This study adapts the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) to the behavior of fraudulent reporting on financial statements so as to examine the effects of moral reasoning and self-monitoring on intention to report fraudulently, using structural equation modeling. The paper seeks to investigate two of the red flags for financial statement fraud identified in Loebbecke et al.'s (1989) paper: client management displays a significant lack of moral fiber and client personnel exhibit strong personality anomalies. As expected, high (...) moral reasoners are more influenced than low moral reasoners by their own attitude towards the behavior. Contrary to prior research, low self-monitors are found to be more influenced than high self-monitors by subjective norms. Future research is recommended to investigate the counter-intuitive results for self-monitors, to consider the implications of group decision making as regards the promulgation of fraudulent financial statements, and to examine additional red flags for financial statement fraud. (shrink)

In today's global marketplace, the Philippines provide a unique example of an Asian culture with established economic ties to the West. In this study, Philippine and United States undergraduate business students responded to 13 vignettes describing questionable ethical actions in business situations. Results reveal significant differences between groups for 9 of the 13 vignettes. For 4 vignettes, Philippine participants were more disapproving of the actions, and for another 5, United States participants were more disapproving. The study suggests that cultural differences (...) continue and the implications of these differences should be considered in today's global economy. (shrink)

This paper argues in support of the WHO’s proposal to forego COVID-19 booster shots until 10% of people in every country are fully vaccinated. The Ethical Argument section shows that we save the most lives and ensure the least amount of suffering by allocating doses first to unvaccinated people. It also argues that there is a duty to support decent lives and to promote health equity, which establish that refraining from boosters is a requirement of justice, not charity. The Replies (...) to Objections section answers objections that appeal to pragmatism, nationalism, ownership, scientific advancement, self-interest, semantics and futility. The Conclusion section emphasizes that for now, wealthy nations should not boost vaccinated people’s immunity and should instead send doses to poorer nations where they are most urgently needed. No data was used in this study. (shrink)

Moral distress is a well-documented phenomenon in the nursing profession, and increasingly thought to be implicated in a nation-wide nursing shortage in the US. First identified by the philosopher Andrew Jameton in 1984, moral distress has also proven resistant to various attempts to prevent its occurrence or at least mitigate its effects. While this would seem to be bad news for nurses and their patients, it is potentially good news for philosophical counselors, for whom there is both socially important and (...) philosophically interesting work to be done. In an effort to encourage such work, this paper explicates the philosophical (as opposed to more purely psychological or institutional) contours of the problem. A subsequent paper, titled 'A Philosophical Counseling Approach to Moral Distress,' will highlight ways in which such a response would differ from the strategies so far deployed within the nursing profession. (shrink)

Critical theorists should turn to disability as an important category of intersectional analysis. I demonstrate this through one type of critical theory—namely, feminism. Disability intersects with all vectors of identity, since disability affects people of all races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, and classes. Gender and sexuality are particularly illustrative because disability is configured in ways that map onto negative images of femininity. Additionally, the ways in which feminist and disability scholars undertake analysis are complementary. And because these two fields are (...) inherently interdisciplinary, dialogue between them can yield a richer notion of intersectionality within intersectionality. (shrink)

This paper argues for global sharing of COVID‐19 treatments during the COVID‐19 pandemic and beyond based on principles of global solidarity. It starts by distinguishing two types of COVID‐19 treatments and models sharing strategies for each in small‐group scenarios, contrasting groups that are solidaristic with those composed of self‐interest maximizers to show the appeal of solidaristic reasoning. It then extends the analysis, arguing that a similar logic should apply within and between nations. To further elaborate global solidarity, the paper distinguishes (...) morally voluntary, sliding‐scale, and mandatory versions. It argues for an all‐hands‐on‐deck approach and gives examples to illustrate. The paper concludes that during the COVID‐19 crisis, global solidarity is a core value, and global sharing of COVID‐19 treatments should be considered a duty of justice, not of charity. (shrink)

Here, Hirschmann responds to Marilyn Friedman and Susan J. Brison's comments on The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom. She clarifies some aspects of her social construction argument, articulates the role of discourse and its relation to material reality, and explicates the potentially paradoxical case of support for women's choices when those choices produce harm.

This essay considers Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See as a work that can contribute to a disability political theory. By recounting the experiences of visually impaired persons in their own words, Diderot opens up possibilities for a disability politics of self-representation, maintaining that sighted persons should listen to blind persons’ accounts of their own experience rather than relying on their own imaginings and assumptions. By using blind experiences to challenge a philosophical (...) problem that intrigued philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amid often-unsuccessful efforts to “cure” blindness through cataract surgeries, Diderot develops a powerful critique of the empiricist stress on vision as the primary source of perception and provides a remarkably forward-looking critique of disablist attitudes toward the blind. Through this philosophical discourse, he engages a political argument about the way knowledge is gathered, evaluated, and interpreted through relationships of power. (shrink)

The family is ignored by many readers of Hobbes, but it plays a central role in Hobbes’s conception of the state and of human nature. This essay considers the various theories of whether the family exists in the state of nature, and in what form—patriarchal or not--and poses its own answer to the challenges posed by Hobbes’s ambiguous comments on women, children, the family, and the state.

The sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women’s work in the home has been a problem that scholars have struggled with at least since the advent of the “second wave” women’s movement, but it has never entered into the primary discourses of political science. This paper argues that John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy provides innovative and useful arguments that address this thorny problem. Productive labor is essential to Mill’s conception of property, and property was vital (...) to women’s independence in Mill’s view. Yet since Mill thought most women would choose the “career” of wife and mother rather than working for wages, then granting that work productive status would provide a radical and inventive foundation for women’s equality. Mill, however, is ambiguous about the productive status of domestic labor, and is thereby representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought, as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender. But because Mill at the same time develops a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists, he offers contemporary political scientists and theorists a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor, the requirements for gender equality, and the accepted categories of political economy. (shrink)

Critiques social contract theory from the perspective of feminist psychoanalytic and psychological theory and develops an alternative feminist understanding of obligation as rooted in an epistemology of connection. Utilizes a feminist standpoint theory approach, and contains a discussion of the relevance of postmodernism to feminist philosophy in general and standpoint theory in particular.

Just as the differentiation of human beings from other species has traditionally been thought to be based on some common essence or nature, so has the division of humankind into certain groups, in particular, men and women and races, been thought to be based on their distinct natures. There are many similarities between the concepts of human nature, ‘women’s nature’ and race, and how these concepts have functioned ideologically: For all three, the traditional idea was that there were fixed, natural (...) essences determining the cognitive, moral, and emotional traits and abilities of the group in question. Some, e.g., Plato, and Herrnstein in recent years, have applied the idea to different social classes as well. I will call this view essentialism, and note that it is compatible with various metaphysical analyses. One could be opposed to metaphysical essentialism, but accept essences in this sense, as, for example, Hume did. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Marcuse's Eros and Civilization from the perspective of Gayle Rubin's classic article “The Traffic in Women.” The primary goals of this comparison are to investigate the social and psychological mechanisms that perpetuate the archaic sex/gender system Rubin describes under current conditions of post-industrial capitalism; to open possible new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors’ applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations of Freud's writings; and to make clearer the role sexual repression continues to (...) play in all forms of oppression, even in a public world seemingly saturated with sex. (shrink)

A society is said to age when its number of older members increases in relation to its number of younger members. The societies in most of the world’s industrialized nations have been aging since at least 1800. In 1800 the demographic makeup of developed countries was similar to that of many Third World countries in the early 1990s with roughly half the population under the age of 16 and very few people living beyond age of 60. Since that time, increases (...) in life expectancy, combined with declines in fertility rates, have dramatically increased the proportion of older persons in developed nations. The rapid increase in the number of older persons relative to younger ones carries important societal implications. In the domain of healthcare, societal aging will increase costs and exert greater pressure to ration services. It will, thus, bring to the fore questions, regarding a just distribution of healthcare between young and old age groups. This paper considers some of the most influential arguments to date for age-based rationing of health care. I show that these arguments fall short, and that the theoretical assumptions underlying them do not withstand careful scrutiny. (shrink)

in her 2010 paper, "the new politics of community," Dr. Collins's argument on community as conceptually and practically a political construct provides a vital connection to the American philosophical tradition, particularly the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey. In my response to her paper, I combine components of her argument with her earlier work in black feminist epistemology. I tie these insights to Du Bois's and Dewey's arguments regarding how communities develop. These are then connected to (...) the work by transnational feminist Chandra Mohanty and political scientist Benedict Anderson on imagined communities. I use these to develop a framework for thinking of some communities as communities of epistemic... (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 3, Page 666-678, June 2022.

This paper addresses the question of whether Derrida's “hauntology” as developed in Specters of Marx and related texts, can be anything more than yet another repetition of a specifically male preoccupation with the Father inscribed on the bodies of women, in this case the always absent daughter. A careful reading suggests that Derrida, and playwnght fathers of daughters such as Shakespeare and August Wilson, may be aware of the paradoxes of their situation.

Explores ontological humility in the history of philosophy, from Descartes to contemporary gender and race theory.

This paper attempts to show that Robert Cumming’s effort in a recent article to explain the work of Jacques Derrida to American philosophers fails to present an adequate account of Derrida’s position because Cumming does not take Derrida’s philosophical views (in this case, his critique of Heidegger) seriously enough. By returning to the Heideggerian and Derridian texts, three main points become clear: first, that Cumming fails to present an alternative interpretation of Heidegger on which to base his criticisms of Derrida’s (...) reading; second, that Cumming’s specific criticisms of Derrida often fail because he engages the issues on a relatively superficial level; and, finally, that Cumming has not proven that Derrida’s work does not present a substantial challenge to Heidegger’s position. I conclude that the task of explaining Derrida’s work to American philosophers has yet to be accomplished. (shrink)

