A growing body of literature critical of ethics review boards has drawn attention to the processes used to determine the ethical merit of research. Citing criticism on the bureaucratic nature of ethics review processes, this literature provides a useful provocation for (re)considering how the ethics review might be enacted. Much of this criticism focuses on how ethics review boards _deliberate,_ with particular attention given to the lack of transparency and opportunities for researcher recourse that characterise ethics review processes. Centered specifically (...) on the conduct of ethics review boards convened within university settings, this paper draws on these inherent criticisms to consider the ways that ethics review boards might enact more communicative and deliberative practices. Outlining a set of principles against which ethics review boards might establish strategies for engaging with researchers and research communities, this paper draws attention to how _Deliberative communication_, _Engagement with researchers_ and the _Distribution of responsibility_ for the ethics review might be enacted in the day-to-day practice of the university human ethics review board. This paper develops these themes via a conceptual lens derived from Habermas’ (The theory of communicative action. Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society, 1984 ) articulation of ‘communicative action’ and Fraser’s (Social Text, 25(26), 56–80, 1990 ) consideration of ‘strong publics’ to cast consideration of the role that human ethics review boards might play in supporting university research cultures. _Deliberative communication_, _Engagement with researchers_ and the _Distribution of responsibility_ provide useful conceptual prompts for considering how ethics review boards might undertake their work. (shrink)

This research examines the relationships between education in business ethics, Reynolds’s (J Appl Psychol 93:1027–1041, 2008) “moral attentiveness” construct, or the extent to which individuals chronically perceive and reflect on morality and moral elements in their experiences, and Singhapakdi et al.’s (J Bus Ethics 15:1131–1140, 1996) measure of perceptions of the role of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR). Education in business ethics was found to be positively associated with the two identified factors of moral attentiveness, “reflective” and “perceptual” moral attentiveness, (...) and with the PRESOR “stakeholder view” factor. Also, reflective moral attentiveness was found to act as a mediator in the relationship between education in business ethics and the PRESOR stakeholder view factor. Evidence of gender and social desirability bias effects was also found. The implications of these relationships and social cognitive theory for improved understanding of the mechanisms by which a variety of variables have their effects on PRESOR in business are discussed. (shrink)

Ogni tentativo di ripensare le nostre categorie politiche deve muovere dalla consapevolezza che della distinzione classica fra zoé e bios, tra vita naturale ed esistenza politica (o tra l'uomo come semplice vivente e l'uomo come soggetto politico), non ne sappiamo piú nulla. Nel diritto romano arcaico homo sacer era un uomo che chiunque poteva uccidere senza commettere omicidio e che non doveva però essere messo a morte nelle forme prescritte dal rito. È la vita uccidibile e insacrificabile dell' 'uomo sacro' (...) a fornire qui la chiave per una rilettura critica della nostra tradizione politica. Quando la vita diventa la posta in gioco della politica e questa si trasforma in biopolitica, tutte le categorie fondamentali della nostra riflessione, dai diritti dell'uomo alla democrazia alla cittadinanza, entrano in un processo di svuotamento e di dislocazione il cui risultato sta oggi davanti ai nostri occhi. Seguendo il filo del rapporto costitutivo fra nuda vita e potere sovrano, da Aristotele ad Auschwitz, dall'Habeas corpus alle Dichiarazioni dei diritti, il libro di Agamben cerca di decifrare gli enigmi - prima di tutti il fascismo e il nazismo - che il nostro secolo ha proposto alla ragione storica. Fino a vedere, nel campo di concentramento, il paradigma biopolitico nascosto della modernità in cui città e casa sono diventate indiscernibili e la possibilità di distinguere tra il nostro corpo biologico e il nostro corpo politico ci è stata tolta una volta per tutte. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn’t convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. In The Birth of (...) Hedonism, Kurt Lampe provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. -/- The Birth of Hedonism thoroughly and sympathetically reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus’s atheism and Hegesias’s pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism’s relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the “new Cyrenaicism” of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker. (shrink)

Individuals’ implicit theories that people’s character is fixed versus malleable are associated with their holding beliefs that morality is primarily determined by fulfilling prescribed duties versus upholding basic rights of others, respectively. Three studies provide evidence that the ability to recognize that a situation can legitimately be considered from a moral point of view is interactively dependent upon the nature of perceivers’ implicit theories and the extent to which the issue involves a violation that emphasizes a failure to fulfill a (...) prescribed duty versus a failure to uphold a fundamental right of others. The studies experimentally manipulated the characteristics of a hypothetical business situation to involve either a duty-based violation or a rights-based violation or no behavioral violation. In addition, Study 1 experimentally manipulated subjects’ implicit theories, while Studies 2 and 3 measured subjects’ chronically held implicit theories. Collectively, the studies provide consistent evidence that entity theorists have greater moral awareness than incremental theorists when considering situations involving duty-based violations, while incremental theorists have greater moral awareness than entity theorists when considering situations involving rights-based violations, and moral awareness is not significantly different for perceivers who are neither strongly entity nor incremental theorists, when considering situations involving duty- versus rights-based violations. Study 3 also found evidence of a moderated-mediated association between violation type and moral intentions, through moral awareness as a mediator, moderated by perceivers’ implicit theories. (shrink)

