This paper investigates ethical perceptions among Hong Kong Chinese managers of themselves and peers according to age, location of education and employment (local vs. multinational), based upon responses to thirteen potentially unethical situations.The major conclusions of the study are: (1) there is little consistency among perceptions of ethical situations; (2) Hong Kong managers perceive their peers as more unethical than themselves; (3) ethical perceptions in some situations are affected by age and to a lesser extent, place of education; and (4) (...) significant interactions were found between age and the nature of employer, as well as between the place of education and the nature of employer. (shrink)

Ethical perspectives on regional, rural, and remote healthcare often, understandably and importantly, focus on inequities in access to services. In this commentary, we take the opportunity to examine the implications of normalizing metrocentric views, values, knowledge, and orientations, evidenced by the recent (2022) New South Wales inquiry into health outcomes and access to hospital and health services in regional, rural and remote New South Wales, for contemporary rural governance and justice debates. To do this, we draw on the feminist inspired (...) approach to rural health ethics involving analysis of power relationships developed by Simpson and McDonald and related ideas from critical health sociology. In presenting this analysis, we extend contemporary thought about spatial health inequities and structural violence. (shrink)

In an effort to build on the current knowledge of ethical behaviour in Asia this paper proposes to replicate existing ethical research and to investigate specific questions relating to intra-cultural differences in Hong Kong. Four major conclusions were derived from this descriptive empirical study. A statistically significant correlation exists between age and ethical beliefs, with older employees less likely to express agreement to an unethical action than younger employees. In contrast to many previous studies no statistically significant differences in ethical (...) beliefs were found in relation to gender, level in the organisation, company size, and whether the respondent worked in a multinational or local company. Significant differences in responses to ethical dilemmas were identified between local and expatriate personnel with expatriate respondents indicating a lower level of agreement to unethical actions. For local respondents, of Hong Kong origin, there was no significant correlation between level of education, religiosity, years of business experience, functional origin and their ethical responses. (shrink)

This paper introduces and defends a new principle for when a structural equation model is apt for analyzing actual causation. Any such analysis in terms of these models has two components: a recipe for reading claims of actual causation off an apt model, and an articulation of what makes a model apt. The primary focus in the literature has been on the first component. But the problem of structural isomorphs has made the second especially pressing (Hall 2007; Hitchcock 2007a). Those (...) with realist sympathies have reason to resist the standard response to this problem, which introduces a normative parameter into the metaphysics (Hall 2007; Halpern and Hitchcock 2010, 2015; Halpern 2016a; Menzies 2017; Gallow 2021). However, the only alternative solution in the literature leaves central questions unanswered (Blanchard and Schaffer 2017). I propose an independently motivated aptness requirement, Evident Mediation, that provides the missing details and resolves the structural isomorph problem without need for a normative parameter. (shrink)

This book challenges readers to rethink rural health ethics. Traditional approaches to health ethics are often urban-centric, making implicit assumptions about how values and norms apply in health care practice, and as such may fail to take into account the complexity, depth, richness, and diversity of the rural context. There are ethically relevant differences between rural health practice and rural health services delivery and urban practice and delivery that go beyond the stereotypes associated with rural life and rural health services. (...) This book examines key values in the rural context that have not been fully explored or taken into account when we examine health ethics issues, including the values of community and place, and a need to “revalue” relationships. It also advocates for a greater attention to meso and macro level analysis in rural health ethics as being critical to ethical analysis of rural health care. This book is essential reading for those involved in health ethics, rural health policy and governance, and for rural health providers. (shrink)

: This paper examines the ethical status of animals and nature within the thought of Mary Whiton Calkins. Though Calkins held that her self-psychology and absolute personalistic idealism were compatible in many ways, the two schools of thought offer different conceptions of personhood with respect to animals and nature. On the one hand, Calkins's self-psychology classified animals and nature as non-persons, due to the fact that self-psychology viewed animals and nature as physical entities bereft of the psychical qualities necessary for (...) personhood. On the other hand, Calkins's absolute personalistic idealism classified animals and nature as persons, due to the absolute personalistic idealist understanding of the universe as ultimately mental and personal. Because Calkins's ethics requires the ethical individual to will for the benefit of all human beings, an ethics that adopts Calkins's psychological conception of personhood promotes an anthropocentrism that views animals and nature as possessing merely instrumental value, while an ethics that adopts Calkins's philosophical conception of personhood views animals and nature as possessing intrinsic value. (shrink)

Compliments have received only cursory attention from speech act theorists and are usually characterised as run-of-the-mill illocutionary acts. Yet both intentionalist and conventionalist theories of illocutionary force struggle to accommodate ordinary language uses of ‘compliment’. I argue that this is because there are in fact two kinds of compliment: illocutionary compliments and perlocutionary compliments. This account illuminates the practice of complimenting, as well as its converse, insulting, and illustrates the complex relationship between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect.

