The relative importance of the Jones’ [Jones, T. M.: 1991, Academy of Management Review 16(2), 366–395] six components of moral intensity was measured using a conjoint experimental design. The most important components influencing ethical perceptions were: probability of effect, magnitude of consequences, and temporal immediacy. Contrary to previous research, overall social consensus was not an important factor. However, consumers exhibit distinctly different patterns in ethical evaluation, and for approximately 15% of respondents social consensus was the most important dimension.

Feel-feel-at-flesh-inside -- Our disabled sense -- Homo Ex Machina -- Stepping outside the story -- The grace of being -- Recovering holosapience -- When wholeness points the way -- A speleology of the body's intelligence.

While some of the great thinkers (Socrates, Kant) have argued for an absolutist view of ethical behavior, over the past 250 years the relativist view has become ascendant. Following the contingency framework of Ferrell and Gresham (1985) and the issue contingent model of Jones (1991), a model for ethical research is proposed. The key components include the moral agent/transgressor, the issue type and its intensity, and the nature of the victim. In addition, a statistical methodology, namely conjoint analysis, is introduced (...) to investigate the trade-offs inherent in relativistic inquiry. In two ethical scenarios, in each of which three factors were varied, conjoint analysis provided important insight. The individual transgressor factor of gender had minimal impact on observer responses to two scenarios of questionable ethicality. In contrast, both the dollar magnitude of the transgression and the organizational status of the transgressor (salesperson/manager/owner) did affect observer responses. (shrink)

In six chapters of uneven length, Peter Lewis Allen, a former literature professor and public policy activist, offers a highly readable romp through two millennia of beliefs and attitudes regarding sin, sex, and disease. In particular, Allen draws on religious, medical, and popular literature from different eras in order to exemplify how particular “diseases”—lovesickness, leprosy, syphilis, bubonic plague, and masturbation—were causally connected with thoughts of punishment for sinful behavior. He then extends this theme into a lengthy chapter describing how the (...) same belief contributed to the chasm between conservative and activist perspectives on AIDS in the United States over the past two decades.Allen, who is admittedly not a historian, picks and chooses a “series of portraits of disease,” offering little contextualization as he creates a “tableau” of perspectives drawn from European and American discourse throughout Christianity. He flavors his chronological narrative with personal experiences drawn from his work in gay health groups. The most significant personal experiences he intersperses stem from thoughts about his one‐time lover, now dead from complications associated with AIDS. He interjects key episodes from this relationship into the book to affirm that “in its fight about how to respond to AIDS,” American society has reenacted a “drama that had been written centuries before” .Allen's engaging writing stands much more firmly as chronologically arranged comparative literature than as historical scholarship. His greatest historiographical faux pas lies in his anachronistic writing about disease. For example, he introduces his chapter on medieval leprosy with a description of the pathological destruction caused by the leprosy bacterium. Then, in selecting situations drawn from Herodotus through the sixteenth‐century “contagionist” Girolamo Fracastoro, he erroneously assumes that “leprosy” implied a singular, consistent disorder throughout this long period. Similar concerns arise regarding his coverage of syphilis. Such errors may have originated from his drawing too exclusively from pre‐1990 historical writings. Works like Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden's Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History and Linda Merian's edited volume The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth‐Century Britain and France , and the voluminous literature on the history of the body, would have provided contextual concepts within which to place more concrete views about the intersections between diseases and culture. The author's desire to flash forward from particular historical periods to AIDS in our society too often leads to weakly substantiated connections between time periods.Allen's strengths lie in his ability to draw on works of literature, especially popular literature. His particular emphasis on French works reflects his own background in medieval French literature. His arguments are also strong when comparing church and society in the medieval period. For example, his chapter on lovesickness clearly delineates the persistent position of the Church Fathers against medics who regularly prescribed a “coital cure” for the disorder, without specifying what partners to select, instead of welcoming disease as a divine corrective.Allen's writing on plague, the shortest chapter of the book, clearly depicts the once‐common view that this epidemic disaster was inflicted by God as a punishment for mankind's sinful nature. However, the omission of any discussion of sex in a chapter of a work subtitled “Sex and Disease, Past and Present,” is somewhat puzzling. Even more conspicuous is the author's failure to expand upon the 1530 poem regarding the plight of the impious shepherd, Syphilis, from whom the disease in question received its name. Why would a literary scholar prone to draw on popular writings not give more than a single‐sentence mention to this historically relevant poem?Of the works Allen has drawn upon, he offers a pleasant mix of primary and secondary accounts that, like all good literary criticism, gives original sources a clear voice. Any work so selectively focused on a few diseases will leave some readers wondering about others that might have been perceived in terms of sex and sin. Were such associations discussed in regard to madness in the eighteenth century, tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, or the wide range of twentieth‐century STDs prior to AIDS? Why was no mention made of leprosy in the twentieth‐century context? Its AIDS‐like stigma has been historically contextualized in several works, including Stephanie J. Castillo's award‐winning 1992 documentary Simple Courage. Similarly, one wonders why the author chose not to drawn on standard medical history accounts on AIDS, including Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox's edited volume AIDS: The Burden of History and, perhaps more important for the Francophile Allen, Mirko D. Grmek's Histoire du SIDA: Début et origine d'une pandémie actualle .Apart from my historiographical criticisms, The Wages of Sin is a most delightful popular rendering of key relations between disease and Christianity. Works like this are extremely useful in reminding the reading public in an articulate, informative, and entertaining manner that they are part of humanity's continuum that has long sought connections between physical health and moral living. Indeed, Allen's apt description of the underlying usefulness of history underscores the importance of his own writing: “We value history because, whatever its distortions and inaccuracies, it is a way of understanding and giving value to our collective human experience and collective human memory”. (shrink)

