Multinational corporations' international staffing policies have been evaluated in terms of cost and efficiency arguments. Research has not addressed, however, the ethical impact of these policies on diverse stakeholder groups. This paper presents a conceptual framework by which ethnocentric, polycentric and geocentric staffing policies are theoretically linked to underlying decision-making modes of instrumentality, bounded rationality and economic rationality, respectively. It goes on to describe the ethical rationales associated with each policy type, namely, distributive justice, moral rights of man, and utilitarianism. (...) An investigation of resulting ethical dilemmas affecting relevant MNC stakeholder groups is incorporated and offered as a tool for analyzing the true and full costs of trade-offs when choosing one policy over another. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the conceptual framework for theory and practice and directions for future research. (shrink)

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in (...) medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition. (shrink)

John Rawls raises three challenges – to which one can add a fourth challenge – to an impartial spectator account: (a) the impartial spectator is a utility-maximizing device that does not take seriously the distinction between persons; (b) the account does not guarantee that the principles of justice will be derived from it; (c) the notion of impartiality in the account is the wrong one, since it does not define impartiality from the standpoint of the litigants themselves; (d) the account (...) would offer a comprehensive, rather than a political, form of liberalism. The narrow aim of the article is to demonstrate that Adam Smith's impartial spectator account can rise to Rawls's challenges. The broader aim is to demonstrate that the impartial spectator account offers the basis for a novel and alternative framework for developing principles of justice, and does so in the context of a political form of liberalism. (shrink)

Ezra Heywood helped initiate Benjamin R. Tucker into the world of anarchist activism. Their relationship spanned three decades and during that time, Tucker matured from a student and apprentice of Heywood 's to a sophisticated radical intellectual. Although at times they disagreed sharply and their reform efforts came to emphasize different issues, the two viewed one another with mutual respect. An examination of their relationship touches upon some of the central concerns of nineteenth century reform.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Uncertainty examines the intrapsychic features of the self as it presents within OCD compulsive doubting. Moshe Marcus and Steven Tuber suggest a phenomenological framework through which to consider the interplay between the cognitive as well as affective components required to make judgments.

The Mesillas Yesharim / Path of the Just was the masterpiece of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the great mystic, philosopher, sage, and saint. For centuries, this classic text for better living has been every man's primer for ideal life. Wherever there were Jews there was a well-thumbed Mesillas Yesharim. In this book, Rabbi Twerski applies the text and themes of Mesillas Yesharim to the everyday challenges of the 90s. He shows us how we can succeed in the quest for (...) a better life and in bettering ourselves. (shrink)

What is the relation between knowledge and orientation? How does being disoriented lead one to new knowledge or/and to being humbled about not knowing? How can not knowing aid in liberatory struggles, in alleviating oppression or even in being in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner? These are some of the questions that Ami Harbin’s work “Disorientation and Moral Life” brought up for me and which I would like to explore below, using prison abolition as one brief example.

I build on Adam Smith’s account of the impartial spectator in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to offer a modest ideal observer theory of moral judgment that is adequate in the following sense: the account specifies the hypothetical conditions that guarantee the authoritativeness of an agent’s (or agents’) responses in constituting the standard in question, and, if an actual agent or an actual community of agents are not under those conditions, their responses are not authoritative in setting this (...) standard. However, in the account that I provide, the hypothetical conditions can themselves be constructed from the psychology and interactions of actual human beings. In other words, facts about the morally appropriate and inappropriate are determined from hypothetical conditions that––while agents in a given society might have yet to attain them––can be constructed from those agents’ shared experiences. Thus, the account offers both an attainable standard of moral judgment and a standard that can transcend the biases of the society which gave rise to it. I also defend the account against three challenges: (a) ideal observer theories do not offer the right kind of motivation to act on the verdicts of the ideal observer; (b) ideal observer theories cannot explain why the idealization in question is well-motivated and not objectionably ad hoc; (c) the standard used in ideal observer theories cannot be defended upon further reflection, because we would need a non-arbitrary, second-order standard to govern our reflection on the first-order standard of moral judgment. (shrink)

