Abstract:This study examined the relationship between the individual difference variables of personal moral philosophy, locus of control, Machiavellianism, and just world beliefs and ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. A sample of 602 marketing practitioners participated in the study. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships. The results either fully or partially supported hypothesized direct effects for idealism, relativism, and Machiavellianism. Findings also suggested that Machiavellianism mediated the relationship between individual difference variables and ethical judgments/behavioral intentions.

This study is the most comprehensive account to date of modern treatments of the love commandment. Gene Outka examines the literature on agape from Nygren's Agape and Eros in 1930. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant writings are considered, including those of D'Arcy, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Tillich, and above all, Karl Barth. The first seven chapters focus on the principal treatments in the theological literature as they relate to major topics in ethical theory. The last chapter explores further the basic normative (...) content of agape and discusses some of the most characteristic problems. "The book is in my judgment the best recent work in religious ethics. Outka brings together analytic moral philosophy and theological ethics, providing a masterly survey of views and issues arising in the past forty years.... I can think of few books of interest to scholars in both philosophy and theology, but Outka's is one. Unlike some scholars who are at home in continental theology, Outka is also at home in secular analytic philosophy; he brings them together in a mutually illuminating way."--Donald Evans "Outka has mastered this vast literature on love, and has brought a critical and clarifying analysis to bear upon it. This is a most important book on a most important subject, and brings the whole discussion into a new phase."--John Macquarrie "The first thing to be said about Outka's book quite simply is that it is excellent; in fact, it is probably the very best available book about contemporary Christian ethical theory."--The Humanities Association Review. (shrink)

: The medical and clinical promise of stem cell research is widely heralded, but moral judgments about it collide. This article takes general stock of such judgments and offers one specific resolution. It canvasses a spectrum of value judgments on sources, complicity, adult stem cells, and public and private contexts. It then examines how debates about abortion and stem cell research converge and diverge. Finally, it proposes to extend the principle of "nothing is lost" to current debates. This extension links (...) historic discussions of the ethics of direct killing with unprecedented possibilities that in vitro fertilization procedures yield. A definite normative region to inhabit is located, within a larger range of rival value judgments. The creation of embryos for research purposes only should be resisted, yet research on "excess" embryos is permissible by virtue of an appeal to the "nothing is lost" principle. (shrink)

The role of imagery in encoding event-based prospective memories has yet to be fully clarified. Herein, it is argued that imagery augments a cue-to-context association that supports event-based prospective memory performance. By this account, imagery encoding not only improves prospective memory performance but also reduces interference to intention-related information that occurs outside of context. In the current study, when lure words occurred outside of the appropriate responding context, the use of imagery encoding strategies resulted in less interference when compared with (...) a standard event-based intention condition. This difference was eliminated when participants were not given a specific context to associate their intention . These results support a cue-to-context association account of how imagery operates in certain event-based prospective memory tasks. (shrink)

Tyler Cowen's ?Why Keynesianism Triumphed? proposed that only Keynesian economists have presented a successful explanation for the Great Depression of 1929?1933 and the continuing slow and intermittent recovery of the rest of the 1930s. This paper examines recent scholarship on the 1930s and finds that there is increasing doubt about the validity of Keynesian explanations, lending credence to both older and recent scholarship that vindicates free?market views of why the Depression happened and why the recovery was so slow and uneven.

