This introduction to the Journal of Business Research special issue on anti-consumption briefly defines and highlights the importance of anticonsumption research, provides an overview of the latest studies in the area, and suggests an agenda for future research on anti-consumption.

African Philosophy is a collection of previously unpublished essays that address epistemological and metaphysical concerns that have emerged from the sub-Saharan regions of Africa. The primary focus of the book is on traditional African conceptions of mind, person, personal identity, truth, knowledge, understanding, objectivity, and reality. The collection also discusses traditional African conceptions of causation, destiny, and free will.

In 2011, when Judith Butler delivered the lecture series that would become Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, the speech act theorist joined other critical scholars attempting to work through the dark cloud of neoliberal fatigue settling over the humanities. “Identitarian ontologies” had become only more entrenched in the age of terror, any potential alternatives seeming destined for “discursive appropriation” by the insidious vocabulary of late biopolitical capitalism. Fatigued, but not yet resigned, Notes sets out “to rethink the speech (...) act”, not to discover something else to say or some other way to say it but instead to take seriously what Butler described more than a... (shrink)

Although there are compelling reasons for believing otherwise, compassion cannot provide a basis for grounding a viable theory of civil and political society. Firstly, it is often irrational or personally irresponsible to be compassionate. Secondly, relations based on compassion do not require characteristics that are essential for a viable civil and political society. Thirdly, the unpredictable consequences of compassion are such that compassion alone is not sufficient for grounding a viable civil and political society. Finally, obligating people to be compassionate (...) is antithetical to what is required for being compassionate. (shrink)

Questions concerning the moral status of embryos, the validity of new technologies for human reproduction, ownership of one's own genes, gene patenting, privacy and discrimination have all been raised and debated. Although debate is healthy, it is only useful if all participants understand the fundamental biological principles underlying human life, human genes and human parenthood. Many people believe that science can play no role in determining when human life begins. I argue that this false assumption is based on a failure (...) to separate different contradictory meanings of the term ‘human life’. In actuality, science has provided great insight into when and how human life and human beings come into existence. I argue as well that, contrary to our intuitive feelings, there is no physical connection between any father and his son; shared genes represent shared information and nothing more. Nevertheless, the feeling of a physical connection between parent and child is very real and instinctive, no matter how false it may be. These new understandings have profound ramifications for the way we treat issues surrounding human reproduction, including both abortion and assisted reproductive technologies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While claiming to be a much-needed corrective to the dual disappointments of structuralism and post-structuralism, one is starting to get the sense that affect may have simply inverted, rather than resolved, the binary of form/feeling. Yet emerging within and against the affective turn is a re-turn to structure as the condition of possibility for affectivity. From this re-turn, which I'll term affective formalism, is culled the transdisciplinary exemplars reviewed here: Ruth Leys's The Ascent of Affect, Gary Genosko's Critical Semiotics, (...) Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects, with a nod to Eve Sedgwick's Touching Feeling. Far from caging affect, these new (and not so new) books suggest a return to form, once again, with feeling. (shrink)

Executives of many publicly held firms agree to compensation packages that create immense exposure to their employer’s stock. Corporate boards, aspiring to motivate executives to make value-maximizing decisions, often tie an executive’s earnings to stock price performance through stock or option awards. However, this engenders a significant ethical dilemma for many executives who are uncomfortable with sizable, firm-specific risk and desire to reduce it through hedging activities. Recent research has shown that executive hedging has become more prevalent. In essence, managers (...) are unwinding the acute economic incentive to act in the best interest of the owners. This appears to violate the spirit of the compensation contract and from a normative standpoint, is not how executives should act. In this article, we describe how some executives are acting in regard to this issue (descriptive ethics), how they should act (normative ethics) and how they can be helped to get from what they are doing, to what they should be doing (prescriptive ethics). (shrink)

For the 17 centuries since Hippocrates called for “the most desperate remedies in desperate cases,” physicians have adhered steadfastly to two cooperative goals: to prolong life and to relieve suffering. ut during the past 50 years, mechanical interventions at the edge of life have thrown those aims into dramatic conflict. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, feeding tubes, and the intensive care unit have postponed physiologic death for many patients who are anencephalic, comatose, or in a persistent vegetative state or prefer death (...) to a life of suffering and pain. Demands from patients' families and cries for social justice have compelled physicians, hospital personnel, and the Supreme Court to analyze concepts long reserved for university philosophers. Although decisions are made daily to withhold and withdraw life support, society is gradually agreeing upon an ethical framework that balances hopeful science with dignified death. This article outlines that ethical framework, reviews recent legal precedents, and suggests practical guidelines for their application. (shrink)

Securities lending has been a lucrative business for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds over the past decade. Unfortunately for investors, the sponsors of these funds have not been very transparent with the details of their securities lending programs, and consequently most investors in these funds are unaware of their exposure to the risks inherent in securities lending. Interestingly, most funds do not return the full profits from securities lending activities to their investors. In this paper, we examine and discuss the (...) ethical considerations related to the securities lending activities of mutual funds and ETFs and offer a series of best practices that we believe will provide better transparency of these activities to fund investors. (shrink)

In 1970, Jacque Monod, a Nobel Laureate and a founding father of molecular biology, wrote a short celebrated book entitled Chance and Necessity.