Vardi, M.Y., Verification of concurrent programs: the automata-theoretic framework, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 51 79–98. We present an automata-theoretic framework to the verification of concurrent and nondeterministic programs. The basic idea is that to verify that a program P is correct one writes a program A that receives the computation of P as input and diverges only on incorrect computations of P. Now P is correct if and only if a program PA, obtained by combining P and A, (...) terminates. We formalize this idea in a framework of ω-automata with a recursive set of states. This unifies previous works on verification of fair termination and verification of temporal properties. (shrink)

This unique longitudinal study examines the state of work centrality and other life areas (family, leisure, community and religion) in Israel among the same individuals (n=407) over a 12-year period. A new representative sample (serving as a control group) of the Israeli labour force in 1992–93 (n=942) assists us in exploring whether the changes occurred by cohort, life course or period effect. The restudied sample maturation led to a decrease in the importance of leisure, while the importance of work, family, (...) community and religion remained stable. The increase of work centrality between the 1980s and the 1990s was found to be influenced by period effect; there was no evidence of a life course or cohort effect on work centrality, while life course effect was found on the importance of community. In contrast to findings from other countries showing that young people attributed relatively high importance to leisure and relatively less importance to work, cohort effect regarding the latter was not observed in Israel. There, young people in the 1990s tended to view work and leisure as important as their predecessors did in the 1980s. Compared with research findings from the United States, Germany and Japan, work centrality in Israel was higher and more stable. (shrink)

Answers to the questions of what justifies conscientious objection in medicine in general and which specific objections should be respected have proven to be elusive. In this paper, I develop a new framework for conscientious objection in medicine that is based on the idea that conscience can express true moral claims. I draw on one of the historical roots, found in Adam Smith’s impartial spectator account, of the idea that an agent’s conscience can determine the correct moral norms, even if (...) the agent’s society has endorsed different norms. In particular, I argue that when a medical professional is reasoning from the standpoint of an impartial spectator, his or her claims of conscience are true, or at least approximate moral truth to the greatest degree possible for creatures like us, and should thus be respected. In addition to providing a justification for conscientious objection in medicine by appealing to the potential truth of the objection, the account advances the debate regarding the integrity and toleration justifications for conscientious objection, since the standard of the impartial spectator specifies the boundaries of legitimate appeals to moral integrity and toleration. The impartial spectator also provides a standpoint of shared deliberation and public reasons, from which a conscientious objector can make their case in terms that other people who adopt this standpoint can and should accept, thus offering a standard fitting to liberal democracies. (shrink)

The hope of this work is that these notes will help to convince more mathematicians that non-standard analysis can make a useful addition to the tools of their trade.

The article calls for a departure from the common concept of autonomy in two significant ways: it argues for the supremacy of semantic understanding over procedure, and claims that clinicians are morally obliged to make a strong effort to persuade patients to accept medical advice. We interpret the value of autonomy as derived from the right persons have to respect, as agents who can argue, persuade and be persuaded in matters of utmost personal significance such as decisions about medical care. (...) Hence, autonomy should and could be respected only after such an attempt has been made. Understanding suffering to a significant degree is a prerequisite to sincere efforts of persuasion. It is claimed that a modified and pragmatic form of discourse is the necessary framework for understanding suffering and for compassionately interacting with the frail. (shrink)

“Religion” is a conglomerate of ideas, cosmologies, beliefs, institutions, hierarchies, elites and rites that vary with time and place, even when one “single” religion is concerned. The methodologies available take one or two of these numerous aspects into consideration, reducing religion’s complexity to a rather simplistic unity. In order to avoid this situation, the ensuing conclusion is a recommendation for methodological eclecticism. The text attempts to characterize not specific scholars or schools but major concerns that define the specificity of particular (...) styles. I propose that they may be grouped in eight main categories of approaches: the theological approach, the historical approach, the psychological approach, the textual-literary approach, the comparative approach, the ritualistic-technical approach, the phenomenological approach and the cognitive approach. This proposal for methodological eclecticism is supplemented with another concept: perspectivism. The last part of the article deals mainly with topics found in a vast literature designated by the umbrella term “Kabbalah”, addressing especially the approach proposed by Gershom Scholem. (shrink)

The claim that nonhuman animals lack foresight is common and intuitive. I propose an alternative whereby foresight is a gradual continuum in that it is present in animals to the extent that it is needed. A second aspect of this commentary points out that the requirements that the memory that mediates foresight be both specific yet flexible seem contradictory.