Research findings on addiction are contradictory. According to biographical records and widely used diagnostic manuals, addicts use drugs compulsively, meaning that drug use is out of control and independent of its aversive consequences. This account is supported by studies that show significant heritabilities for alcoholism and other addictions and by laboratory experiments in which repeated administration of addictive drugs caused changes in neural substrates associated with reward. Epidemiological and experimental data, however, show that the consequences of drug consumption can significantly (...) modify drug intake in addicts. The disease model can account for the compulsive features of addiction, but not occasions in which price and punishment reduced drug consumption in addicts. Conversely, learning models of addiction can account for the influence of price and punishment, but not compulsive drug taking. The occasion for this target article is that recent developments in behavioral choice theory resolve the apparent contradictions in the addiction literature. The basic argument includes the following four statements: First, repeated consumption of an addictive drug decreases its future value and the future value of competing activities. Second, the frequency of an activity is a function of its relative (not absolute) value. This implies that an activity that reduces the values of competing behaviors can increase in frequency even if its own value also declines. Third, a recent experiment (Heyman & Tanz 1995) shows that the effective reinforcement contingencies are relative to a frame of reference, and this frame of reference can change so as to favor optimal or suboptimal choice. Fourth, if the frame of reference is local, reinforcement contingencies will favor excessive drug use, but if the frame of reference is global, the reinforcement contingencies will favor controlled drug use. The transition from a global to a local frame of reference explains relapse and other compulsive features of addiction. (shrink)

This experimental study evaluated the influence of stated organizational concern for ethical conduct upon managerial behavior. Using an in-basket to house the manipulation, a sample of 113 MBA students with some managerial experience reacted to scenarios suggesting illegal conduct and others suggesting only unethical behavior. Stated organizational concern for ethical conduct was varied from none (control group) to several other situations which included a high treatment consisting of a Code of Ethics, an endorsement letter by the CEO and specific sanctions (...) for managerial misconduct. Only in the case of suggested illegal behavior tempered by high organizational concern were managers influenced by organizational policy to modify the morality of their actions. However, the responses to the illegal scenarios were significantly more ethical than the reactions given to the unethical (but not illegal) situations. The implications of these findings are then discussed. (shrink)

We all live our daily lives surrounded by the products of technology that make what we do simpler, faster, and more efficient. These are benefits we often just take for granted. But at the same time, as these products disburden us of unwanted tasks that consumed much time and effort in earlier eras, many of them also leave us more disengaged from our natural and even human surroundings. It is the task of what Gene Moriarty calls focal engineering to (...) create products that will achieve a balance between disburdenment and engagement: “How much disburdenment will be appropriate while still permitting an engagement that enriches one’s life, elevates the spirit, and calls forth a good life in a convivial society?” One of his examples of a focally engineered structure is the Golden Gate Bridge, which “draws people to it, enlivens and elevates the human spirit, and resonates with the world of its congenial setting. Humans, bridge, and world are in tune.” These values of engagement, enlivenment, and resonance are key to the normative approach Moriarty brings to the profession of engineering, which traditionally has focused mainly on technical measures of evaluation such as efficiency, productivity, objectivity, and precision. These measures, while important, look at the engineered product in a local and limited sense. But “from a broader perspective, what is locally benign may present serious moral problems,” undermining “social justice, environmental sustainability, and health and safety of affected parties.” It is this broader perspective that is championed by focal engineering, the subject of Part III of the book, which Moriarty contrasts with “modern” engineering in Part I and “pre-modern” engineering in Part II. (shrink)

Recent work by Jaegwon Kim and others suggest that functionalism leaves mental properties causally inefficacious in some sense. I examine three lines of argument for this conclusion. The first appeals to Occam's Razor; the second appeals to a ban on overdetermination; and the third charges that the kind of response I favor to these arguments forces me to give up "the homogeneity of mental and physical causation". I show how each argument fails. While I concede that a positive theory of (...) mental causation is desirable, there is no reason to think that functionalism renders such a theory unattainable. (shrink)

This book exhibits the centrality of hope in Kant's critical philosophy, and brings into question the rationality of that hope, and how the question of that rationality can be raised. The question of the rationality of hope is further explored through Kierkegaard's writing.

