Background Moral courage is a recognized virtue. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the master’s students of nursing (MSNs) in China have shown tenacious moral courage. Objective This study elaborates on the moral courage of Chinese MSNs through their experiences of volunteering during the pandemic. Research Design Descriptive qualitative, interview-based. Participants and Research Context Participants were nursing postgraduate students who participated in the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic selected by purposeful sampling. The sample size was determined by (...) data saturation, which was reached with 10 participants. Data were analyzed using a deductive method of content analysis. Because of the isolation policy, telephone interviews were adopted. Ethical considerations After obtaining the approval of the ethical institution of the author’s school (No. 138, 30 August 2021), verbal consent was obtained before the interview with the participants. All data were processed anonymously and confidentially. In addition, we recruited participants through MSNs’ counselors, and obtained their phone numbers with their permission. Results Data analysis resulted in 15 subcategories that were subsequently grouped into 3 major categories including proceed without hesitation, the outcome of practicing moral courage, and develop and maintain moral courage. Conclusion This qualitative study is based on the special background of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the MSNs in China have shown tenacious moral courage in the work of epidemic prevention and control. Five factors led them to take action without hesitation, and six possible outcomes followed. Lastly, this study provides some suggestions for nurses and nursing students to enhance their moral courage. To better develop and support moral courage in the future, it is necessary to use different methods and multidisciplinary approaches to study moral courage. (shrink)

Face recognition payment, an innovative financial technology service, is a recently developed mode of payment service that has garnered attention in the offline market, particularly in China. However, studies examining the adoption of FRP by consumers are scarce. Therefore, this study proposed a causal model built on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, and key predictors related to the intention of using FRP were identified. The structural equation model-based results obtained from 305 Chinese participants demonstrated that the (...) intention was most affected by relative advantage. In addition, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and perceived risk also had a significant impact. However, trust was found to not significantly affect consumers’ intentions, despite it negatively influencing perceived risk. Thus, the results of this study are expected to provide a set of guidelines for companies regarding the implementation of FRP. (shrink)

Background The urgency of ensuring adequate moral courage in clinical nursing practice is evident. However, currently, there are few formal intervention plans targeted at enhancing the moral courage of nurses. Aim To develop a training program for improving the moral courage of nurses using the modified Delphi method. Research design A modified Delphi study. Participants and research context From November to December 2022, a literature review and expert group discussion were conducted to develop a preliminary training plan framework. From January (...) to March 2023, a two-round Delphi survey was performed, and a consensus was reached regarding the plan through online questionnaires. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the institutional ethics committee (No. 138, 30 August 2021). All participants provided written informed consent. Results Consensus was reached on eight themes and 33 items to strengthen the moral courage training program for nurses. Conclusions Guided by a unified goal of moral education, a multi-level and acceptable intervention plan was designed to enhance the moral courage of nurses. (shrink)

Interpersonal relationship is one of the important factors affecting college students’ mental health. The relationship between interpersonal relationship and college students’ mental health has also become a large number of academic research topics. In order to explore whether there is a correlation between optimism and college students’ mental health, and if so, what kind of situation it presents. Based on literature review, mathematical statistics and questionnaire survey, this study optimized the iterative process of clustering algorithm. Extract valuable parts from a (...) large amount of precipitation of students’ psychological data, establish data models, and provide decision-making guidance for managers. The results show that there are significant differences between optimists and pessimists in optimistic factors and pessimistic factors. Optimists score significantly higher on optimistic factors than pessimists, while pessimists score significantly lower than pessimists. Conclusion optimism can significantly alleviate life stress and intervene psychological crisis. (shrink)

Mononuclear phagocytes (MPs), which consist of dendritic cells, monocytes, and macrophages, are distributed throughout the body and actively eliminate invading microorganisms and abnormal cells. Depending on the local microenvironment, MPs manifest considerably various lifespans and phenotypes to maintain tissue homeostasis. Vascular‐associated mononuclear phagocytes (VaMPs) are the special subsets of MPs that are localized either within the lumen side or on the apical surface of vessels, acting as the critical sentinels to recognize and defend against disseminated tumor cells. In this review, (...) we introduce three major types of VaMPs, patrolling monocytes, Kupffer cells, and perivascular macrophages, and discuss their emerging roles in immunosurveillance during incipient metastasis. We also explore the roles of lineage‐determining transcription factors and cell surface receptors that endow VaMPs with potent anti‐tumor activity. Finally, we highlight the molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive the phenotypic plasticity of VaMPs and summarize combinatory strategies for targeting VaMPs in overt metastasis. (shrink)