In this paper, I offer a novel argument for why cat-calling is wrong. After warding off the objection that cat-calls are compliments and therefore morally benign, I show that it cannot be the semantic content of cat-calls which makes cat-calling wrong, because some cat-calls have seemingly benign content yet seem to wrong their targets (usually women and LGBTQ people) nonetheless. Instead, cat-calling is wrong because it silences targets, by preventing them from blocking cat-callers’ presuppositions of authority, and exploits them, by (...) forcing them into the demeaning position of acting as if they consider cat-callers to have authority over them. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between banking access and farm household investment. The assets we examine are non-retirement financial assets, retirement financial assets, and real estate assets not owned by the farm operation. Using data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey and the universe of commercial bank branches from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, we find that distance to commercial banks is negatively related to the degree of investment in each of these assets for farm households. We also find that (...) internet availability, as measured by the share of farms in the county with internet, is positively associated with farm households’ investment in each of these assets. Further our results show that farm households that are located in the South have the lowest bank access as measured by bank proximity and internet availability. (shrink)

This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. "First Philosophy," the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald's philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of "existence," "being," "experience," the "subject," or "language," with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within (...) Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy. Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the "death of philosophy," this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today. (shrink)

This dissertation begins by addressing the question of when a causal model is apt for deciding questions of actual causation with respect to some target situation. I first provide relevant background about causal models, explain what makes them promising as a tool for analyzing actual causation, and motivate the need for a theory of aptness as part of such an analysis (Chapter 1). I then define what it is for a model on a given interpretation to be accurate of, that (...) is, say only true things about, some target situation. This involves a systematization of various representational principles mentioned and/or discussed throughout the literature into a method of interpretation, which I propose be taken as standard (Chapter 2). Next, I explain and address two reasons for which accuracy as I’ve defined it is insufficient for aptness. The first reason – already discussed in the literature – is the problem of structural isomorphs. In response, I propose the aptness condition of Explicit Partial Mediation (Chapter 3). The second reason – which has yet to be noticed – is the problem of the indeterminacy of accuracy. As I demonstrate, a model is accurate of a target situation only relative to a set of background possibilities – what I call a modal profile. It follows that a model represents a situation only relative to some modal profile or other. I go on to discuss the ramifications of this observation for a theory of actual causation in terms of models. I argue that the relativity be taken at face value and built into our metaphysical account of causation, resulting in a view that I call causal relativism (Chapter 4). I explore one advantage of this view in detail: that the resulting account can defend the principle of strong proportionality against several objections (Chapter 5). Finally, I apply the earlier discussion of aptness to attempts to provide a semantics of counterfactuals in terms of causal models – an interventionist semantics. I show how just as a similarity semantics relies on an opaque notion of similarity, an interventionist semantics relies on an analogous notion of aptness. The challenge of articulating aptness thus undermines the claim that an interventionist semantics avoids representational problems inherent in a similarity semantics (Chapter 6). I close with a recap and suggestions for future research (Chapter 7). -/- . (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD begins from the premise that trauma can be better treated if it is better understood. To that end, this book builds a prismatic account of trauma, encompassing neuroscience, psychology, and phenomenology in order to establish that trauma is an embodied, adaptive response to a world without meaning.