This paper begins by examining several potentially unethical recent marketing practices. Since most marketing managers face ethical dilemmas during their careers, it is essential to study the moral consequences of these decisions. A typology of ways that managers might confront ethical issues is proposed. The significant organizational, personal and societal costs emanting from unethical behavior are also discussed. Both relatively simple frameworks and more comprehensive models for evaluating ethical decisions in marketing are summarized. Finally, the fact that organizational commitment to (...) fostering ethical marketing decisions can be accomplished by top management leadership, codes of ethics, ethics seminars/programs and ethical audits is examined. (shrink)

After briefly presenting Ronald Giere's (1979, 1980) recent counterfactual characterization of population-level causation, I present two counterexamples to the characterization. The difficulty discussed stems from nonaccidental correlations that can obtain between causally effective and causally neutral factors.

Time was when you could bite a tomato and not ingest fish genes. Time was when you could eat french fries and just worry about the fat and salt, not the bacterial genes that produce insecticides in the potato. Those times are over, thanks to corporate control over both genetic engineering and the lack of food-labeling. Unless you are a “hard core” consumer of organic foods, you eat genetically engineered foods everyday. While 80-90% of US consumers believe genetically engineered foods (...) should be labeled, only 3% know they already on the market.[1] Today 60-70% of the food in a grocery store contains components from genetically modified crops. Moreover, this technology was unleashed on over 45 million acres of US farmland last year alone, after having been commercially introduced only four years ago.[2] Here we will provide a brief background on the types of genetically engineered crops that are being surreptitiously forced upon consumers, then argue against their current widespread use. (shrink)

This article describes and reflects upon Australia's extensive, federally-mandated, environmental education program. This program is based on a National Conservation Strategy which went into effect in 1989. But the program has massive support on the state and local levels as well. In addition to traditional classroom study of the environment and environmental issues, Audtralian Students do composting, re-vegetation of local canyons, and other hands-on activities. In many areas of the students' deatiledreports become the data base for the government's environmental monitoring (...) program. A remarkable aspect of environmental education in Australia is the web of groups and individuals who are involved: local farmers, Aboriginal peoples, banks, local nurseries, and all levels of government, along with environmental organizations like Greening Astraila and Landcare.In contrast to Australia, the United States lacks a systematic educational program focused on the environment. The article concludes by summarizing the strengths of the Australian program and criticizing the American failure to establish such a program. Reasons for this failure are suggested. Finally, a general contrast is offered, showing the differences between two philosophies of education—the Technocratic Philosophy of Education vs. the Holistic Philosophy of Education. (shrink)

While self-report data is a staple of modern psychological studies, they rely on participants accurately self-reporting. Two constructs that impede accurate results are insufficient effort responding and response styles. These constructs share conceptual underpinnings and both utilized to reduce cognitive effort when responding to self-report scales. Little research has extensively explored the relationship of the two constructs. The current study explored the relationship of the two constructs across even-point and odd-point scales, as well as before and after data cleaning procedures. (...) We utilized IRTrees, a statistical method for modeling response styles, to examine the relationship between IER and response styles. To capture the wide range of IER metrics available, we employed several forms of IER assessment in our analyses and generated IER factors based on the type of IER being detected. Our results indicated an overall modest relationship between IER and response styles, which varied depending on the type of IER metric being considered or type of scale being evaluated. As expected, data cleaning also changed the relationships of some of the variables. We posit the difference between the constructs may be the degree of cognitive effort participants are willing to expend. Future research and applications are discussed. (shrink)

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral and political criteria invoked in human rights documents possess cross-cultural force, many modern and postmodern developments erode confidence in moral appeals that go beyond a local consensus or apply outside a particular community. Often the point of departure for discussion is the Enlightenment paradigm of (...) a common morality, in which it is assumed that certain unchanging beliefs inhere in the structure of human reason. Whereas some thinkers continue to defend this paradigm, others modify it in diverse ways without abandoning entirely the attempt to address a universal audience, and still others jettison virtually all of its distinguishing features. Exhibiting a range of positions Western participants take in these debates, this volume seeks to advance the substance of the debates themselves without prejudging the outcome. Rival assessments of the Enlightenment paradigm are offered from various philosophical and theological points of view. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette C. Baier, Alan Donagan, Margaret A. Farley, Alan Gewirth, David Little, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

The question of whether (and, within the believing communities, the agreement that) scripture is a source and canon for moral discernment and judgment must be distinguished from the question of what this source provides or how this canon functions as a norm.1.