Bu çalışmada, düşünme ile karşılaşmalar arasındaki içkin ilişkinin irdelenmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Karşılaşmalar içinden yaratıcı düşünmenin sahih bir analizini yapabilmek için, antik dönemden modern döneme kadar düşünce tarihi içinden bir güzergah izlenecektir. Bu anlamda, temel amaç olarak, içinde kritik düşünürlerin düşüncelerinin karşılaşarak hep biraz fazlasını açığa vurarak ilerlediği düşünsel bir patikanın izi sürülecektir. Buradaki, biraz fazlası ifadesi önemlidir. Çünkü o, biraz fazlası, kendini hep daha fazla kritik ve üretici karşılaşmalar içinden devam ettirmek isteyen yaratıcı düşünmenin edimsel gücüyle ilgilidir. Bunu açığa çıkarmak adına, (...) trajik diyaloglarda köklenen ve devam ederek Deleuze düşüncesine ve belki de ötesine uzanan eleştirel düşünmenin bir yolu takip edilecektir. Bu yönüyle, iki trajik yazar olan Sophocles ve Euripides’ in düşüncesinden, Nietzsche, Heidegger ve Deleuze düşüncesine kadar kritik düşünürler arasında gerçekleşen her bir kritik karşılaşmanın, yaratıcı düşünmenin edimsel gücü olarak kendini hep yeniden açığa vurduğu iddia edilecektir. Bu iddia ortaya konulurken, öznellik temelli ve akılcı bir eksende hareket eden ve yaratıcı düşünmenin gücünü zayıflatan geleneksel düşünce, Platon düşüncesi merkeze alınarak eleştirilecektir. (shrink)

Leaders, particularly new leaders, seek to establish high levels of trust, as it has been associated with higher levels of effectiveness and group outcomes. This study is designed to understand how trust changes and develops for leaders in a new role and the implications of that change. Although calls for research on trust over time have been made for the past 2 decades, our knowledge of this phenomenon is still quite limited. The findings indicate that leader and unit performance is (...) a function not only of absolute trust level, but is also affected by the direction and magnitude of change in trust across time periods, with the highest levels of effectiveness being associated with leaders who exhibited an increase in trust from the group over time. The data also suggest that the direction and rate at which trust grew was determined by initial expectations and transformational leadership behaviors. (shrink)

Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as (...) subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals’ options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual’s time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe. (shrink)

Two distinct attitudes have been adopted by investigators in the field of the sociology of knowledge. One of them may be called speculative; the other, empirical. The central interest of an investigator having the speculative attitude lies in developing a theory of the sociology of knowledge. The central interest of investigators having the empirical attitude lies in finding out or explaining concrete phenomena; the theory is employed, implicitly or explicity, for this purpose. The existence of the two attitudes may be (...) in part explained, as far as the German sociology of knowledge is concerned, by reference to the history of this school, which has grown out of and has been determined by a Marxist and materialistic philosophy, and especially by the use of this philosophy as a political instrument in the struggle of the emerging proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This statement, however, must be supplemented by a short location of the four most important contributors to the theory of the German sociology of knowledge. Max Scheler approaches the problem phenomenologically; he was the first and only one to ask the fundamental question, “What is knowledge?” Karl Mannheim, though markedly influenced by the Marxist viewpoint, particularly by Lukács, seems to me more adequately characterized by stressing his development from a more exclusively speculative to a more decidedly empirical attitude, which latter is especially evident in his most recent book, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. Alexander von Schelting's main contribution is his thorough logical analysis of Mannheim's theory in the light of Max Weber's methodology. Ernst Grünwald has given the most complete survey of the forerunners, the history, and the various contributions of the sociology of knowledge. These four thinkers are indirectly dependent on the historically determined emphasis of the movement on ideology in that they remain on the level of a theoretical discussion without arriving at factual research. (shrink)

