The findings of this article increase our understanding of corporate social responsibility from the consumers' perspective in a Chinese setting. Based on primary data collected via a self-administered survey in Shanghai and Hong Kong and results of similar studies conducted in Europe and the United States, we provide evidence to show that Chinese consumers are more supportive of CSR. We also show that Carroll's pyramid of responsibilities can be applied in China. We evaluated the importance placed by Chinese consumers on (...) the four responsibilities of firms - economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic - and find that economic responsibilities are most important while philanthropic responsibilities are of least importance. The nature of these differences is important for firms intending to use corporate social responsibility for strategic purposes. (shrink)

In his PhD proposal, now published as Seeing Sociological, Garfinkel [2006] formulated action in terms of a mutually constitutive structure—the Noesis-Noema Structures. This structure can be traced to Aaron Gurwitsch’s gestalt psychology and Law of Good Gestalt which theorises how participants prioritise functional Gestalts over other possible meanings of what is perceivable in their surroundings. While Gurwitsch illustrated his theory using images, in this paper we revisit Gurwitsch’s theory in light of the advances in recording real-time interaction to consider Gestalt (...) in spatio-temporality of real-time interaction. We consider the Law of Good Gestalt in terms of the dimensions of time and space, and postulate two analytical principles—the Principle of Good Momentary Gestalt and the Principle of Good Temporal Gestalt—for analysing a multi-angle video segment of a monologue taken from a training event. The analysis examines how the monologue was embedded in a multi-layer projection structure, so that during the time of the monologue, the trainer and trainees can be seen as achieving a transition between one activity to another while sustaining the frame of the training event. Through this, the analysis highlights the multi-layered structure of participants’ field of perception that constitutes their experience of the social activity, and explores a “method” to reconstruct such a structured field of perception through re-coupling meanings to the assemblages of multimodal resources recoverable on video. (shrink)

In a world which can be increasingly described as a “society of organizations,” it is incumbent upon organizational researchers to account for the role of organizations in determining the well-being of societies and the individuals that comprise them. Workplace spirituality is a young area of inquiry with potentially strong relevance to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and societies. Previous literature has not examined ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality that organizations might expect based upon the co-existence of multiple ethical work (...) climates, nor has previous literature accounted for the relevance of the cosmopolitan source of moral reasoning in the ethical treatment of workplace spirituality. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by articulating two such ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality: the “quiet desperation” dilemma and the instrumentality dilemma. Moreover, I propose two theoretical contexts that foster “both-and” rather than “either-or” thinking, thereby mitigating the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas. For the “quiet desperation” dilemma, I propose a person–organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality. For the instrumentality dilemma, I propose a multiparadigm approach to workplace spirituality research to avoid the privileging of one research interest over another. I conclude with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh (Int J Soc Robot 1:217–221, 2009) argues that robot ethics should investigate what interaction with robots can do to humans rather than focusing on the robot’s moral status. We should ask what robots do to our sociality and whether human–robot interaction can contribute to the human good and human flourishing. This paper extends Coeckelbergh’s call and investigate what it means to live with disembodied AI-powered agents. We address the following question: Can the human–AI interaction contribute to our moral (...) development? We present an empirically informed philosophical analysis of how the AI personal assistant Siri changes its users’ way of life, based on the responses obtained from 20 semi-directive individual interviews with Siri users. We identify changes in the users’ social interaction associated with the adoption of Siri. These changes include: (1) the indirect effect of reducing opportunities of human interaction, (2) the second-order effect of diminished expectations toward each other in a community, and (3) the acquired preference to obtain hassle-free interaction with Siri over human interaction. We examine them in relation to concerns that are voiced in the current debates over the rise of AI, namely the suspicion that humans could become overly reliant on AI (Danaher 2019) and the worry that social AI could impede on moral development (Fröding and Peterson, Ethics Inf Technol 23:207–214, 2012; Li, Ethics Inf Technol 23:543–550, 2021). We analyze the ethical costs that come from these changes in light of virtue ethics and address potential objections along the way. We end by offering directions for thinking about how to live with AI personal assistant while preserving favorable conditions for moral development. (shrink)