Good knowledge management is important for enterprises to maintain competitive advantage; however, the knowledge hiding behavior may hinder this process. Based on the conservation of resources and psychological ownership theories, using a chain intermediary model, this study investigates the effect of justice sensitivity on knowledge hiding through perceived time pressure and territoriality, and further tests the moderating role of territoriality. For the study, we collected 436 questionnaires from China through the Wenjuanxing Sample Service, of which 391 were valid. We then (...) conducted multiple regression analysis and employed the bootstrap method for our tests. The results show that victim sensitivity has a significant effect on perceived time pressure, territoriality, and knowledge hiding, and that a chain mediating effect of perceived time pressure and territoriality is established between justice sensitivity and knowledge hiding. Further, territoriality has a positive moderating effect on perceived time pressure and knowledge hiding, while the mediating effect of perceived time pressure on justice sensitivity and knowledge hiding is also moderated by territoriality. Further, the study offers important practical implications in that enterprises should not blindly pursue results by making employees work excessively overtime. And there should have rationalized regulations in organization to ensure justice. The management should pay close attention to the psychological problems of victim and perpetrator. Instead, enterprises should have a certain degree of control, offer rationales for overtime work, and give high wages to the employees to compensate for their time, thus making the employees feel the worthiness of their overtime work and reducing the probability of engaging in knowledge hiding behaviors. (shrink)

Par l'angle de lecture choisi, la question du souci de soi, Kuan-Min Huang invite dans son livre à une nouvelle découverte de la pensée chinoise classique une découverte qui, par contraste, doit simultanément permettre à la philosophie occidentale de nous apparaître sous un nouveau jour. Si ce thème du souci de soi est fondamental en particulier chez les Stoïciens, il est, à la suite de Pierre Hadot, réactualisé par le dernier Michel Foucault. Le renouveau de ce thème au XXe (...) siècle s'inscrit dans celui de la philosophie morale ; la notion classique de sujet se voit ainsi pensée à de nouveaux frais en termes de sujet appelé à prendre soin de soi. Autrement dit, le souci de soi implique une culture du soi. La pensée chinoise considérée ici est avant tout celle du confucianisme et celle du taoïsme, mais afin d'en saisir la singularité, cet ouvrage donne aussi des aperçus des Ecoles légaliste et moïste. (shrink)

本书以独特的视角,将孙中山建设哲学置于世界自经典物理学转向现代科学、中国从革命转向建设的新时代大视野中,进行审视。采用宏观、中观与微观相结合、自然科学与人文科学相结合、理论与实践相结合、历史与现实相结 合的方法,通过对大量史料的梳理、缕析、归纳,对现实社会的观察、调查与综合分析,而后对孙中山的以系统、开放、协调、均衡与和谐为基调的建设哲学,进行全方位、多视角的透视和深刻剖析,高度肯定其对开启中国现代 思维的历史意义,及其在中国现代化建设中的当代意义.

SummaryInstead of telling us why one should or should not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, most philosophers try to see whether this can or cannot be done. Since there are no clearly stated rules of inference for the ordinary language, the is‐ought dichotomy is re‐examined within the context of the deontic logic. This paper shows that rules like ‐AB ÓOB enables us to adopt the theorems of the propositional logic normatively, because logical standards for exactness, truth, completeness, etc. are (...) all values and conventions accepted by the deontic logicians right from the beginning.RésuméLa plupart des philosophes reste attachée à une manière incorrecte de poser la question de la dichotomie entre ce qui est et ce qui devrait être. Au lieu de se demander, avec Hume, si nous avons de bonnes raisons ?on;autoriser ou ?on;interdire des raisonnements qui concluent de ľêtre au devoir être, des philosophes tels que Searle se demandent si de tels raisonnements sont possibles dans une langue naturelle. Comme, dans une telle langue, nous n'avons pas de règie univoque pour la déduction logique, j'examine la règie de la logique déontique AB OAOB selon la formalisation de Azizah al‐Hibri. Je montre que la règie ne viole pas du tout ľinterdiction de conclure ?on;énonces de faits à des énoncés normatifs. Car dans la logique déontique, les règies et les théorèmes de la logique des propositions sont utilisés dans un sens normatif.ZusammenfassungIn bezug auf die ‘Sein‐Sollen‐Dichotomie’ scheinen die meisten Philosophen bis jetzt auf einer falschen Fragestellung zu beharren. Anstatt wie Hume zu fragen, ob wir gute Gründe haben, Schlüsse von Sein und Sollen zuzulassen oder zu verbieten, versuchen Philosophen wie etwa Searle festzustellen, ob wir dies im Rahmen der natürlichen Sprache tun konnen. Da wir in der natürlichen Sprache keine eindeutige Regel für logische Schlüsse haben, wird die Regel der deontischen Logik nach der Formalisierung von Azizah al‐Hibri untersucht. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Regel keineswegs das Verbot, von 1st‐Sätzen auf Soll‐Sätze zu schliessen, verletzt. Denn in der deontischen Logik werden die Regeln und Theoreme der Satzlogik in einem norrnativen Sinn gebraucht. (shrink)