After summarizing Weber's description of the 'ethic of ultimate ends' and the 'ethic of responsibility', the assumptions underlying his classification are examined, especially the relationship of violent and non-violent means to politics and to political responsibility. It is argued that the two assumptions underlying the classification have been demonstrated by events since his 1918 lecture to be invalid. Therefore the classification itself no longer has validity. Its rejection has political implications and requires fresh attention to the problems of political ethics. (...) The outline of a possible alternative classification of political ethics, focused on their view of means and ends, is tentatively offered as a stimulus to further thought. (shrink)

Poetic and dramatic readings of selected Platonic dialogues show the fallacy of the philosophical and political positions usually attributed to Plato. Dialogues dealt with include Apology, Meno, Ion, Republic, Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Laws.

The Ethical Journalist gives aspiring journalists the tools they need to make responsible professional decisions. Provides a foundation in applied ethics in journalism Examines the subject areas where ethical questions most frequently arise in modern practice Incorporates the views of distinguished print, broadcast and online journalists, exploring such critical issues as race, sex, and the digitalization of news sources Illustrated with 24 real-life case studies that demonstrate how to think in 'shades of gray' rather than 'black and white' Includes questions (...) for class discussion and guides for putting important ethical concepts to use in the real world Accompanying website includes model course schedules, discussion guides, PowerPoint slides, sample quiz and exam questions and links to additional readings online: www.wiley.com/go/foreman. (shrink)

The political systems of the Roman Republic were based almost entirely on tradition, “the way of the ancestors”, rather than on a written constitution. While the founders of the American Republic looked to ancient Rome as a primary model for their enterprise, nevertheless, in line with the rationalist spirit of their age, the American founders attempted to create a rational set of rules that would guide the conduct of American politics, namely, the US Constitution.These two examples offer a striking case (...) of the ideal types, famously delineated by Michael Oakeshott in “Rationalism in Politics” and elsewhere, between politics as a practice grounded in tradition and politics as a system based on principles flowing from abstract reasoning.This book explores how the histories of the two republics can help us to understand Oakeshott’s claims about rational versus traditional politics. Through examining such issues we may come to understand better not only Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism, but also modern constitutional theory, issues in the design of the European Union, and aspects of the revival of republicanism. (shrink)

This paper brings Lyotard into connection with the discussions of Socrates in REPUBLIC concerning general libidinal economy and its relation to the logos in human beings. Since desire is always the desire to be amoral -- not to recognize the person as subject, but rather recognizing it as a market for the capital gain of desire, it is to be suspected that desire within the subject is the cause of so-called differends between subjects. This is what Republic is about.

This paper answers the questions ‘what is the Merchant of Venice?’ and ‘how may it accomplish its purpose?’ I argue that the usual treatments of this play are inadequate and show how the play is a comedy through which the passions appropriate for the good human being are engendered. What is raised and ridiculed are our own temptations to lesser joys and less sweet uses mimetically roused in us by the action and characters of the play. What is whetted but (...) left unsatisfied is our higher love for justice. Thus the play provides a catharsis (purification) of desire and sympathy. (shrink)

This paper explicates the relationship of innate corruption and natural goodness in Kant's Religion against a background of mistaken arguments and interpretations by Goethe, Allison, and Gordon Michalson, among others. It also argues that the only argument that can be given for the claim of innate moral corruption is a kind of ad hominem; it shows that Kant is giving such an argument, and argues that that argument is valid in its place. It concludes by saying that if this explication (...) is true then it is a mistake to read Kant as a despiser of the body. (shrink)