This paper empirically re(dis)covers a moment of conjuncture within Leicester when an opportunity opened up through multicultural/anti-racist education for schools and colleges to develop their ‘multicultural capital’. It does this through the thematic analysis of the key proximate document Report of the Working Party on Multicultural Education as well as drawing on interview data provided by two important agents who helped to implement Leicester’s/Leicestershire’s moment of multicultural education. This moment generated a symbolic, ideational, and conceptual shift within Leicester’s education provision (...) toward a more culturally inclusive position that began to recognise the cultural capital of non-white students. However, this moment was to be lost in the ‘neoliberal epoch’. It is argued in this paper that neoliberal education policy/practice has become an enabling mechanism for renascent colonial ideology. By re(dis)covering this vision for the official recognition of non-white cultural capital, this paper demonstrates the possibilities for alternative directions within Leicester’s schools and colleges that can challenge neoliberal and colonial conceptions of education. It suggests that there are still spaces and structures that can be re(dis)covered in order for this vision to be enabled. (shrink)

Perceptual grouping is fundamental to many auditory processes. The Iambic–Trochaic Law (ITL) is a default grouping strategy, where rhythmic alternations of duration are perceived iambically (weak‐strong), while alternations of intensity are perceived trochaically (strong‐weak). Some argue that the ITL is experience dependent. For instance, French speakers follow the ITL, but not as consistently as German speakers. We hypothesized that learning about prosodic patterns, like word stress, modulates this rhythmic grouping. We tested this idea by training French adults on a German‐like (...) stress contrast. Individuals who showed better phonological learning had more ITL‐like grouping, particularly over duration cues. In a non‐phonological condition, French adults were trained using identical stimuli, but they learned to attend to acoustic variation that was not linguistic. Here, no learning effects were observed. Results thus suggest that phonological learning can modulate low‐level auditory grouping phenomena, but it is constrained by the ability of individuals to learn from short‐term training. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emotional import of literary devices deployed in fiction. Reflecting on the often-favored approach in the analytic tradition that locates fictional characters, events, and narratives as sources of readers’ emotions, I attempt to broaden the scope of analysis by accounting for how literary devices trigger non-cognitive emotions. I argue that giving more expansive consideration to literary devices by which authors present content facilitates a better understanding of how fiction engages emotion. In doing so, I also explore the (...) somatic dimension of reading fiction. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in the role of non-cognitive affective responses in the philosophical literature on fiction and emotion. This flurry of scholarly interest is partly a reaction to cognitivist accounts of fiction and emotion that have been found to be inadequate. The inadequacy is particularly salient when this approach is employed to account for narrative horror. Cognitivist conceptions of the emotion engendered by narrative horror prove to be too restrictive. Cognitivist accounts also fail to give the formal devices (...) and stylistic elements deployed in narrative horror a proper place within the spectator’s emotional engagement with it. In this paper I propose an alternative conception of the emotion “horror” that incorporates non-cognitive affective responses. I argue that this conception of “horror” is more fine-grained than the one characterized as a cognitivist approach. It captures more literary examples of the horror experience and it accommodates better the fear of the unknown. It also makes possible an aesthetics of horror in which formal devices and stylistic elements are given their proper place. (shrink)

The Apostolic Faith Mission of SA is the largest indigenous Pentecostal denomination in Southern Africa. The AFM followed the nationalist emphasis on apartness and by the end of the 1950s consisted of four separate churches: a White church, and three daughter churches — a Black, a Coloured and an Indian. This article attempts to outline events, persons, institutions and values that might be grouped under the heading `mission effort', along with insights and comments from personal experience.

Fairness of Artificial Intelligence decisions has become a big challenge for governments, companies, and societies. We offer a theoretical contribution to consider AI ethics outside of high-level and top-down approaches, based on the distinction between “reality” and “world” from Luc Boltanski. To do so, we provide a new perspective on the debate on AI fairness and show that criticism of ML unfairness is “realist”, in other words, grounded in an already instituted reality based on demographic categories produced by institutions. Second, (...) we show that the limits of “realist” fairness corrections lead to the elaboration of “radical responses” to fairness, that is, responses that radically change the format of data. Third, we show that fairness correction is shifting to a “domination regime” that absorbs criticism, and we provide some theoretical and practical avenues for further development in AI ethics. Using an ad hoc critical space stabilized by reality tests alongside the algorithm, we build a shared responsibility model which is compatible with the radical response to fairness issues. Finally, this paper shows the fundamental contribution of pragmatic sociology theories, insofar as they afford a social and political perspective on AI ethics by giving an active role to material actors such as database formats on ethical debates. In a context where data are increasingly numerous, granular, and behavioral, it is essential to renew our conception of AI ethics on algorithms in order to establish new models of responsibility for companies that take into account changes in the computing paradigm. (shrink)

