The UN Global Compact is a voluntary initiative designed to help fashion a more humane world by enlisting business to follow ten principles concerning human rights, labor, the environment, and corruption. Although the four-year-old Compact is a relatively successful initiative, having signed up over eleven hundred companies and more than two hundred of the large multinationals, and having begun some important projects on globalization issues, there is a serious problem in that very few of the major U.S. companies have joined. (...) While the premier U.S. companies are interested in meeting the legitimate expectations of society, there is concerncentering around accountability issues. The accountability issues are in four major areas: 1. Accountability showing that the globalization of the economy actually helps the poor. 2. Accountability showing the corporate performance matches rhetoric. 3. Accountability that provides legitimacy to a two-tier pricing system and other measures that are designed to assist the poor in developing countries. 4. Accountability in the human rights area; what societal expectations are multinational companies accountablefor? The article outlines the problems that the Compact brings to the fore and offers some insight from the ethical literature that may address U.S. company concerns or provide new ways of thinking about the issues. It further argues that the forum provided by the Compact may be the most effective means to gain consensus of the role of business in society. (shrink)

Autonomy is one of the central concepts of contemporary moral thought, and Kant is often credited with being the inventor of individual moral autonomy. But how and why did Kant develop this notion? The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Philosophy is the first essay collection exclusively devoted to this topic. It traces the emergence of autonomy from Kant's earliest writings to the changes that he made to the concept in his mature works. The essays offer a close historical and (...) philosophical analysis of what prompted Kant to develop his conception of autonomy, charting the historical background which prompted his search, and thoroughly analysing different stages of his writings in order to see which element of autonomy was introduced at which point. The resulting volume will be of interest to both scholars and students of Kantian moral philosophy, as well as to anyone interested in the subject of autonomy. (shrink)

ArgumentThe nineteenth century witnessed the advent of the modern zoo. Nearly everyone who came to watch the exotic animals was a “lay person” in the sense that virtually none had formal training in zoology. This paper provides a typology of these observers: the zoo directors, assistants, keepers, animal painters, and the “common” visitor. What did they observe and what were their motivations? Did they pursue a certain agenda? What kind of knowledge, if any, did they produce? Soon the issue of (...) the reliability of these observations emerged. Lay observers insisted on the veracity of their intimate and personal knowledge of animals while academics complained that their claims could not be generalized and were tainted by anthropomorphism. Hence the focus on the observations of these laymen will reveal contemporary assumptions on what may count as “scientific.” This is closely linked to the question of how far the zoo may qualify as a site of scientific investigation in the first place. The constraints on doing research on animals in a public space such as the zoo were numerous. Yet despite these obstacles the zoological garden contributed to the rise of ecological thinking as well as to the formation of ethology as a scientific discipline. (shrink)

We present a plural logic that is as expressively strong as it can be without sacrificing axiomatisability, axiomatise it, and use it to chart the expressive limits set by axiomatisability. To the standard apparatus of quantification using singular variables our object-language adds plural variables, a predicate expressing inclusion (is/are/is one of/are among), and a plural definite description operator. Axiomatisability demands that plural variables only occur free, but they have a surprisingly important role. Plural description is not eliminable in favour of (...) quantification; on the contrary, quantification is definable in terms of it. Predicates and functors (function signs) can take plural as well as singular terms as arguments, and both many-valued and single-valued functions are expressible. The system accommodates collective as well as distributive predicates, and the condition for a predicate to be distributive is definable within it; similarly for functors. An essential part of the project is to demonstrate the soundness and completeness of the calculus with respect to a semantics that does without set-theoretic domains and in which the use of settheoretic extensions of predicates and functors is replaced by the sui generis relations and functions for which the extensions were at best artificial surrogates. Our metalanguage is designed to solve the difficulties involved in talking plurally about individuals and about the semantic values of plural items. (shrink)

For at least the last twenty years, philosophers have attempted various strategies for reviving the Hegelian notion of recognition and redeploying it in discourses centered around social justice, including multiculturalism, feminism, race theory, and queer theory. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic may seem like an obvious place to start to analyze the oppression of one group by another. Given that Hegel is not literally talking about slaves, however, but a stage of consciousness, indeed the onset of self-consciousness, we might wonder why his (...) notion of recognition has become so important to these contemporary discourses on oppression. One reason is that the Hegelian model of recognition proposes that.. (shrink)