On Sunday morning, 23 February 1997, the world awoke to a technological advance that shook the foundations of biology and philosophy. On that day, we were introduced to Dolly, a 6-month-old lamb that had been cloned directly from a single cell taken from the breast tissue of an adult donor. Perhaps more astonished by this accomplishment than any of their neighbors were the scientists who actually worked in the field of mammalian genetics and embryology. Outside the lab where the cloning (...) had actually taken place, most of us thought it could never happen. Oh, we would say that perhaps at some point in the distant future, cloning might become feasible through the use of sophisticated biotechnologies far beyond those available to us now. But what many of us really believed, deep in our hearts, was that this was one biological feat we could never master. New lifemust have its origins in an embryo formed through the merger of gametes from a mother and father. It was impossible, we thought, for a cell from an adult mammal to become reprogrammed, to start all over again, to generate another entire animal or person in the image of the one born earlier. (shrink)

Walter Savage Landor's exasperated marginal comment on line 13 of Horace, C. 1. 4 has sent modern commentators scurrying to the poem's defence. The skirmish has been won for Horace, but at the expense perhaps of magnifying the importance of line 13: A. Y. Campbell insisted that pallida mors, far from being irrelevant, was ‘the focus of the whole poem’.

The discovery, more than 60 years ago, of a mutant mouse with a short tail led to the birth of the new field of developmental genetics. Over the years since, numerous investigators have probed the biology of the original short‐tail mutation at the T locus, as well the naturally‐occurring t haplotypes that were uncovered as a result of their interaction with this mutation. Although the T locus ranks among the best characterized developmental loci in the mouse, it was not among (...) the first to be cloned. This situation has now been rectified with two recent reports from Herrmann, Lehrach and their colleagues. While the T locus is expressed uniquely in the embryonic tissues predicted from the mutant phenotype, the gene itself, as well as the predicted amino acid sequence of the T product, show no strong homology to any known sequence. For the moment, at least, the mystery behind the function of the T locus still awaits definitive resolution. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss three areas in which advances in human reproductive technology could occur, their uses and abuses, and their effects on society. First is the potential to drastically increase the success rate and availability of in vitro fertilization and embryo freezing. Second is the ability to perform biopsies on embryos prior to the onset of pregnancy. Finally, I will consider the adding or altering of genes in embryos, commonly referred to as genetic engineering.As new reproductive technologies (...) pass from experimental models into the potential for medical utilization, I believe that it will be important for lawmakers everywhere to avoid the impulse to outlaw procedures that a society believes to be unnatural at a first glance. Rather, I would hope that they can respond thoughtfully with legislation that serves two purposes — to protect the rights of couples to overcome infertility or to reduce the risk of genetic disease in their children-to-be, and more importantly, to protect children-to-be from the abuses that could result from some of the practices that I will discuss. (shrink)

Adaptive mutation is defined as a process that, during nonlethal selections, produces mutations that relieve the selective pressure whether or not other, nonselected mutations are also produced. Examples of adaptive mutation or related phenomena have been reported in bacteria and yeast but not yet outside of microorganisms. A decade of research on adaptive mutation has revealed mechanisms that may increase mutation rates under adverse conditions. This article focuses on mechanisms that produce adaptive mutations in one strain of Escherichia coli, FC40. (...) These mechanisms include recombination-induced DNA replication, the placement of genes on a conjugal plasmid, and a transient mutator state. The implications of these various phenomena for adaptive evolution in microorganisms are discussed. BioEssays 22:1067–1074, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Ormerod and Chronicle reported that optimal solutions to traveling salesperson problems were judged to be aesthetically more pleasing than poorer solutions and that solutions with more convex hull nodes were rated as better figures. To test these conclusions, solution regularity and the number of potential intersections were held constant, whereas solution optimality, the number of internal nodes, and the number of nearest neighbors in each solution were varied factorially. The results did not support the view that the convex hull is (...) an important determinant of figural attractiveness. Also, in contrast to the findings of Ormerod and Chronicle, there were consistent individual differences. Participants appeared to be divided as to whether the most attractive figure enclosed a given area within a perimeter of minimum or maximum length. It is concluded that future research in this area cannot afford to focus exclusively on group performance measures. (shrink)