While most contemporary proposals of ethics for machines draw upon principle-based ethics, a number of recent studies attempt to build machines capable of acting virtuously. This paper discusses the promises and limitations of building virtue-ethical machines. Taking inspiration from various philosophical traditions—including Greek philosophy (Aristotle), Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi), phenomenology (Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus) and contemporary virtue theory (Julia Annas)—we argue for a novel model of machine ethics we call the “skillful-expert model.” This model sharply distinguishes human virtues and their machine (...) analogues and rejects the direct transposition of human virtues to machines, as suggested by most proposals for machine virtues. Instead, we propose that human skills are better candidates for machine virtues. (shrink)

Biomimicry as a design concept is indeed revolutionary in its implications for human systems of production, but it is a concept in need of further philosophical elaboration and development. To this end certain philosophical principles underlying the organization of living systems generally are identified and it is argued that not only our systems of production but also our psychocultural patterns of desire need to be reorganized in accordance with these principles if we are collectively to achieve the integration into nature (...) to which biomimicry aspires. Even were this reorganization to be effected however, there is still an ethically momentous ambiguity in biomimicry that needs to be teased out before we can be assured that biomimicry will indeed produce the bioinclusive sustainability outcomes that it seems to promise. (shrink)

This book presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami's films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work. Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami's later films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will (...) Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love"--Back cover. (shrink)

_Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art_ features pairs of newly commissioned essays by some of the leading theorists working in the field today. Brings together fresh debates on eleven of the most controversial issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art Topics addressed include the nature of beauty, aesthetic experience, artistic value, and the nature of our emotional responses to art. Each question is treated by a pair of opposing essays written by eminent scholars, and especially commissioned (...) for the volume. Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for further discussion. Will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in aesthetics, while also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers. (shrink)

Near the end of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the book’s eponymous protagonist recalls visiting the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes with his friend Marie.1 The zoo is in bad shape; the pair overhear children questioning their parents: “Mais il est où? Pourquoi il se cache? Pourquoi il ne bouge pas? Est-ce qu’il est mort?” Sebald writes:I recollect that I myself saw a family of fallow deer gathered together by a manger of hay near the perimeter fence of a dusty (...) enclosure where no grass grew, a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm. Marie particularly asked me to take a photograph of this beautiful group, and as she did so, said Austerlitz, she said... (shrink)

Taking the work of Amartya Sen as a point of departure, a case is made that there may be no single policy with as many potential benefits as a guaranteed job at a living wage–benefits package for every person ready and willing to work. The case is outlined in 4 arguments. Along the way, numerous social and economic costs of unemployment and underemployment and benefits of full employment are catalogued. Reference is also made to how the right to employment is (...) supported by a variety of arguments for social justice, an area in which Sen has made important contributions. (shrink)

This article compares the ways in which the classic Western philosophical division between the private and public spheres is challenged by an apparently disparate pair of thinkers—Confucius and Jane Addams. It is argued that insofar as the public and private distinction is that between the sphere of the family and that outside of the family, Confucius and Addams offer ways of rethinking that distinction. While Confucius endorses a porous relation between these realms, Addams advocates a relation that fosters reconstructive transformation (...) of each the private and public spheres. Because Confucius and Addams both challenge the idea of a rigid separation between the private and public, while at the same time differing from one another in important ways, a comparative engagement of their views is performed, with the suggestion that Confucians might glean very much from Addams, while contemporary feminists might do the same from both she and Confucius. (shrink)

