The demand for organ transplants, both globally and in South Korea, substantially exceeds the supply, a situation that might have been aggravated by the enactment of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Decision Act (LSTDA) in February 2018. This legislation may influence emergency medical procedures and the availability of organs from brain-dead donors. This study aimed to assess LSTDA’s impact, introduced in February 2018, on organ donation status in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients in a metropolitan city and identified related factors. We conducted (...) a retrospective analysis of a regional cardiac arrest registry. This study included patients aged 16 or older with cardiac arrest and a cerebral performance category (CPC) score of 5 from January 2015 to December 2022. The exclusion criteria were CPC scores of 1–4, patients under 16 years, and patients declared dead or transferred from emergency departments. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyse factors affecting organ donation. Of the 751 patients included in this study, 47 were organ donors, with a median age of 47 years. Before the LSTDA, there were 30 organ donations, which declined to 17 after its implementation. In the organ donation group, the causes of cardiac arrest included medical (34%), hanging (46.8%), and trauma (19.2%). The adjusted odds ratio for organ donation before the LSTDA implementation was 6.12 (95% CI 3.09–12.12), with non-medical aetiology as associated factors. The enactment of the LSTDA in 2018 in South Korea may be linked to reduced organ donations among patients with OHCA, underscoring the need to re-evaluate the medical and legal aspects of organ donation, especially considering end-of-life care decisions. (shrink)

Plato's penchant for mythmaking sits uneasily beside his reputation as the inventor of rationalist philosophy. Hegel's solution was to ignore the myths. Popper thought them disqualifying. Tae-Yeoun Keum responds by carving out a place for myth in the context of rationalism and shows how Plato's tales inspired history's great political thinkers.

We offer a precautionary account of why business managers should proactively rethink about what kinds of automation firms ought to implement, by exploring two challenges that automation will potentially pose. We engage the current debate concerning whether life without work opportunities will incur a meaning crisis, offering an argument in favor of the position that if technological unemployment occurs, the machine age may be a structurally limited condition for many without work opportunities to have or add meaning to their lives. (...) We term this the axiological challenge. This challenge, if it turns out to be persuasive, leads to a second challenge, to which managers should pay special attention: the teleological challenge, a topic especially relevant to the broad literature about corporate purpose and governance. We argue that both the shareholder profit-maximization model and its major alternative, stakeholder theory, are insufficient to address the meaning crisis. Unless rebutted, the two challenges compel business leaders to proactively rethink the purpose of business for future society. Otherwise, businesses will be contributors to a major ethical crisis and societal externality in the coming society. (shrink)

Collection of author's fragmented works; includes philosophical aspects of Vaibhāṣika, Sautrāntika doctrines, Mādhyamika and followng Tibetan schools.

Transnational articulation programmes are one way China is attempting to advance its higher education system. We report a study of twelve Chinese students’ experiences in two China-Australia 2...

Based on a questionnaire survey, this study is the first to systematically focus on Mongolian managers' perceptions of BE. As such, this paper (1) examines Mongolian managers' views of BE, (2) compares BE perceptions in Mongolia to those in the USA, Japan and Korea, and (3) identifies differences and similarities between the four national groups. We find that unethical practices exist and are quite common in Mongolia, where nearly half of the respondents have experienced ethical conflicts during their career. These (...) conflicts mostly arose in relation to respondents' superiors and colleagues and were related to fairness or discrimination. The results indicate that in their (un)ethical decision-making, Mongolian mangers are situational, but also place importance on the behaviour of their superiors. Finally, situational questions revealed that unlike respondents from the other three national groups, Mongolian managers do not see a significant difference between their own BE attitudes and those of an average manager. (shrink)

Root text and autocommentary on Buddhist logic.

We examine whether investors value the disclosure of first-time standalone corporate social responsibility reports, and whether market valuations differ between government-controlled and privately controlled firms. Using a matched sample of Chinese publicly listed firms, we find that CSR initiators have higher market valuations than matched CSR non-initiators, and CSR initiators controlled by the central and local governments have lower market valuations than CSR non-initiators and CSR initiators controlled by private shareholders. Additional analyses demonstrate that CSR initiators with high CSR reporting (...) quality and perceived credibility have higher market valuations than CSR initiators with low CSR reporting quality and medium or low perceived credibility of CSR reporting. We do not find convincing evidence that CSR mandate, litigation risk, and prior stock returns affect market reactions to CSR reporting. Overall, we find that the market values standalone CSR reports, and that CSR reporting quality and perceived credibility are important factors in market valuation. (shrink)