Abraham Fraunce’s The Shepherds’ Logic (c. 1585) is one of the first English adaptations of Petrus Ramus’s Dialecticae libri duo (1556). Preserved in a manuscript also containing two shorter essays on Ramist dialectic, the work was later modified and enlarged for publication as The Lawyers’ Logic (1588). But Fraunce’s substantial and almost exclusive use of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherds’ Calendar (1579) as the source for practical examples makes the manuscript treatise a unique document revealing the influence of the Ramist reform (...) of the arts of discourse on the new literary elite led by Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey. This is the first published critical edition of Fraunce’s early treatise and the two companion essays. It presents the texts in modernized spelling, traces their sources and contexts, and draws out their literary and philosophical implications. It also includes relevant excerpts from The Lawyers’ Logic, such as Fraunce’s quantitative-verse translation of Virgil’s Second Eclogue and its Ramist analysis, and a full catalogue of the quotations from Spenser’s Calendar. As a whole, this edition sees Fraunce’s pastoral logic as a first-hand testimony showing how scholarly training in the Renaissance arts of discourse enlightened the composition and interpretation of poetic texts. (shrink)

Lantos and Feudtner argue that SUPPORT was an instance of CER and that CER differs from research involving unproven, experimental therapies because it exposes research subjects to the same risks patients regularly face in clinical practice. Like many defenders of SUPPORT, they formally acknowledge the study as research but want it to be thought of as clinical care. They develop an appealing argument, but it is misleading. Whatever doctors might have done in clinical practice, their choice of target range within (...) the study and for study participants was influenced by research aims. Just as in research involving unproven, experimental therapies, the care of patients in SUPPORT was altered for the goal of obtaining knowledge to help future patients. (shrink)

What characteristics or attributes of a healthcare decision qualify it as acceptable to those who are empowered to judge it as adequate and hence suitable to either proceed (or not) with a recommen...