At present, the task of enforcing UK competition law lies almost exclusively with a public regulator. One of the aims of the Competition Bill which is currently before Parliament is to enable private litigants to seek redress through the courts for harm caused by unlawful anti-competitive conduct. This article considers the appropriate role of private actions in the enforcement of competition law. It is argued that private actions are of both instrumental and intrinsic value: not only can private actions act (...) as a deterrent against harmful behaviour, but they also enable those harmed by unlawful anti-competitive conduct to seek compensation for injury from the perpetrator. But private enforcement suffers from several shortcomings which are not shared by public enforcement. Accordingly, it is argued that although there is a strong case for ‘privatizing competition regulation’, private enforcement should be used to supplement, rather than supplant, public enforcement. This article also explores the problems within a regulatory scheme which combines both private and public enforcement, drawing on the experience of other jurisdictions to shed light on how such ‘aggregation problems’ might best be resolved. Finally, UK competition regulation is examined from an enforcement perspective. It is argued that the UK Competition Bill has the potential to provide a significantly more effective and efficient scheme of regulation. Whether or not this potential is realized will depend on a number of factors, particularly the ability of UK courts to interpret the legislative prohibitions in a coherent, predictable, and transparent manner which is consistent with the economic theory upon which competition regulation is based. (shrink)

Traditional notions of civic education often introduce privilege and reproduce Eurocentric notions of citizenship. Proponents of cultural citizenship champion Black cultural knowledge, and critical race pedagogies to help marginalized individuals, including students of color, actualize their agentic selves. This manuscript presents three vignettes to demonstrate how teachers implemented the Black Lives Matter at School’s 13 Guiding Principles to develop Black cultural citizenship with students. Three salient aspects emerged: (1) the need for students to be active contributors in the current movement (...) for Black liberation; (2) a call to support students unlearning and relearning Black history; and (3) instruction that provides opportunities for students to recognize and challenge systems of oppression. (shrink)

In Beyond Moral Judgment, Alice Crary defends a version of moral objectivism which turns on the idea that participation in moral life involves acquired affective proclivities: subjective capacities which nevertheless allow us to be receptive to objective features of the world. In this article, I draw out key aspects and implications of her account with reference to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2014 film The Look of Silence, a companion piece to 2012's The Act of Killing. The film depicts a series of confrontations (...) between optometrist Adi Rukun and warlords and gangsters involved in massacres perpetrated during Indonesia's anti-communist purges. Many of the interviews were carried out under the pretext of conducting eye tests, and the optometric equipment Rukun affixes to the faces of the perpetrators – who often appear quite cavalier about or even proud of their deeds – functions as a stark metaphor for their failures to see the meaning and consequences of their actions. As I work to show, there is something disq... (shrink)

This book foregrounds postcolonial theory as a lens through which to explore the concept of 'global heritage' and argues that the meso-level spaces of institutional ethos and cultural pedagogy must take an active role in the pursuit of cultural equality. Through interviews and accounts of observational, eampirical data, chapters draw attention to how the cultural capital of Global Majority students is institutionally positioned as a racialised and inferior cultural capital that is constantly required to 'prove itself' in the Western school. (...) Ultimately, the book contributes to international discussion on decolonising education and the spaces within in order to enact change, further the field, and more precisely to recognise the importance of global heritage as vital to a transformative understanding of the West's cultural identity within a globalised world. This book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate researchers in the fields of multicultural education, school leadership, management and administration, and education policy and politics more broadly. Those interested in social justice, ideas of cultural and racial equality, and the sociology of education more broadly will also benefit from the volume. (shrink)

The proposed paper wishes to reflect on the conception of non-self and Shunyta and how these ideas are discerned in the process of remaking of Man as it is understood in the classical Indian philosophy. The concept of non-self is very carefully elaborated in such a way that it could define the unique relationship that thehuman being have with the world of existence where remaking of man is an absolute necessity to transact with the uncertain and indescribable phenomenal world. The (...) paper would prefer to review this aspect based on the method employed by the Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy, using the idea of shnyata where allphenomenal experiences are delineated based on selflessness of the phenomenal world and of the subjective self (dharmanairatmya and pudgalanairatmya). It is argued here that the conception of self is understandable only contextually where a notional subjective self is in contact with phenomenal happenings of the world, but a proper understanding of either of the entities would reveal the conception of selflessness and the notional self. The procedure of “remaking ofman” is explained as the proper discernment of essencelessness of subjective self. The notion of a real self (pudgala) is clearly understood by reconstructing the psychophysical personality of man that the notion of selflessness is revealed by explaining the function of his dispositions and feelings. A proper conception of sunyata and the procedure remaking of man are intrinsically connected. (shrink)