Instead of understanding property and rationality individualistically as in capitalism, the ecological crisis makes it imperative that we change the priority to the social/collective point of view. Public goods/commonstock should be the default, and private property should have to be justified. Rationality should be understood not primarily from an individual perspective, but from a social/collective point of view. This does not entail the sacrifice of individual rights and freedom to the collective, but rather the synthesis of the two. Planning and (...) freedom coincide if the planning is democratic, which can only happen in a more egalitarian society. (shrink)

Multiple dimensions and textures of transcendence are evoked not just by reflection on humans in their relationship with God and community but also by encounter with bonobos—primates that are very close genetic kin with humans. The promise for theological reflection is rooted in bonobo social adaptation as a highly cooperative species. Bonobo sexual behavior accompanies and expresses a high level of social intelligence. The point of my project is not a scientific one intended to argue persuasively for individual self-awareness or (...) self-transcendence in bonobos. Instead, it emphasizes connectedness, interdependence, and sociality as windows on transcendence. Such a view does not require consciousness or intellectual recognition of self-in-relation, but it certainly presumes embodiment of self-in-relation. Various textures of transcendence reflect multidirectional relationships among Pan paniscus (bonobos), Homo sapiens , and the Sacred. (shrink)

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided (...) a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw. (shrink)

The Aging Self and the Aging Society Ethical issues involving the elderly have recently come to the fore. This should come as no surprise: Since the turn of the century, there has been an eightfold in crease in the number of Americans over the age of sixty five, and almost a tripling of their proportion to the general population. Those over the age of eighty-five- the fastest growing group in the country-are twenty one more times as numerous as in 1900. (...) Demographers expect this trend to accelerate into the twenty-first century. The aging of society casts into vivid relief a num ber of deep and troubling questions. On the one hand, as individuals, we grapple with the immediate experience of aging and mortality and seek to find in it philosophical or ethical significance. We also wonder what responsi bilities we bear toward aging family members and what expectations of others our plans for old age can reasona bly include. On the other hand, as a community, we must decide: What special role, if any, do older persons occupy in our society? What constitutes a just distribution of medical resources between generations? And, How can institutions that serve the old foster imperiled values, such as autonomy, self-respect, and dignity? Only recently have we begun to explore these themes, yet already a rich and fruitful literature has grown up around them. (shrink)

Drawing on recent bioethics literature on emerging infectious diseases, as well as the authors’ own previous analyses, this chapter addresses the ethical underpinnings of global health partnerships to combat emerging infectious disease. After an introduction to the topic, section “Introduction” proposes the twin ends of establishing structural justice and ensuring threshold human capabilities as key justice standards. It shows how these standards play a critical role in determining justice in global health partnerships. Section “Next Steps: Global Health Partnerships” illustrates these (...) justice standards by applying them to the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Section “Conclusion” models multi-level global health partnerships that build-in justice considerations and proposes next steps for pandemic preparedness. (shrink)

In ‘Does zero-COVID neglect health disparities?’ we made the case that strict zero-COVID policies implemented during the coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19) pandemic raise health equity concerns so serious that these policies are not ethically sustainable.1 Zero-COVID, which has dominated many Pacific Rim societies, sets zero deaths from COVID-19 as a goal, and aims to reach it by forcefully containing transmission through short-term lockdowns, followed by stringent find, test, trace and isolate methods. Since the paper appeared in 2021, the Omicron variant (...) and subvariants took hold, making a strict zero goal unattainable and leading many countries to abandon it. Careful ethical analysis of zero-COVID’s impact remains crucially important, however, not only because the novel coronavirus continues to surprise us, but also to ensure lessons learnt from this pandemic are carried forward to future pandemics. In ‘Zero-COVID and health inequities’,2 Schaefer argues that it is possible to pursue zero-COVID yet offset any negative impacts on disadvantaged groups. Citing Singapore, where zero-COVID led to outbreaks in crowded and unsanitary migrant workers dormitories, Schaefer notes the government offset these effects, setting up less densely populated ‘quick build dormitories’ that caused daily case counts to drop, even while zero-COVID remained …. (shrink)

In ‘Nothing to Be Ashamed of: Sex Robots for Older Adults with Disabilities,’1 I make the case that the unwanted absence of sex from a person’s life represents not just a loss of physical pleasure, but a loss of dignity. Since people aged 65 and over suffer disproportionately from disabilities that impair sexual functioning, I focus on this population. Drawing on an analysis of dignity developed at greater length elsewhere,2 I argue that sex robots can help older adults with disabilities (...) and that societies ought to take reasonable steps to make them available to this population. Unlike other assistive technologies, robots invite human-robot relationships and can form close connections with older adults.3 In response to the proposal, four commentators have introduced objections that I address below. Sorell4 argues that people who are young and able-bodied may wish for sex in their lives too and its absence may be a bigger concern for them than for older people. In reply, while my focus is older adults with disabilities that impair sexual function, I also acknowledge that loss of sexual function can occur at any age as can the absence of a …. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 22-24.

Accession Number: ATLA0001713221; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 945-961.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 961.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Models of the architecture of mature cognitive systems can inform the study of normal and disordered cognitive development, if one distinguishes between proximal and distal causes of performance. The assumption of residual normality need not be made in order to apply adult models to performance early in development, because these models can be modified to reflect the results of compensatory processing.