People are often involuntarily laid off from their jobs through no fault of their own. Employees who are dismissed in this manner cannot always legitimately hold employers accountable for these miserable situations because the decision to implement layoffs is often the best possible outcome given the context—that is, layoffs in and of themselves may be “necessary evils.” Yet, even in circumstances in which layoffs qualify as “necessary evils,” morality demands that employers respect the dignity of those whose employment is involuntarily (...) terminated. In this paper I argue that to preserve the dignity of employees who are involuntarily terminated, in most cases employers have a substantial reason to offer a special kind of unemployment benefit, “severance pay.” To support my claim I draw and expand upon Bernard Williams’s analysis of “agent-regret,” which I believe greatly helps to address and articulate employers’ obligations in the context of involuntary termination. (shrink)

Presentation of the thesis that the doctrines of Śaiva Siddhānta school in Hindu philosophy accords well with the modern disoveries in cosmology and biology.

ABSTRACT:In this article I inquire into Confucian ethics from a non-ideal stance investigating the complex interaction between Confucian ideals and the reality of the modern workplace. I contend that even Confucian workers who regularly engage in social rites at the workplace have an internal, Confucian reason to appreciate the value of rights at the workplace. I explain, from a Confucian non-ideal perspective, why I disagree with the presumptuous idea that labor (or workplace) rights are necessarily incompatible with Confucian ideals and (...) values. Specifically, I argue that if managers were “sages,” the highest moral exemplars and authorities in the Confucian tradition, they would perceive that social rituals alone are often not a contextually intelligent and valued response for the development of intimate communities in the modern workplace. The sage perspective will lead Confucian managers to realize, from their own moral perspective, that they have good reason to balance rites with rights, so long as the adoption is extrinsically valuable and consistent with the Confucian ideal. This article contributes to the debates about Confucianism's compatibility with rights, helps Western human rights scholars better contextualize their arguments in Confucianism-influenced cultures, and contributes to the development of a Confucian or Chinese approach to business ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this article we investigate a philosophical problem for normative business ethics theory suggested by a phenomenon that contemporary psychologists call “bounded ethicality,” which can be identified with the putative fact that well-intentioned people, constrained by psychological limitations, make ethical choices inconsistent with their own ethical beliefs and commitments. When one combines the idea that bounded ethicality is pervasive with the idea that a person morally ought to do something only if she can, it raises a doubt about the practical (...) relevance of the moral principles that business ethics theory prescribes. We call this doubt the Radical Behavioral Challenge. It consists in the idea that people cannot generally conform to the normative ethical principles that business ethics theorists prescribe, and that these principles are therefore practically irrelevant. We answer the Radical Behavioral Challenge and explore normative implications of our answer. (shrink)

Compared to constraint-based causal discovery, causal discovery based on functional causal models is able to identify the whole causal model under appropriate assumptions [Shimizu et al. 2006; Hoyer et al. 2009; Zhang and Hyvärinen 2009b]. Functional causal models represent the effect as a function of the direct causes together with an independent noise term. Examples include the linear non-Gaussian acyclic model, nonlinear additive noise model, and post-nonlinear model. Currently, there are two ways to estimate the parameters in the models: dependence (...) minimization and maximum likelihood. In this article, we show that for any acyclic functional causal model, minimizing the mutual information between the hypothetical cause and the noise term is equivalent to maximizing the data likelihood with a flexible model for the distribution of the noise term. We then focus on estimation of the PNL causal model and propose to estimate it with the warped Gaussian process with the noise modeled by the mixture of Gaussians. As a Bayesian nonparametric approach, it outperforms the previous one based on mutual information minimization with nonlinear functions represented by multilayer perceptrons; we also show that unlike the ordinary regression, estimation results of the PNL causal model are sensitive to the assumption on the noise distribution. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data support our theoretical claims. (shrink)