Problems in peer review, the backbone of maintaining high standards in scientific publishing, have led to wide spread discontent within the scientific community. Training in the peer review process and a simpler format to assist in decision making are possible courses to improve and expedite the process of peer review and scientific publishing. The authors discuss problems in the peer review process focusing on challenges related to major revisions and reviewer's wish list of experiments; this leads to the loss of (...) time and money. Major revisions rarely lead to significant improvements, while simultaneously delay the dissemination of knowledge. The authors propose simple solutions including training peer reviewers to improve the peer review system. (shrink)

A situated agent is one which operates within an environment. In most cases, the environment in which the agent exists will be more complex than the agent itself. This means that an agent, human or artificial, which wishes to carry out non-trivial operations in its environment must use techniques which allow an unbounded world to be represented within a cognitively bounded agent. We present a brief description of some important theories within the fields of epistemology and metaphysics. We then discuss (...) ways in which philosophical problems of scepticism are related to the problems faced by knowledge representation. We suggest that some of the methods that philosophers have developed to address the problems of epistemology may be relevant to the problems of representing knowledge within artificial agents. (shrink)

We consider the varieties and directions of influence that the source and target domains involved in a conceptual metaphor can have on each other during the course of understanding metaphorical utterances based on the metaphor. Previous studies have been restricted both as to direction of influence and as to type of influence. They have been largely confined to the “forward” (source to target) direction of influence, and they have concentrated on the transfer of features or propositions and (to some extent) (...) the highlighting of aspects of a domain. By contrast, this article stresses the importance both of other varieties of influence (e.g., transfer of queries and uncertainty effects) and of “reverse” influence (target to source). We seek to curb the natural tendency to think that, because metaphor involves an overall move from source to target, therefore all inter-domain influences in the course of understanding go in that direction. The bulk of the article explores the theoretical issues involved. These issues have arisen out of a reasoning-based approach to metaphor, seeking to make best use of information from metaphorical utterance, context, source and target domains, and known metaphorical mappings, by applying a complex overall reasoning process. The article briefly explains the thorough implementation of reverse influence in a computer program for metaphorical reasoning called ATT-Meta, although the theoretical considerations are relevant to all disciplines concerned with metaphor. We make some suggestions for further computational and psychological research on metaphor. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

Contemporary biomedical ethics and environmental ethics share a common ancestry in Aldo Leopold's and Van Rensselaer Potter's initial broad visions of a connected biosphere. Over the past five decades, the two fields have become strangers. Public health ethics, a new subfield of bioethics, emerged from the belly of contemporary biomedical ethics and has evolved over the past 25 years. It has moved from its traditional concern with the tension between individual autonomy and community health to a wider focus on social (...) justice and solidarity. Public health has a broad focus that includes individual, community, and environmental health. Public health ethics attends to these broad commitments reflected in the increasing concern with the connectedness of health of individuals to the health of populations, to the health of animals, to the health of the environment; it is well situated to reconnect all three “fields” of ethics to promote a healthier planet. (shrink)

For over 100 years, the field of contemporary public health has existed to improve the health of communities and populations. As public health practitioners conduct their work – be it focused on preventing transmission of infectious diseases, or prevention of injury, or prevention of and cures for chronic conditions – ethical dimensions arise. Borrowing heavily from the ethical tools developed for research ethics and bioethics, the nascent field of public health ethics soon began to feel the limits of the clinical (...) model and began creating different frameworks to guide its ethical challenges. Several public health ethics frameworks have been introduced since the late 1990s, ranging from extensions of principle-based models to human rights and social justice perspectives to those based on political philosophy. None has coalesced as the framework of choice in the discipline of public health. This paper examines several of the most-known frameworks of public health ethics for their common theoretical underpinnings and values, and suggests next steps toward the formulation of a single framework. (shrink)

Background: The Clinical Ethics Residency for Nurses was offered selectively to nurses affiliated with two academic medical centers to increase confidence in ethical decision-making. Research Question/Aim: To discover how effective the participants perceived the program and if their goals of participation had been met. Research design: A total of 65 end-of-course essays (from three cohorts) were analyzed using modified directed content analysis. In-depth and recursive readings of the essays by faculty were guided by six questions that had been posed to (...) graduates. Ethical considerations: Institutional review board approval was granted for the duration of the program and its reporting period. Confidentiality was maintained via the use of codes for all evaluations including the essays and potentially identifying content redacted. Findings: An umbrella theme emerged: participants had developed ethical knowledge and skills that provided a “moral compass to navigate the many gray areas of decision-making that confront them in daily practice.” Six major themes corresponding to questions posed to the participants included the ability to advocate for good patient care; to support and empower colleagues, patients, and families; they experienced personal and professional transformation; they valued the multimodal nature of the program; and were using their new knowledge and skills in practice. However, they also recognized that their development as moral agents was an ongoing process. Discussion: Findings support that enhancing nurse confidence in their moral agency with a multimodal educational approach that includes mentored practice in ethical decision-making, enhancing communication skills and role-play can mitigate moral distress. A majority found the program personally and professionally transformative. However, they recognized that ongoing ethics discussion involvement and supportive environments would be important in their continued development of ethical agency. Conclusion: Multimodal ethics education programs have potential to be transformative and enhance nurse confidence in their ethical decision-making. (shrink)

