investigators and reviewers might improve the efficiency with which IRBs function. (shrink)

The paper studies how leaders can break employee silence. Drawing upon self-determination theory, we argue that empowering leadership can activate employees’ intrinsic motivation such that employees are more willing to break the silence at work; furthermore, the effect is stronger when employees have high levels of job autonomy. We collected time-lagged and multi-source data in a large company to test our hypotheses. The results show that empowering leadership can reduce employee silence through enhancing their intrinsic motivation. The mediation effect and (...) and the boundary effect of job autonomy on the mediation effect are all supported. This paper contributes to the literature on leadership, employee silence, and job design characteristics. (shrink)

We study whether greater social trust is associated with a lower incidence of corporate misconduct. Both social norm and network theory suggest that social trust can affect managerial behavior and reduce the likelihood of misconduct behavior. Consistent with this prediction, we find that social trust is negatively associated with corporate misconduct behavior. Moreover, we show that, when media coverage is higher, the negative relation between social trust and corporate misconduct behavior is more pronounced. Further analyses suggest that social trust can (...) help mitigate both disclosure-related and nondisclosure-related misconduct. (shrink)

On the premise that the good knowing is the originary reality, this article provides a synopsis of Wang Yangming’s exposition of the fundamental essence of liangzhi. The self-existent resemblances of the originary reality are outlined and summarized as the eight virtues of liangzhi: voidness, intelligence, luminousness, awareness, constancy, happiness, true I, and purity. These eight virtues are, however, ultimately subsumed by the middle, which governs them in common. The middle is the original state and true form of the fundamental essence (...) of liangzhi, which Wang Yangming describes as a transparent mirror and level balance. (shrink)

This research focuses on students' online purchase intentions in Pakistan toward different products available for sale on numerous e-business websites. This study's main objective is to determine which methodology is better to enhance customer online purchase intention. It also aims to discover how to improve perceived benefits and lower perceived risks associated with any available online product and entrepreneurship. AMOS 24 has been used to deal with the mediation in study design with bootstrap methodology. The study was conducted on 250 (...) students from different educational institutes in Pakistan using a simple random sampling technique. A finding of this study suggests that both methods positively impact online purchase intention of consumers and sustainable digital economy. But social media advertisement is more effective through enhancing the perceived benefits of products. In contrast, product content factors are more effective at lowering the perceived risks associated with available online products. (shrink)