Cet article vise à réintégrer la question du langage intérieur dans les idées linguistiques de l’énonciation, notamment celles sur le mode de signifiance et l’opération énonciative. En nous référant aux études de Benveniste, de Merleau-Ponty et de Culioli, nous examinons dans quelle mesure le langage intérieur se distingue du monologue intérieur au sens de se parler à soi-même : ce langage intérieur en tant qu’expression pure et naturelle du sens général, implique une réflexivité non consciente et non verbale, dans la (...) genèse du sens ainsi que dans la construction dynamique des formes discursives. Eu égard à ces valeurs, nous procédons à l’analyse énonciative du discours littéraire de la conscience. Plusieurs faits de discours, liés à la non-coïncidence entre le mot et la chose vécue dans la conscience, tels que la nomination, l’indéfinition, la négation, manifestent les traces du langage intérieur global, non construit, inconscient et silencieux, qui mobilise le langage extériorisé. (shrink)

What is unique about art genres? In this paper, I will show that genres are best understood as clusters of regulative rules for appreciation. Evaluation, interpretation, and other appreciative responses to a work of art are sensitive to how the work is categorised, and genres are the categories that play a normative role in this context. Genres as rules have social foundations and arise from a speech act that I distinguish from classification and call framing. Based on this account, I (...) will illustrate genre practices as social practices in which we declare and propose rules of appreciation to each other. (shrink)

Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

This paper is about three distinct but interrelated problems: (1) the role 0f rights in moral theory, (2) thc characterization 0f agent relative values and their admissibility in consequ<—:ncc—bascd evaluation, and ( 3) the nature 0f moral evaluation 0f states 0f aihirs.

According to one strongly supported view, fiction is a functional kind that communicates imaginings. Combining this definitional thesis with a plausible principle concerning functional kinds leads to the following evaluative thesis: features that contribute to communicating imaginings constitute good-making features as fiction, and features that impede this constitute bad-making features as fiction. However, this thesis is at odds with the actual practice of fiction. Critics can show their admiration for complicated works of fiction by stating, “That’s beyond my imagination!” I (...) argue that in resolving this paradox of hard-to-imagine fiction, we should not deny the observation, but rethink the definitional thesis. Works of fiction that are puzzling, redundant, contradictory, and collapsed can have a unique value that smooth works cannot. They can have value as fiction in that they challenge our imagination or place us in an exotic state of being lost in the imagination. (shrink)

Colloquially, episodic memory is described as “the memory of personally experienced events”. Even though episodic memory has been studied in psychology and neuroscience for about six decades, there is still great uncertainty as to what episodic memory is. Here we ask how episodic memory should be characterized in order to be validated as a natural kind. We propose to conceive of episodic memory as a knowledge-like state that is identified with an experientially based mnemonic representation of an episode that allows (...) for a mnemonic simulation thereof. We call our analysis the Sequence Analysis of Episodic Memory since episodes will be analyzed in terms of sequences of events. Our philosophical analysis of episodic memory is driven and supported by experimental results from psychology and neuroscience. We discuss selected experimental results that provide exemplary evidence for uniform causal mechanisms underlying the properties of episodic memory and argue that episodic memory is a natural kind. The argumentation proceeds along three cornerstones: First, psychological evidence suggests that a violation of any of the proposed conditions for episodic memory amounts to a deficiency of episodic memory and no form of memory or cognitive process but episodic memory fulfills them. Second, empirical results support a claim that the principal anatomical substrate of episodic memory is the hippocampus. Finally, we can pin down causal mechanisms onto neural activities in the hippocampus to explain the psychological states and processes constituting episodic memory. (shrink)

A volume of studies of utilitarianism considered both as a theory of personal morality and a theory of public choice. All but two of the papers have been commissioned especially for the volume, and between them they represent not only a wide range of arguments for and against utilitarianism but also a first-class selection of the most interesting and influential work in this very active area. There is also a substantial introduction by the two editors. The volume will constitute an (...) important stimulus and point of reference for a wide range of philosophers, economists and social theorists. (shrink)

How valuable is the market mechanism for practical morality? What is its moral standing? We can scarcely doubt that as individuals we do value tremendously the opportunity of using markets. Indeed, without access to markets most of us would perish, since we don't typically produce the things that we need to survive. If we could somehow survive without using markets at all, our quality of life would be rather abysmal. It is natural to feel that an institution that is so (...) crucial to our well-being must be valuable. And since moral evaluation can hardly be indifferent to our interests and their fulfillment, it might appear that there is nothing much to discuss here. The market's moral standing “has to be” high. (shrink)