In this paper I identify a distinctive kind of gaslighting: communicative gaslighting. Communicative gaslighters intentionally misrepresent the communicative properties of an utterance—their own or their target’s—in a way which functions to undermine the target’s confidence in her abilities as a communicator. I argue that we can gaslight people as both speakers and hearers, and about (among other properties) the locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary dimensions of utterances. Communicative gaslighting is concerning because not only does it undermine targets’ communicative agency, but also (...) it can contribute to a general decay of communicative conventions. (shrink)

This study sought to determine if hues overlayed on a video recording of a piano performance would systematically influence perception of its emotional arousal level. The hues were artificially added to a series of four short video excerpts of different performances using video editing software. Over two experiments 106 participants were sorted into 4 conditions, with each viewing different combinations of musical excerpts and hue combinations. Participants rated the emotional arousal depicted by each excerpt. Results indicated that the overall arousal (...) ratings were consistent with the nominal arousal of the selected excerpts. However, hues added to video produced no significant effect on arousal ratings, contrary to predictions. This could be due to the domination of the combined effects of other channels of information over the emotional effects of the hypothesized influence of hue on perceived performance. To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate the impact of these hues upon perceived arousal of music performance, and has implications for musical performers and stage lighting. Further research that investigates reactions during live performance and manipulation of a wider range of lighting hues, saturation and brightness levels, and editing techniques, is recommended to further scrutinize the veracity of the findings. (shrink)

There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a distinguished group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to 'emerge' from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of the will, and (...) the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality. (shrink)

A promising development in the philosophy of causation analyzes actual causation using structural equation models, i.e., “causal models”. This paper carefully considers what it means for an interpreted model to be accurate of its target situation. These considerations show, first, that our existing understanding of accuracy is inadequate. Further, and more controversially, they show that any causal model analysis is committed to a kind of relativism – a view whereby causation is a three-part relation holding between a cause, an effect, (...) and something else. In particular, insofar as a causal model analysis construes causation mind-and-language independently, it must treat causation as relative to a specification of background possibilities – i.e., a ‘modal profile.’ Or, so I argue. (shrink)

Christian morality has been of enormous significance in world history and still underpins moral notions today. In this groundbreaking volume, J. Ian H. McDonald explores the notion of Christian ethics and discusses its roots, its significance in developing moral standards throughout the world and its stability in the modern world. The Crucible of Christian Morality begins with a study of the ethos of early Christian communities, examining the relation of cosmic vision to moral attitude and authority, noting also the (...) types of moral discourse used, and tracing the roots of these developments to the Old Testament and to the ministry of Jesus. The second half of the book concentrates on selected moral themes, concerned with persons, with communities in societies and with virtue or moral excellence, situating them in the context of ancient cultural developments. (shrink)

The relationship between career counselling and widening participation is increasingly capturing the attention of educational researchers, especially those interested in its social justice implications. International research on first-in-family students demonstrates the continual class-based barriers they are faced with which influence their progression into and through higher education. Career counselling has an important role to play in both supporting first-in-family students to not only enter university but also set them on a career trajectory which allows them to fulfil their aspirations. However, (...) access to effective forms of career counselling remains fragmented and highly dependent on social class. This article explores how first-in-family students engage in what we call ‘DIY career counselling,’ where they draw on their informal networks and the internet to enhance their understanding of their future prospects and possible trajectories. Their efforts suggest a strong desire to learn more about what university can offer them and how they can position themselves advantageously in the job market; furthermore, their efforts also suggest a consumerist awareness that the career counselling on offer in their secondary schools was lacking. (shrink)

The expressivist theory in metaethics has a historical lineage dating back to the work of the great philosopher David Hume. Among the major metaethical alternatives to expressivism are constructivist theories, theories that have an origin in the work of another great philosopher, Immanuel Kant. One of the best-known and most influential recent formulations of such a view is due to John Rawls. There has been a great deal of discussion of the relationship between expressivism and deflationary theories of truth. In (...) stark contrast, there has been very little discussion of the relationship between constructivist theories and deflationary theories of truth. I argue that Rawlsian constructivists should adopt a minimalist theory of truth. (shrink)

Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education and Literature, Volume 5 in the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, is the main source of Nightingale’s work on the methodology of social science and her views on social reform. Here we see how she took her “call to service” into practice: by first learning how the laws of God’s world operate, one can then determine how to intervene for good. There is material on medical statistics, the census, pauperism and Poor (...) Law reform, the need for income security measures and better housing, on crime, gender and the family. Her comments on a new edition of The Dialogues of Plato are given, with their impact on the revision of the next edition. We see Nightingale’s condemnation of Plato’s “community of wives,” with her stirring approval of love (even outside marriage!), marriage and the family. In this volume also her views on natural science, education and literature are reported. Nightingale was an astute behind-the-scenes political activist. Society and Politics publishes (much of it for the first time) her correspondence with such leading political figures as Queen Victoria, W.E. Gladstone and J.S. Mill. There are notes and essays on public administration and personal observations on various members of royalty, prime ministers and ministers, and Indian viceroys. Nightingale’s support of the vote for women (contrary to much in the secondary literature) is here shown. Correspondence and notes on British general elections from 1834 to 1900 is reported, with letters to and for (Liberal) political candidates and fierce condemnations of Conservatives. Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary. (shrink)

In 2016 Pope Francis went to Lund in Sweden for a joint service with the Lutherans to begin the events marking the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Catholics have also been involved in conferences and other events that have been organized as part of this anniversary. The context and background to the Catholic Church's involvement is the Church's commitment to ecumenical dialogue made at the Second Vatican Council. The theological basis for that commitment is to be found in the Second (...) Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium and its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. This paper takes the opportunity of this anniversary to take stock of the progress of the ecumenical movement and notes some of the issues and challenges that have impacted upon it. As well as social and cultural factors these include the increasing importance of interreligious dialogue and its relationship to ecumenical dialogue. Ecumenists also have to take account of the widely varying interpretations of the Reformation offered by church historians. Finally the paper argues that in the Catholic Church perceptions of ecumenism often fail to take account of the many ways in which the Second Vatican Council significantly changed the global role and profile of the Catholic Church as a source and agent of peace and reconciliation on many different levels. Ecumenical engagement is an integral part of that continuing development which is increasingly acknowledged by political and religious leaders throughout the world. (shrink)

Do both the zoo and the mental hospital induce psychosis, as humans are treated as animals and animals are treated as humans? How have we looked at animals in the past, and how do we look at them today? How have zoos presented themselves, and their purpose, over time? In response to the emergence of environmental and animal studies, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, theorists, literature scholars, and historians around the world have begun to explore the significance of zoological parks, past and (...) present. Zoo Studies considers the modern zoo from a range of approaches and disciplines, united in a desire to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. The volume begins with an account of the first modern mental hospital, La Salpêtrière, established in 1656, and the first panoptical zoo, the menagerie at Versailles, created in 1662 by the same royal architect; the final chapter presents a choreographic performance that imagines the Toronto Zoo as a place where the human body can be inspired by animal bodies. From beginning to end, through interdisciplinary collaboration, this volume decentres the human subject and offers alternative ways of thinking about zoos and their inhabitants. This collection immerses readers in the lives of animals and their experiences of captivity and asks us to reflect on our own assumptions about both humans and animals. An original and groundbreaking work, Zoo Studies will change the way readers see nonhuman animals and themselves. (shrink)

Many online messages now contain emoji – these small images have quickly become an important means of communicating. Yet they have not yet been taken seriously in philosophy of language. In this exploratory paper, I attempt to remedy this neglect by analysing the communicative functions of emoji. I argue that emoji have at least three communicative functions. Firstly, they can serve a replicative function, in that they can play the same role as words and punctuation, thereby replicating the function of (...) existing written communicative devices. Secondly, they can serve a compensatory function, in the sense that they can be used to make up for features of face-to-face conversation which are lost in written online conversation. Thirdly, they can serve supplementary functions, in that we can perform new communicative acts with emoji which we could not previously perform either in written or face-to-face communication. (shrink)

This paper provides a general introduction to the use of causal models in the metaphysics of causation, specifically structural equation models and directed acyclic graphs. It reviews the formal framework, lays out a method of interpretation capable of representing different underlying metaphysical relations, and describes the use of these models in analyzing causation.

This paper addresses the question of what constitutes an apt interpreted model for the purpose of analyzing causation. I first collect universally adopted aptness principles into a basic account, flagging open questions and choice points along the way. I then explore various additional aptness principles that have been proposed in the literature but have not been widely adopted, the motivations behind their proposals, and the concerns with each that stand in the way of universal adoption. I conclude that the remaining (...) work of articulating aptness for a SEM analysis of causation is tied up with issues to do with modality, ontology, and mereology. Continuing this work is therefore likely to shed light on the relationship between these areas and causation more generally. (shrink)

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding (...) such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century. (shrink)