In this article we explore the possibility of viewing complex systems, as well as the models we create of such systems, as operating within a particular type of economy. The type of economy we aim to establish here is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s reading of George Bataille’s notion of a general economy. We restrict our discussion to the philosophical use of the word ‘economy’. This reading tries to overcome the idea of an economy as restricted to a single logos or (...) master narrative. At the same time, however, Derrida illustrates that we always operate from a restricted framework and as such something will always escape and interrupt our understanding of the world. In this paper we will propose that one could use Derrida’s reading of Bataille, along with notions such as différance, in order to move towards an understanding of complex systems as existing within certain sets of possibilities and constraints. We argue that this view of an economy agrees with the work of Edgar Morin on complexity and his conceptualization of general complexity. (shrink)

Urban street trees (USTs) have a range of values – some of which are easier to quantify than others. Focusing specifically on the UK context and using the Sheffield Tree Protests (2012–) as a case study, whilst confirming existing research as to the variety of values associated with their specifically ‘cultural’ services, the article argues that USTs have an additional potential form – what I call ‘civic-transformative value’. This form of value has at least three key characteristics. Firstly, it is (...) place-based and communal; second, its form is ‘relational’; and finally, as intrinsically contingent, it is pluralistic in the sense that its civic-transformative potential is dependent on successfully integrating a range of other values. The article emphasises both the possibility and necessity of ‘convergence’ – that is, a pluralistic and pragmatic alliance of values which might help protect not only USTs, but other embattled sites of nature. (shrink)

Why and under what conditions are individuals altruistic to family and friends in their social networks? Evolutionary psychology suggests that such behaviour is primarily the product of adaptations for kin- and reciprocal altruism, dependent on the degree of genetic relatedness and exchange of benefits, respectively. For this reason, individuals are expected to be more altruistic to family members than to friends: whereas family members can be the recipients of kin and reciprocal altruism, friends can be the recipients of reciprocal altruism (...) only. However, there is a question about how the effect of kinship is implemented at the proximate psychological level. One possibility is that kinship contributes to some general measure of relationship quality (such as ‘emotional closeness’), which in turn explains altruism. Another possibility is that the effect of kinship is independent of relationship quality. The present study tests between these two possibilities. Participants (N= 111) completed a self-report questionnaire about their willingness to be altruistic, and their emotional closeness, to 12 family members and friends at different positions in their extended social networks. As expected, altruism was greater for family than friends, and greater for more central layers of the network. Crucially, the results showed that kinship made a significant unique contribution to altruism, even when controlling for the effects of emotional closeness. Thus, participants were more altruistic towards kin than would be expected if altruism was dependent on emotional closeness alone – a phenomenon we label a ‘kinship premium’. These results have implications for the ongoing debate about the extent to which kin relations and friendships are distinct kinds of social relationships, and how to measure the ‘strength of ties’ in social networks. (shrink)

In medizinethischen Kontexten bezeichnet der Ausdruck „Odysseus-Verträge“ Selbstbindungen, die in der vorausschauenden Bitte von Patienten an ihre Ärzte bestehen, eigene spätere Behandlungspräferenzen nicht zu befolgen. Umstritten ist jedoch, ob eine vorhergehende Anweisung ein Handeln gegen den Patientenwillen in der aktualen Behandlungssituation rechtfertigt. In diesem Beitrag wird die Frage nach der Verbindlichkeit von Odysseus-Anweisungen erörtert. Zunächst wird gezeigt, dass die Befolgung einer Odysseus-Anweisung eine Form des paternalistischen Handelns darstellt und die Frage nach der Verbindlichkeit von Odysseus-Anweisungen daher in diejenige nach der (...) Rechtfertigung paternalistischen Handelns zu überführen ist . Im Folgenden wird als Rechtfertigungsmodell für paternalistisches Handeln ein Zustimmungsmodell verteidigt , dem zufolge eine paternalisierende Maßnahme durch die antizipierte spätere Zustimmung des Patienten zu dieser Maßnahme gerechtfertigt wird . Nach einer Erörterung des Einwandes, dass damit die besonderen normativen Probleme von Odysseus-Anweisungen aus dem Blick geraten , werden abschließend Fälle untersucht, in denen aufgrund eines irreversiblen Kompetenzverlustes keine spätere Zustimmung zur paternalisierenden Maßnahme mehr möglich ist. In diesen Fällen, so die These, ist ein paternalistisches Handeln gegen den aktualen Patientenwillen nicht gerechtfertigt; kommt es hier also zu einem Konflikt zwischen dem in der Vorausverfügung dokumentierten und dem aktualen Patientenwillen, ist letzterer zu respektieren .In the context of medical ethics, the term „Ulysses contract“ denotes an advance directive by means of which a patient binds himself for the future by instructing a doctor to act against his foreseen future preferences. There is some controversy, however, about whether a person’s prior decisions should be regarded as mandatory for the doctor even when they conflict with her present desires. In this contribution, I address the questions whether and under what circumstances Ulysses instructions should be regarded as binding. In Part , I attempt to show that observing a Ulysses instruction means acting paternalistically and that therefore the question whether Ulysses contracts ought to be respected should be transformed into the question how paternalistic action can be justified. Parts and are concerned with the justification of paternalistic action. On the basis of a conception of welfare as being tied to the person’s interests and preferences, I defend a consent-based model of justification . More specifically, I suggest that the patient’s anticipated later consent to a precedent paternalistic action should count as its justification . In what follows, I attempt to rebut the objection that this account does not do justice to the specific normative problems of Ulysses contracts . Finally, I examine cases in which, due to an irreversible loss of competence, a paternalistic action cannot be assented to by the patient. I argue that in these cases, acting against the patient’s present wishes cannot be justified. If in such a case a patient’s present request runs contrary to the past request expressed in the advance directive, the former should be respected. (shrink)