If critical theory is meant to be the “ruthless criticism of all that exists”, on what basis can critical theory ground its evaluative claims without being self-defeating? Is there a normative ground on which critique can stand? For Jürgen Habermas, critical theory has a ground embedded in the normative logic of communicative interactions. On the contrary, for Michel Foucault, critique can stand on no ground: critique is the refusal of any given ground and the opening up of possibilities for “thinking (...) and acting differently.” In this dissertation, I will show that a reconsideration of the Habermas-Foucault debate can be helpful for elucidating the normative foundations and the tasks of critical theory. Given the incommensurability of Habermas’s and Foucault’s positions, this elucidation aims to forge a non-assimilatory synthesis between them. Juxtaposing Habermas’s emphasis on moral universality and the participant’s perspective with Foucault’s focus on objectivating problematization, I will suggest that, taken in isolation, their critical theories are inadequate, and a ‘synthesis’ of their respective positions can be found in a “critical conception of participatory normativity.” This conception of normativity, which is in some sense outlined in the critical theories of Theodor Adorno and Judith Butler, will offer a way of understanding the normative foundations of critical theory. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that mammalian chromosomes contain discretecis‐acting loci that control replication timing, mitotic condensation, and stability of entire chromosomes. Disruption of the large non‐coding RNA gene ASAR6 results in late replication, an under‐condensed appearance during mitosis, and structural instability of human chromosome 6. Similarly, disruption of the mouse Xist gene in adult somatic cells results in a late replication and instability phenotype on the X chromosome. ASAR6 shares many characteristics with Xist, including random mono‐allelic expression and asynchronous replication timing. (...) Additional “chromosome engineering” studies indicate that certain chromosome rearrangements affecting many different chromosomes display this abnormal replication and instability phenotype. These observations suggest that all mammalian chromosomes contain “inactivation/stability centers” that control proper replication, condensation, and stability of individual chromosomes. Therefore, mammalian chromosomes contain four types ofcis‐acting elements, origins, telomeres, centromeres, and “inactivation/stability centers”, all functioning to ensure proper replication, condensation, segregation, and stability of individual chromosomes. (shrink)

Nature in its wider cosmic sense is not at risk from human exploitation and predation. To see life on Earth as but a local manifestation of this wider, indestructable and inexhaustible nature is to shield ourselves from despair over the fate of our Earth. But to take this wide view also appears to make interventionist political action on behalf of nature-which is to say, conservation-superfluous. If we identify with nature in its widest sense, as deep ecology prescribes, then the “self-defence” (...) argument usually advanced by deep ecologists in support of conservation appears not to work. I argue that the need for eco-activism can be reconciled with a rejection of despair within the framework of deep ecology, and that in the process of this reconciliation the meaning of the term conservation acquires a new, spiritual dimension. (shrink)

This book brings together philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried's art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried's analyses of absorption and theatricality, and the accounts of modernism he develops from them, can throw new light on problems in aesthetics, and questions of authenticity, scepticism, modernity, and politics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection contributes to current debates in aesthetics, modernism studies, literary studies, art theory, (...) and both analytic and continental philosophy. (shrink)

A logical empiricist “baseline statement” can formalize some propositions established by a body of evidence or set of observations. However, it may not necessarily capture, of two propositions it entails, whether all the subsets of the evidence that establish one proposition also establish the other, vice versa, or neither. Yet, according to this paper, which obtains should sometimes matter for confirmation. It illustrates by showing how this “evidential dependence” can be used to address problems with generalizations of grue-like predicates, and (...) do so still within a very simple broadly Hempelian framework. (shrink)

Consequentialism and the moral agent question -- Motivation ethics -- Deontology and the moral agent question -- Moral demandingness and two concepts of evaluation -- The problem of special relationships -- Global duties and the state -- Legitimacy and the good -- Interpersonal comparisons of the good -- On the scope of reason.

In this article, I address the matter of what James's Pragmatism has to offer someone today, a full century after its publication. Toward this end, I underscore the theme of meliorism present in the text, focusing on notions of "promise" employed by James at several points therein. James's emphasis on "promise" is predicated upon a deeply intimate relationship between humans and the world, such that our relationship to the universe is much like that which exists between promising parties. I argue (...) that this aspect of James's discussion undergirds his conception of pragmatism as a method of inquiry and theory of truth capable of improving the human condition. I conclude that the "promise" of Pragmatism is the basis for at least one worthy response to the question of what James's century-old text has to offer someone today. (shrink)