An ethical and legal framework is needed to regulate the rapidly developing human brain organoid research field properly. However, considering the legal issues involved in human brain organoid research remains underdeveloped and scattered. This article reviews the legal issues of human brain organoid research, grouping them into the following five broad themes: (1) consciousness, (2) legal status, (3) consent, (4) ownership, and (5) transplantation. The issues in each topic include both the urgent (e.g., appropriate forms of consent) and the speculative (...) (e.g., protection of conscious human brain organoids). Therefore, we have attempted to be as explicit as possible about the timescale within which each issue will be realized and to prioritize each. Examining these issues has revealed legal issues specific to human brain organoid research and issues common to research in other fields. Further discussion of human brain organoid research from a legal perspective is needed in the future, considering discussions in related fields. (shrink)

Teaching competency in bioethics has been a concern of the field since its start. In 1976, The Hastings Center published the first report on the teaching of contemporary bioethics. Graduate programs culminating in an MA or PhD were not needed at the time, concluded the report. “In the future, however,” the report speculated, “the development and/or changing social priorities may at some point allow, or even require, the creation of new academic structures for graduate education in bioethics.” Although that future (...) might be upon us, the creation of a terminal degree in bioethics has its detractors. Scholars have debated whether bioethics is a discipline with its own methods and theoretical grounding, a multidisciplinary field bringing various professional perspectives to bear on particular types of problems, a set of problem-solving skills to resolve moral disagreements, or something else entirely. Whether or not efforts to develop the methods and theory of bioethics have matured to the point that it is now a discipline in the strictest sense, new bioethics training programs have appeared at all postsecondary levels. In this essay, we examine the number and types of U.S. programs and degrees in this growing field. (shrink)

In this article we build on the program of research in well-being marketing by further conceptualizing and refining the conceptual domain of the concept of consumer well-being (CWB). We then argue that well-being marketing is a business philosophy grounded in business ethics. We show how this philosophy is an ethical extension of relationship marketing (stakeholder theory in business ethics) and is superior to transactional marketing (a business philosophy grounded in the principles of consumer sovereignty). Additionally, we argue that well-being marketing (...) is based on duty ethics concepts, specifically the duty of beneficence and non-maleficence. Subsequently, we show how the well-being concept guides marketing decisions for consumer goods firms. (shrink)

Lee Trepanier and Khalil M. Habib Introduction Since the end of the cold war and the advent of globalization, interest in cosmopolitanism, with its ideas of ...

In their article “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) invite us to prioritize environmental health...

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was created by President Obama in 2009 to identify and promote policies and practices that ensure scientific research, health care delivery, and technological innovation are conducted in socially and ethically responsible manners. The bioethics commission is an independent and thoughtful group of experts who advises the President and, in so doing, strives to educate the nation on bioethical issues. As part of the effort to promote policies and practices ensuring the ethical (...) conduct of research, innovation, and health care delivery, the bioethics commission staff, in consultation with commission members, has used the bioethics commission reports to develop pedagogical materials for traditional and nontraditional educational settings. The goal is to use contemporary issues addressed by the bioethics commission to support teaching of bioethics ideas, principles, and theories across the major areas of study and practice. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 61-63.

This study examines how ambiguity in corporate objectives affects managers’ choice between opposing sustainability and short-term profit goals. We test this question with an experiment in which we vary whether environmental sustainability is included explicitly as a strategic objective that is used for managers’ performance evaluations. Findings show that managers increase biodegradable production and correspondingly decrease short-term profit when environmental sustainability performance is explicitly incorporated within the company’s strategic objectives. Also, managers in the implicit incorporation group are more likely to (...) decrease their biodegradable production when they learn that their counterparts within the firm have chosen to decrease biodegradable production in other product lines. Further, managers in the explicit incorporation group have greater trust in senior management, and that trust mediates the negative relationship between incorporation ambiguity and the level of biodegradable production. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed. (shrink)

The concept of liquid modernity proposed by Zygmunt Bauman suggests a rapidly changing order that undermines all notions of durability. It implies a sense of rootlessness to all forms of social construction. In the field of development, such a concept challenges the meaning of modernization as an effort to establish long lasting structures. By applying this concept to development, it is possible to address the nuances of social change in terms of the interplay between the solid and liquid aspects of (...) modernization. (shrink)