The pathologization of women’s depression covers over the social and institutional causes of that symptomology. Insofar as patriarchal values continue to devalue and debase women and mothers in ways that colonize psychic space, and depression becomes a cover for what I call ‘social melancholy.’ This is not the melancholy of traditional psychoanalysis, but a form of melancholy that results from oppression, domination, and the colonization of psychic space. Social melancholy differs from both Freud’s notion of melancholy in that it is (...) the result of social factors that constitute the depressed subject as ashamed and lacking agency. Crucial to my analysis is a distinction between shame and guilt missing from traditional psychoanalytic accounts of melancholy and depression. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to add one further value to the previously articulated “universal values” and to describe the constituent components of three universal values.Design/methodology/approachThis interpretive/constructivist study of Australia's largest online community of seniors involved a 30‐month ethnographic investigation. After an initial period of 11 months of observing social interaction on the entire site, in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 30 participants, selected according to criterion sampling, a form of purposive sampling.FindingsFour key moral values were identified: equality, freedom, (...) respect and trust. All of them had been found in other studies, with equality and respect (as human dignity) identified as universal values. The findings from this study suggest that freedom is another universal value.Originality/valueThis study extends the understanding of universal values to include freedom. Further, it demonstrates the constituent components for freedom, and those of two other universal values previously identified in the literature, equality and human dignity, as well as revealing linkages between these three values. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility for a means of bringing about novelty which does not rely on kairological philosophies based on an event. In contrast to both common sense and contemporary philosophical understandings of the term where for novelty to arise there must be some break in the repetition of the structure, this paper argues that it is possible for novelty to come about through small-scale experimentation. This is done by relying on the philosophical notion of ‘economy’ in order to (...) understand how we think about the world. In this regard, our thinking about the world depends upon acknowledging certain possibilities at the expense of others. History can then be seen as the distribution of emphasis which allows for these past possibilities and the future potentiality they may hold. Novelty, defined here as a rereading of history, is precisely the disruption of these possibilities and a challenge to the memory of the system. The conclusion to this paper argues that experimentation is an important means by which we can bring novelty into the world. (shrink)

In [STU 00, KUT 03] we introduced a family of ‘modal' languages intended for talking about distances. These languages are interpreted in ‘distance spaces' which satisfy some of the standard axioms of metric spaces. Among other things, we singled out decidable logics of distance spaces and proved expressive completeness results relating classical and modal languages. The aim of this paper is to axiomatize the modal fragments of the semantically defined distance logics of [KUT 03] and give a new proof of (...) their decidability. (shrink)

Der Band versammelt die Beiträge einer internationalen Tagung zu zentralen Stationen der Vorsokratiker-Rezeption: Platon, Aristoteles, Autoren der hellenistischen und der Kaiserzeit, der Renaissance und der Gegenwart. Die Untersuchungen zeichnen sich durch einen rezeptionsorientierten Forschungsansatz aus und gehen in vielfältiger Hinsicht den Funktionen nach, die die Bezugnahmen auf die Vorsokratiker im jeweils untersuchten Rezeptionskontext erfüllen. Sie fragen: Welche Haltung zum rezipierten Text zeigt sich im rezipierenden Text? Dient er polemischer Abgrenzung oder vielmehr der Bekräftigung eigener Auffassungen im Rekurs auf die Autorität,der (...) Alten‘? Inwieweit lässt der rezipierende Text das Bemühen um eine unvoreingenommene, sachlich-objektive Darstellung erkennen? Konstruieren die rezipierenden Texte eine Rezeptions- oder Sukzessionslinie und wie ordnen sie sich selbst gegebenenfalls in diese ein? Wird hierbei der hermeneutische Prozess der Rezeption reflektiert oder thematisiert? Mit der Untersuchung dieser und ähnlicher Fragen greift der Band einen Forschungsansatz auf, der mit Bezug auf die Vorsokratiker ganz wesentlich von Georg Wöhrle gefördert wurde; ihm ist der Band als Festschrift gewidmet. (shrink)

Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied culture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I reformulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian Information and Communications Technology workplace. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a qualitative research methodology. A total of 43 ICT professionals were interviewed during the month of February 2014 in six Australian capital cities. All interviews were conducted face-to-face and followed a semi-structured interviewing format utilising open-end questions and further probing questions. The purposive sample represented ICT professionals from large and small organisations, government (...) and private sector, different geographic locations, ages, genders, types of jobs and employment experience. Data analysis was completed with the help of QSR NVivo 10, a software package for managing qualitative data. Findings – Of the 25 reasons identified for unethical behaviour in ICT workplaces, 30 per cent of participants agreed on five major ones: pressure, bad management, greed, lack of respect towards ICT and communication issues. Practical implications – By focussing on the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian ICT workplace, this article helps those identifying strategies for dealing with unprofessional behaviour to take into account the root causes of unprofessional behaviour. Originality/value – There is hardly any literature on reasons for unethical behaviour in the ICT workplaces. This article seeks to address this imbalance in the literature. Also, integrity systems in ICT are a new focus in collective, organisational ethics. Identification of and resolving unethical ICT workplace practice is an innovative contribution to the literature. (shrink)

ArgumentDiscussions of the scientific uses of moving-image technologies have emphasized applications that culminated in static images, such as the chronophotographic decomposition of movement into discrete and measurable instants. The projection of movement, however, was also an important capability of moving-image technologies that scientists employed in a variety of ways. Views through the microscope provide a particularly sustained and prominent instance of the scientific uses of the moving image. The category of “education” subsumes theses various scientific uses, providing a means by (...) which to bridge the cultures of scientific and popular scientific moving images. (shrink)

This article considers several problems concerning the origin of the soul in the work of the nineteenth century American theologian, William G. T. Shedd. He opts for the traducian position, which is, that the soul is passed down from parents to child, in a way similar to the passing of physical seed from two human parents that fuse in syngamy to form a genetically distinct entity. The essay considers three problems with this view. The first concerns the composition of human (...) natures; the second, whether souls are fissiparous; and the third, the relationship between traducianism, creationism and Augustinian realism. (shrink)

On 26 February 2020, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany pronounced a judgement that the prohibition of assisted suicide services set out in § 217 of the Criminal Code is void. It thereby reestablished the legal state that had obtained before 2015. Furthermore, it defined the right to die as an autonomy-based right, thereby dissociating the right to take one???s life from states of extreme suffering caused by illness. The judgement implies that one can, in principle, resort to assistance for (...) suicide even in the absence of illness and suffering. In this contribution, I deal with the problems that arise as a consequence of dissociating legitimate assisted suicide from states of illness. I analyze Bettina Schöne-Seifert???s suggestion to regard an understandable (,,nachvollziehbar“) wish to die as a wish that is protected by the right to autonomy. It turns out that the criterion of understandability is deficient: it either commits us to regarding every wish to die as understable or it undermines the anti-paternalistic requirement of respecting the patient???s autonomy. (shrink)

Philosophers have been attracted by the theory that an agreement consists of undertakings by the parties. But the theory faces objections from three sides: unconditional undertakings by both parties are insufficient for an agreement; if the parties give interconditional undertakings, both comply if neither does anything; and, if one party gives an unconditional undertaking and the other a conditional one, a condition of interdependence is breached. The options are to live with the breach, to produce an undertaking-based theory that avoids (...) the objections, or to analyse an agreement otherwise than in terms of undertakings. I consider each option and advocate the third: a better theory is that two people have an agreement where one makes an offer to the other that the other accepts. (shrink)

ArgumentI propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play was “biocentrism,” (...) the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.– Moholy-Nagy. (shrink)

Not only in its conceptual reconstruction but also in the straightforward application of Badioursquo;s thought its problems and tensions come to light. This paper thus sets out to identify a generic truth procedure in the domain of art; specifically within theatre starting out from the Meyerhold-event and tracing enquiries in the work of Artaud and Brecht. It turns out once one follows the lines of further enquiries one ends up sketching an explosive genealogy that gives rise to the concept of (...) an art of presentation transgressing the boundaries of theatre, art and philosophy. (shrink)