Camus is defined by many as an absurdist philosopher of revolt. The Plague, however, shows him working rigorously through a well-known division between ancient and modern ethics concerning the relation of reason, feeling and happiness. For Aristotle, the virtues are stable dispositions including affective and intellectual elements. For Kant, one’s particular feelings are either that from which we must abstract to judge moral worth, or are a constant hindrance to proper moral activity. Further, Kant claims “habit belongs to the physical (...) nature of the determination of the will,” which seems to imply habit cannot be a moral determination at all. A related disagreement regards virtue and happiness. Aristotle’s happiness is “an activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” For Kant and other moderns, happiness is an ideal of imagination, “a maximum of well-being in my present, and in every future, state,” all the elements of which “are without exception empirical.” Thus happiness seems more the constant counterweight to moral action than its fulfillment. Kant and Aristotle agree, however, in their judgment of many characters and actions, as is illustrated in The Plague. The novel provides realistic insights into a philosophical agreement between these supposed oppositions. In particular, I show how both philosophers would agree in their judgements concerning both the relative goodness and relative happiness of Joseph Grand and Raymond Rambert. The illustration of this agreement proves Camus is valorizing a traditional ethic. (shrink)

Presented in six principal analytic chapters with supporting appendices, this book explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe's twelfth century commercial renaissance. Employing the classic analytic techniques of economics, Gene Heck determines that medieval Europe's feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns. He then proceeds by demonstrating how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in "Dark Age economics" (...) ― in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism. While treatises such as Maxime Rodinson's excellent book, Islam and Capitalism, document the capitalistic nature of the Islamic economic system, in applying modern economic method to medieval orientalist historiography, this work is unique in capturing both the evolution and the impact of the system's role in forging medieval history. (shrink)

A sensitive remembrance of bluegrass dreams and lessons.

Both Aristotle and Tolkien are authors of short works seemingly concentrated on one form of literary art. Both works contain references which seem to extend further than that single art and offer insights into the worth and purpose of art more generally. Both men understand the relevant processes of mind of the artist in a similar way, and both distinguish the value of works of art based on their effect on the audience. But Tolkien figures the natural human artistic bent (...) as an elvish strain in us, and in his legends the elves are passing away to make way for the new—human beings. The legendary tales are an image of the natural pagan man giving place to the new man coming to be after Christ. This implies that what Aristotle called the mimetic nature of man—the source of all artistic play and work—is being given a new shape and orientation. Further, the master of those who know, in explicating catharsis, must have been reaching for something that exceeded his grasp and he did not know it. The aim of this essay is to explore the agreements (seeming and real) and disagreements (seeming and real) between what can be built up as each author’s general literary and aesthetic ideas—so, the relation between pagan and Tolkien’s Christian poetics. This will include evaluating where each is more or less adequate to the task of a general aesthetic, ending in an exploration of the purpose of art for the “new man.”. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explicate the philosophical and theological premisses involved in Fr. Paneloux’s second sermon in Camus’ The Plague. In that sermon Fr. Paneloux says that the suffering of children is our bread of affliction. The article shows where one must start in order to get to that point, and what follows from it. Whether or not the argument given should be called a theodicy or a reductio ad absurdum of religious belief is an open question for a philosopher, (...) but the argument is shown to cohere with the traditional belief in God’s omnipotent goodness. (shrink)

The thesis of this text is that representation and mimesis, and so reason and passion, are not opposed, but differ. Their presumed opposition leads to many false and therefore harmful ideas and practices, as Glaucon exhibits in his republic, but even these harmful ideas and practices exhibit not only that it is not possible to escape either mimesis or representation but also that the harm is precisely to develop a culture along the lines of a hegemonic structure wherein one is (...) dominant and the other secondary—that is the point Plato exhibits in his Republic. Mimesis and representation are, in a more contemporary parlance, differing regimens of phrasal connection, phrase being a word that is as musical as it is grammatical. No ground can serve as a place of judgement between the two of them for all ground is the dust/blood/text of both. As Plato says, "all the arts of the muses are iconic and mimetic." It is more accurate, and therefore best, to see mimesis and representation not as differing acts, but as differing aspects or moments of every semiotic act—and every act is semiotic to a being for which any act is so. (shrink)