Die spekulative Frage, wie das Denken sich und somit ein Selbst denken kann, ist die prinzipientheoretische Grundfrage der Philosophie. In ihr ist auch die transzendentale Frage nach den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit des Denkens eines Gegenstandes überhaupt enthalten. Wie sie darin enthalten ist und inwiefern die transzendentale Fragestellung auf die spekulative verweist und ihrer bedarf, wird im Anschluß an Kant zu zeigen sein, denn die spekulative Frage ist nicht die Ausgangsfrage Kantens. Kant geht aus von der Antinomie von empiristischem Skeptizismus und (...) ontologischem Dogmatismus und spielt sie an der Differenz von Ding und Denken durch, die dieser Antinomie zugrundeliegt. Die Ontologie wird darum von ihm belehrt, daß sie das Gedankending nicht mit dem Gegenstand der Erfahrung und das Denken nicht mit dem Erkennen verwechseln dürfe. Der Empirismus wird hingegen belehrt, daß die Gegen-stände der Erfahrung und ihre Zusammensetzungen kein Gegebenes, sondern ein vom Denken mit Bezug auf das Anschauungsmaterial Gemachtes sind. Die Differenz von Ding und Denken bleibt solcherart in Kants transzendentaler Frage nach den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit des Denkens eines Gegenstandes überhaupt aufbewahrt. Sie macht sich in Kants Antworten auf diese Frage aber auch geltend und bleibt als bloße Differenz von Verstandesspontaneität und rezeptiver Sinnlichkeit der blinde Fleck, um den seine Argumentationen kreisen. Die ersten vier Kapitel des vorliegenden Buches folgen diesem Kreisgang der Kantischen Beweisführung. Das Beweisziel: die transzendentallogische Entdeckung der Formen des Denkens eines Gegenstandes überhaupt, versuchen die Kapitel 5 und 6 einzulösen, indem - im Gegensatz zur ‚exoterischen‘ Lehre Kantens und zur nach-idealistischen Standardinterpretation des Kritizismus - die Vereinbarung von transzendentalem Idealismus und empirischem Realismus nicht in einem Apriori gesucht wird, das schlechterdings mit dem ‚Verstande‘ zu identifizieren wäre, sondern das gegenstandskonstitutive Verstandesapriori vielmehr aus ursprünglichen - die Differenz von Verstand und Sinnlichkeit allererst ermöglichenden - Weisen der Synthesis entwickelt wird. Diese genetische Grundlegung des Apriori ist anhand der Prinzipien der klassischen Logik und einer Analyse des Seinssinnes der Kopula “ist” als transzendentallogische Differenzierung der Urteilssynthesis durchzuführen und mit Bezug auf die Gegebenheitsweisen Raum und Zeit durch eine korrespondierende transzendental-phänomenologische Analyse zu vervollständigen. Da das genetische Apriori aber nicht unmittelbar, sondern nur vermittels der reflexiv-synthetischen Bewußtseinsstruktur auf die Kantischen Gegenstandskategorien bezogen werden kann, bleibt in Fortführung des Nachweises der Vollständigkeit der Kantischen Kategorientafel die spekulative Frage zu beantworten, wie Synthesis (Vermittlung) und damit das Denken selbst zu denken ist. Dieser Aufgabe und den damit untrennbar verbundenen Problemen der Verhältnisbestimmung von transzendentaler und formaler Logik, sowie von regulativer und konstitutiver Apriorität, sind die letzten vier Kapitel gewidmet, wobei in diesem Problemzusammenhang der Begriff der Transzendentalphilosophie in Auseinandersetzung mit einigen ihrer vor- und nach-kantischen Positionen noch näher zu klären sein wird. Wollte man das Ergebnis dieser Klärung vorweg zusammenfassen, dann ließe sich in Abwandlung eines oft zitierten Kantischen Satzes sagen, daß die transzendentale Logik seit Platon keinen Schritt rückwärts und mit Kant erst einen Schritt vorwärts hat tun dürfen und folglich schon von den ältesten Zeiten her nahezu vollendet sei. Vordergründig betrachtet, relativiert dieses Resultat den historischen Anspruch, den Kant an seine ‚Revolution der Denkungsart‘ geknüpft hat, es bekräftigt dafür jedoch um so mehr den systematischen Anspruch, den die Transzendentalphilosophie als Prinzipientheorie erheben und auch einlösen muß. (shrink)

1. Philosophy of Science. The term “philosophy of science” is used here to refer to the study of the approaches and methodologies of the sciences. By “approach” is understood the totality of the presuppositions of a given science : more precisely, both philosophical and scientific presuppositions—that is, categories, postulates, and premises as conditions—and “existential” presuppositions. By “methodology” is understood the intellectual-emotional structure of a given science—that is, its categories, postulates, and premises as characteristics, as well as its concepts, methods, and (...) techniques. Further, I advocate understanding a given science through a study of its approach and of its methodology. Finally, I submit that the best understanding of either of the two is impossible without the study of the other. More specifically, I advocate the consideration of a particular science as a given, and the interpretation of its intellectual structure or methodology ; and then the study of its presuppositions or underlying approach. (shrink)

Arendt's book is an analysis of the vita activa, which comprises the three human activities of labor, work, and action. Her presentation involves a critique of modern and current conceptions of them and of many other social phenomena, and an emphasis on distinctions customarily neglected. The interpretation of her book, disregarding the many factual statements it contains, proceeds in a theoretical vein, analyzing her major conceptions, and then turns practical, asking what we as social scientists who listen to her must (...) do (focusing on ?behavior? and ?action?, ?values?, the means?end scheme, and man's historicity and dualism). The paper concludes with a brief explication of areas of research seen to emerge out of Arendt's work. (shrink)