The four essays by Jeremy Bentham assembled in this volume date from the spring and summer of 1822 and are based exclusively on manuscripts, many of which have never before been published. In the essays `Economy as Applied to Office', `Identification of Interests', `Supreme Operative', and `Constitutional Code Rationale', Bentham develops the general principles of constitutional law and government which underpin the detailed administrative provisions set out in Constitutional Code. In addition, original and penetrating discussions of such topics as sovereignty, (...) constitutional rule, democratic and monarchical government, public finance, the aptitude and powers of officials, corruption, the influence of public opinion, and the delusive effect of religion and titles of honour, affirm Bentham's status as a political theorist of the first rank. As an important application of utilitarian principles to the structure and organization of government, and a major contribution to the theory of representative democracy, this volume will be of interest to students of philosophy, law, politics, economics, and history. (shrink)

Since the financial crisis, there has been much discussion about the importance of ethics in economic life. An important contribution to this discussion was a 2018 Vatican letter on the financial system which reiterated and further developed Catholic social teaching. This article argues that the Catholic Church is correct to unite the disciplines of economics and ethics. However, it is proposed that, as Catholic social teaching in this field develops further, there should be more focus on the importance and development (...) of the virtues. The letter reaffirmed earlier Catholic Church teaching on the regulation of markets. Once again, the formation in the virtues, especially the virtue of prudence, can help us make discerning judgments about the place of regulation in economic life. Furthermore, an understanding of human anthropology and the economic history of financial institutions can help us make prudent judgments in relation to these issues. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: * A Neuroscientific Theory of Cognition: The Global Workspace Model * The Burden of Proof and the Loss of Innocence * The Harshest Attack on Freedom and Consciousness: Daniel Dennett * A More Radical Entailment? * Consciousness as an Emergent Property * Conclusion * Notes.

This article explores the effect of women’s movement into the labor market on the gender segregation of work, using the Current Population Survey from 1972 to 1993. The author includes as working those respondents who were “keeping house” and codes keeping house as an occupation. The results show higher estimates of gender segregation, and slightly steeper declines over time, than were seen in previous studies. Analysis of one-year longitudinal changes reveals less movement out of female-dominated occupations when keeping house is (...) included as an occupation. Finally, a decomposition of the segregation trend shows that the movement of women away from keeping house contributed as much to the overall decline in gender segregation as did the desegregation of paid occupations. The author concludes that the movement of women’s work from the household to the labor market has been a driving force in the changing nature of gender inequality. (shrink)

In this Open Peer Commentary, we draw on our clinical experience to argue that instrumental paternalism carves a pathway to competent refusal of medical intervention. Whether C successfully navigat...

One of the deepest problems in philosophical theology is that of divine causality and human freedom. The analogy between God and the author of a work of fiction can shed light on this and many other thorny problems in philosophical and dogmatic theology.

Connecting poetry and philosophy of language, Philip Mills bridges the continental and analytical divide by bringing together the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Through an expressivist philosophy of poetry, he argues that we can understand some of the core questions in the philosophy of language. Mills highlights the continuity of poetic language with ordinary language, and positions Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's thinking as the clearest way to expand the philosophy of poetry. By tracing the expressivist tradition of philosophy of language, (...) this study locates its roots in German Romanticism right through to the work of contemporary expressivists such as Huw Price and Robert Brandom. Where poetry has been difficult to grasp with the traditional philosophical tools used by aestheticians, A Poetic Philosophy of Language operates at the crossroads between philosophy of art and language, proposing a new philosophy of poetry with wide-ranging potentialities. (shrink)

Explores the nature of scientific theory and how we search for answers, drawing from examples such as Thomas Jefferson's surveying techniques and mathematics, map-making, and geology.

This book examines the U.S economy from 1967 to 2011 and utilizes a new method to predict the future of the economy as far ahead as 2030. Projections using estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Census are used to further project personal income, personal income annual change, and disposable personal income to 2030.

We draw a distinction between defensive and predatory forms of aggression, and how these forms relate to basic neuropsychological systems, especially the Fight-Flight-Freeze-System (FFFS; putatively related to defensive aggression), and the Behavioural Approach System (BAS; putatively related to predatory aggression). These systems may help further to account for proximal brain processes and personality influences in the context of sex differences.