Long before Wittgenstein drew attention to its complexities, the concept of play had captured the interest of theorists for millennia. How do games contribute to our knowledge of the world? Wherein lies their universal appeal? Play is usually associated with a certain blitheness and buoyancy - could it nevertheless be argued that playfulness is not quite as innocent as it might seem? Bence Kun draws on Adorno's writings to explore the relation between philosophical play (understood here as imaginative thought as (...) well as experimental expression) and an experience of dread Adorno links to children's first encounter with death. By investigating his less familiar works, some of which have not yet been translated, Kun challenges the received view on Adorno's approach to metaphysics, the role of systematic inquiry and the modern condition. As he has Adorno say, the originary impression of shock at the heart of philosophical reflection can only be fully apprehended through an open-ended and defiantly creative intellectual practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:You Mean It’s Not My Fault:Learning about Lipedema, a Fat DisorderCatherine A. Seo“As a surgeon there is nothing more I can do for you. You need to lose 75 pounds before I can even consider repairing the damage done.” Implied and not directly stated, “… Because it’s your fault.” I sat listening, dumbfounded. I was at one of the top teaching hospitals in the country, face to face with (...) a respected Harvard Medical School trained surgeon who came highly recommended.I had seemingly irreversible damage that was leading to permanent immobility. I was experiencing excessive and uncontrollable swelling in my extremities. I was in unrelenting pain that prevented me from sleeping through the night.The surgeon looked down at the floor avoiding my gaze and—after never before mentioning weight as a possible contraindication to surgery during any of our interactions associated with five surgeries, in over two years, including at least 25 consultations, pre-op, post-op, or follow-up visits stated—in essence, “I can’t help you. You are too fat. It’s your fault.” Not until now, this moment, a couple of months after “the-surgery-gone-wrong-that-ended-in-terrible-complications,” I was being told that it was my fault.He then looked down at his pager that had conveniently buzzed within minutes after he delivered this news, and then walked out of the examining room leaving me to fend for myself in dealing with serious and life-changing complications. Susan1*, his Nurse Practitioner, printed out and handed me a standard listing of BMI calculations, marched me into the common hallway to weigh me, pointed out my BMI >30, reinforced the message that he would do nothing to remedy this horrific situation unless I lost 75 pounds, and then sent me on my way.I stood outside the hospital in shock. This just wasn’t happening, and it couldn’t be happening to me. I had grown to trust this surgeon, and I was struggling to comprehend what had just happened. As the shock wore off, I reengaged in several failed attempts to get help from him. He seemed to have convinced himself that the reason the surgery had gone awry was because of my excess weight, and not because, as I later learned, I had been misdiagnosed and the procedure, as it was performed, was far too aggressive. My health condition was deteriorating and it appeared as if weight was being scapegoated for the complications.If a solution was to be found, I was going to have to find it. After many months of research, I discovered that I have lipedema, an unrecognized [End Page E6] and generally misdiagnosed hereditary, genetically-based fat disorder. I had always had lipedema, which in my case seems to have been triggered at least since puberty. There are an estimated 17 million women in the USA alone who have lipedema, unrecognized or misdiagnosed.I, like most other women in America, knew that weight was a personal choice, and fat is a result of eating too much. Or was it? This ingrained and culturally accepted structure of knowledge began to disintegrate. I then asked the question, if this disease of lipedema is a fat disorder—and I had been to many, many doctors in my 63 years—why was it never identified? Why was I left to struggle in a constant battle trying to accomplish the impossible? I then learned about and named “anti-fat bias” and began to unravel the answers.About LipedemaAccording to Karen L. Herbst, Ph.D., M.D., endocrinologist and expert on fat disorders, lipedema (lipoedema in Europe) is an inherited genetic disease, affecting at least 11% of women of all sizes, from the extremely thin to the morbidly obese, resulting in localized fat that is bilateral, symmetrical and usually from the waist to just above the ankles. It can also affect the upper arms. Unlike the “normal” fat of obesity, lipedemic fat cannot be lost through diet and exercise. It is not uncommon for the comorbidity of overweight or obesity to accompany lipedema. Allen and Hines, physicians at the Mayo Clinic, first named Lipedema in 1940.Believed... (shrink)

1. Mŏrimal -- 2. Inyŏm taerip kwa chŏngch'i hyŏnsil -- 3. Kŏdae han ch'akkak -- 4. Chayu sasang ŭi pyŏnch'ŏn kwa posu chŏngsin -- 5. T'arinyŏmjŏk inyŏm ŭi ppuri -- 6. Posujuŭi chŏngsin ŭi chaebalgyŏn -- 7. Sasil, chinsil kwa sahoe t'onghap -- 8. Maejŭmmal : yŏmwŏn kwa hyŏnsil.