This paper is a revised version of the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Annual Lecture, 2016. It discusses the demands of critical reasoning in ethical arguments, and focuses in particular on the assessment of justice. It disputes the belief that reasoning about choice remains unfinished until an optimal alternative has been identified. A successful closure of a reasoning may identify a maximal alternative, which is not judged to be worse than any other available option. A maximal alternative need not be optimal (...) in the sense of being ‘best’. Critically sound reasoning can lead us to a partial ordering yielding a maximal alternative that is not optimal. The compulsive search for an optimal alternative needlessly limits the reach of reasoning in ethics. (shrink)

The importance of business ethics is not contrdicted in any way by Adam Smith’s pointer to the fact that our “regards to our own interests” provide adequate motivation tor exchange. There are many important economic relationships other than exchange, such as the institution of production and arrangements of distribution. Here business ethics can playa major part. Even as far as exchange is concerned, business ethics can be crucially important in terms of organization and behavior, going weil beyond basic motivation.

Drawing on cognitive moral development and moral identity theories, this study empirically examines the moral antecedents and consequences of authentic leadership. Machiavellianism, an individual difference variable relating to the use of the ‘end justifies the means’ principle, is predicted to affect the link between morality and leadership. Analyses of multi-source, multi-method data comprised case studies, simulations, role-playing exercises, and survey questionnaires were completed by 70 managers in a large public agency, and provide support for our hypotheses. Our findings reveal that (...) Machiavellianism offsets the positive relationship between moral reasoning and authentic leadership. Specifically, we show that when Machiavellianism is high, both the positive relationship between moral reasoning and authentic leadership, and the positive relationship between authentic leadership and moral actions, are reversed. This study offers new insights on the underlying processes contributing to the emergence of leaders’ authentic behavior and moral action. Implications for the moral development of leaders, and directions for improved leadership training are provided. (shrink)

This paper argues that many of Adam Smith’s insights,particularly those in his Theory of moral sentiments, have a relevance tocontemporary thought about economics and ethics that is currentlyunderappreciated. In economics, for example, Smith was concerned notonly with the sufficiency of self-interest at the moment of exchange butalso with the wider moral motivations and institutions required tosupport economic activity in general. In ethics, Smith’s concept of animpartial spectator who is able to view our situation from a criticaldistance has much to contribute (...) to a fuller understanding of therequirements of justice, particularly through an understanding ofimpartiality as going beyond the interests and concerns of a localcontracting group. Smith’s open, realization-focussed and comparativeapproach to evaluation contrasts with what I call the “transcendentalinstitutionalism” popular in contemporary political philosophy andassociated particularly with the work of John Rawls. (shrink)

Recent studies of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) have shown that the sense of body ownership is constrained by several factors and yet is still very flexible. However, exactly how flexible is our sense of body ownership? In this study, we address this issue by investigating the following question: is it possible that one may have the illusory experience of owning four hands? Under visual manipulation, the participant adopted the experimenter’s first-person perspective (1PP) as if it was his/her own. Sitting (...) face to face, the participant saw four hands—the experimenter’s two hands from the adopted 1PP together with the subject’s own two hands from the adopted third-person perspective (3PP). We found that: (1) the four-hand illusion did not occur in the passive four-hand condition. (2) In the active four-hand condition, the participants tapped their index fingers, imitated by the experimenter. When tactile stimulations were not provided, the key illusion was not induced, either. (3) Strikingly, once all four hands began to act with the same pattern and received synchronous tactile stimulations at the same time, many participants felt as if they had two more hands. These results show that the sense of body ownership is much more flexible than most researchers have suggested. (shrink)

This paper reports the validation of a 6-item short form of the original 35-item Servant Leadership Behavior Scale, a widely used measure of servant leadership behavior. The holistic perspective of servant leadership and the inclusion of spirituality are two distinctive features of the SLBS relative to other servant leadership measures. Psychometric properties of the SLBS-6 were examined on the basis of seven studies. In the preliminary scale development, the factor structure of the new measure was tested using a combination of (...) all samples. The subsequent seven studies were aimed at building further its construct validity relative to observed variables within the servant leadership nomological network in direct, mediating, and moderating relationships. Analyses of all datasets using MPlus with maximum-likelihood estimation provided support for the 6-item structure and demonstrated its internal consistency reliability, criterion-related validity, and construct validity. As such, the study presents the SLBS-6 as the shortest holistic measure of servant leadership to date that can be used with confidence for research and training purposes. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1992, given by Amartya Sen, an Indian philosopher.

The great poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore once remarked that he was extremely sad that he was not alive when Gautama Buddha was still around. Tagore very much wished he could have had conversations with Buddha. I share that sentiment, but, like Rabindranath, I am also immensely grateful that, even now, we can enjoy—and learn from—the ideas and arguments that Buddha gave us twenty-five hundred years ago. Our world may be very different from what Buddha faced in the sixth century (...) bce, but we can still benefit greatly from the reasoned approach to ethics, politics, and social relations that Gautama Buddha brought to the world of human understanding. (shrink)