This paper investigates the effect of the countervailing forces within organizations of formal systems that direct employees toward ethical acts and informal systems that direct employees toward fraudulent behavior. We study the effect of these forces on deception, a key component of fraud. The results provide support for an interactive effect of these formal and informal systems. The effectiveness of formal systems is greater when there is a strong informal “push” to do wrong; conversely, in the absence of a strong (...) push to do wrong, the strength of formal systems has little impact on fraudulent behavior. These results help to explain why the implementation of formal systems within organizations has been met with mixed results and identifies when formal systems designed to promote ethical behavior will be most efficacious. (shrink)

Even as paleoanthropology becomes increasingly sophisticated in revealing both the broad contours and the details of the deep evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, it continues to be informed by lingering pre-evolutionary residues. Specifically, the goal of prior research was to demonstrate that the influence of the ancient Scala Naturae as an organizing principle significantly contributed to the scientific community’s delayed acceptance of Australopithecus as a plesiomorphic member of the Hominidae. The present study extends this research through a selective examination of (...) non-primary source material reporting on significant early hominid discoveries over the last century, beginning with Australopithecus africanus and ending with Ardipithecus ramidus. It is argued that these accessible sources reify to varying degrees the perception among the non-expert public that human beings are an inevitable culmination of the evolutionary process. This culturally transmitted schema of human exceptionalism continues to impact other life on Earth in profound ways, in some cases with calamitous results. (shrink)

This work approaches international law as more than merely information contained in international legal norms, & does not view international law as a body of ...

Religion was an important subject of Dilthey's philosophical reflections. In this essay, I examine this largely untouched thematic area, focusing in particular on one period in his career. My thesis is that the core of Dilthey's philosophy of religion is what I call the "immanence thesis." This is a claim that Dilthey employs in interpreting various phenomena of religious life. Dilthey's view is that religious myths and symbols are ways of articulating the immanent "meaning" or "sense" of historical life. This (...) thesis ties various strands in Dilthey's philosophy of religion into a coherent whole. (shrink)

This essay begins by remarking that the broad understanding of atheism is not a position that theism per se commits one to claiming is unreasonable. The essay then, however, proceeds to present an argument against atheism being reasonable. This constitutes a variant of the fine-tuning version of the Design Argument, and contends that both the universe’s fine-tuning to us, and our fine-tuning to the universe, are better explained by the ‘God hypothesis’ than by a range of alternatives. While admitting that (...) there is no single ‘killer argument’ against atheism, the essay argues that a persuasive, cumulative case for the God hypothesis—with cosmic fine-tuning as its strongest suit—can nevertheless be constructed. (shrink)

In this article, I consider what states of knowledge of the value of outcomes are consistent with a classical theist's praying to God that He bring about those outcomes. I proceed from a consideration of the cases which seem least problematic (the theist knows these outcomes to be ones which would be, at least after they've been prayed for, best or at least good), through a consideration of cases where the outcomes prayed for are ones the goodness and badness of (...) which the theist is agnostic about, to consider finally praying for outcomes that the theist knows would be bad at the time he or she is praying for them. I conclude that even prayers of this last sort should, albeit only on rare occasions, be prayed. (shrink)

As soon as we attend to the subject, either by asking questions or by making statements about it, we ipso facto make the subject the object of our attention. The question then is whether we can get behind the subject as object and attain the subject as subject. Is the project not self-refuting? For an answer I invoke the parallel case of insight into insight. We cannot imagine the act of insight and so cannot understand it directly, but we can (...) construct symbols of insight, understand them, and thus indirectly achieve some understanding of it. Lonergan made five attempts to achieve insight into insight; the article examines them one by one and applies them to our parallel case in order to conclude that there is a meaningful sense in which we may attain and speak of the subject as subject. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

This article explores the issue of girls’ concerns about sexual activity in a liberal Nordic context. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among young people in Denmark, the article identifies three types of concerns girls can have about sexual activity: social expectations, relational expectations and dignity. Whilst contemporary research has tended to focus on the influence different sexual morality discourses have in shaping different expectations and concerns about these, little attention seems to be paid to girls’ normative concerns about sex related to (...) well-being. This article sheds light on how these normative concerns are related to girls’ sense of dignity based on Andrew Sayer’s work on dignity and moral sentiments. Finally, the article argues that tension between sexual morality discourses and moral sentiments may be the source of resistance that girls practise with a new ‘fuckboy’ discourse. (shrink)

Numerous species use different forms of communication in order to successfully interact in their respective environment. This article seeks to elucidate limitations of the classical conduit metaphor by investigating communication from the perspectives of biology and artificial neural networks. First, communication is a biological natural phenomenon, found to be fruitfully grounded in an organism’s embodied structures and memory system, where specific abilities are tied to procedural, semantic, and episodic long-term memory as well as to working memory. Second, the account explicates (...) differences between non-verbal and verbal communication and shows how artificial neural networks can communicate by means of ontologically non-committal modelling. This approach enables new perspectives of communication to emerge regarding both sender and receiver. It is further shown that communication features gradient properties that are plausibly divided into a reflexive and a reflective form, parallel to knowledge and reflection. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection (understood as second-order mental states). According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and (...) creativity that is helpful in newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive (animal) form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate the connection between forms of sustainability and masculinity through a study of everyday life in a Danish alternative slaughterhouse. In contrast to the predominant form of slaughterhouses today in Western contexts, the ‘alternative’ slaughterhouse is characterized as non-industrial in scale and articulating some form of a sustainability orientation. Acknowledging the variability of the term, we firstly explore how ‘sustainability’ is understood and practiced in this place. We then illuminate the situated manifestations of masculinities, which appear (...) predominantly- though not exclusively- hegemonic in nature. We next reflect on how the situated and particular sustainability of this site come to bear on a workplace long characterized as a masculinized site of, e.g., violence and repression, showing how the sustainability of the alternative slaughterhouse has potential to nourish alternative masculinities. We finally call for more attention at this nexus of sustainability and masculinities studies, to examine how the broad sustainability turn in food systems needs to be further examined in relation to what masculinities it perpetuates, as well as how a focus on masculinities may enhance our understanding of varying forms of sustainability, especially their potential for ecologically and socially just food systems. (shrink)