Some Costs of American Corporate Capitalism: A Psychological Exploration of Value and Goal Conflicts

Evolutionary psychology has been proposed as a metatheoretical framework for psychology. We argue that evolutionary psychology should be expanded if it is to offer new insights regarding the major issues in psychology. Evolutionary developmental biology can provide valuable new insights into issues such as the domain-specificity of the human mind, the nature–nurture debate, stages in development, and the origin of individual differences. Evolutionary developmental biology provides evidence for the hypotheses that domain-general and domain-specific abilities co-occur, that nature and nurture interact in a dynamic and nonadditive way, that stages occur in development, and that individual differences are the result of pleiotropic effects during development.     

Sporting Integrity,Coherence, and Being True to the Spirit of a Game

Abstract

The term ‘sporting integrity’ is widely used in the normative assessment of sports. The term, however, suffers from a lack of conceptual precision. Alfred Archer’s ‘coherence-view’ of sporting integrity goes a long way to help clarify what ‘sporting integrity’ actually means and the specific institutional and individual obligations that it generates. Archer argues that ‘sporting integrity’ essentially means that the constraints athletes face ‘cohere’, in the sense of applying consistent inefficiencies between athletic competitors. For example, those who use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are less constrained than those who do not use PEDs, and thus PED use undermines sporting integrity. This paper presents the argument that over and above competitive coherence, sporting integrity means living up to the ‘spirit’ or ‘ethos’ of a game. The implications of this view are that a sport could have ‘coherent’ competitive constraints and still lack sporting integrity; additionally, a sport could have ‘incoherent’ competitive constraints and still demonstrate sporting integrity. These implications are drawn out relative to the three specific cases that Archer uses to illustrate his coherence view; namely, PED use in professional cycling, ‘tanking’ in Olympic badminton, and the prospect of allowing the Rangers Football Club entrance into the Scottish Premier League without playing through and first winning/qualifying in the lesser leagues.     

Integrating Integrity: The Organizational Translation of Policies on Research Integrity

Science and Engineering Ethics - Responsible conduct of research and research integrity has become a key concern in both research policy and public media resulting in a number of soft law...     

Consumerism and identity: Some psychoanalytical considerations

Abstract

The author examines the role that the buying of commodities plays in the identity formation of the individual. He concludes that it is nowadays no longer the instrumental utility value but a psychical utility value that influences the decision to buy a commodity and that the psychical utility value can have different functions for consumers. In neurotically structured individuals, normal consuming can end in an identity extension where the individual identifies transitively unconscious scenes with those in advertisements, thus making these unconscious scenes conscious in their guise. When individuals are mainly narcissistically structured, an “identity of commodities” can be found, that is, a non-personal identity formation mediated by commodities in which the individuals identify reflexively with the scenic figures from Internet games, movies, television programs, and commercials.     

The Morality of Price/Quality and Ethical Consumerism

Res Publica - Hussain claims that ethical consumers are subject to democratic requirements of morality, whereas ordinary price/quality consumers are exempt from these requirements. In this paper,...     

The True Wilkomirski

The paper considers whether it matters that Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments is not, as he presented it, a genuine survivor account, but rather a fabrication or fiction. It matters in one way and it doesn't in another. It matters because the truth is important: both in general and with regard specifically to the Holocaust. However, that Fragments is a fiction also doesn't matter, for it can be read independently of its author's identity; can be read as being, indeed, fiction. Read thus, the book retains much of its power and quality as a narrative of what the memories of a child survivor might be. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Spiritual Practices: The True Test of Spirituality

"Spirituality" may be the most loaded word in conversations on religion today. In this article I want to examine the current tensions between spirituality and religion and also suggest that "spiritual practices" are the key to authentic spirituality.     

Women and Salary Negotiation: The Costs of Self-Advocacy

Introducing the concepts of self- and other-advocacy should prove useful as a means of understanding the different contexts in which women and men can effectively and comfortably exert power and influence when making requests. In this conceptual paper, social psychological research is reviewed demonstrating that women can advocate effectively on behalf of others without incurring costs, but gender-linked stereotypes, roles, and norms constrain them from advocating as freely and effectively for themselves. It is argued that women do not frequently make requests for themselves, because they have learned that they may ultimately lose more than they gain. This gendered difference has implications for ongoing pay and promotion inequities.     

A Comparative Study of Integrity Tests: The Criterion-Related Validity of Personality-Based and Overt Measures of Integrity

In the field of personality assessment, one construct or set of constructs that is emerging as important for both publishers and users of psychological testing has been labelled variously as integrity, conscientiousness, reliability, delinquency, or responsibility. The associated organizational outcome has been broadly labelled counterproductivity. In the present study, four integrity scales, selected scales from mainstream personality inventories, derived molar integrity factors and optimal scale linear combinations were correlated with admissions of counterproductivity. It was found that (a) all four integrity scales were significantly correlated with the counterproductivity criterion, (b) individual personality scales from normal personality inventories, as well as unit-weighted linear combinations of them, were approximately as highly correlated with counterproductivity as were the integrity tests, and (c) personality traits conceptually distinct from the domain of integrity were also related to counterproductivity.     

The Virtue of Freedom in Capitalism

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the sort of liberty associated with a capitalist economic system is of particular value because it ensures moral self-responsibility. Two conceptions of freedom are considered but only one is invoked. It is contended that one, namely, positive freedom, is actually a kind of ability or power. One's positive freedom may be lost as a result of events not initiated by other human beings. Negative freedom, by contrast, is a distinctively normative notion. It is a social condition that members of a community ought to maintain out of respect for human dignity, that is, each person's responsibility to choose to live rightly.
It is argued that since 'ought' implies 'can', persons can only be morally responsible for what they can choose to do. If they lack negative freedom, then in addition to natural limitations, they will also be limited by the voluntary conduct of others. Yet this limitation could be prevented by the choices of others, including governments, to secure for all persons their negative freedom. Because of the universality of the requirement that each person be left free, such negative freedom is the quintessential public good.
Finally, the concrete expression of negative freedom is the right to private property— one's sphere of moral authority. This makes the capitalist economic system an essential aspect of the society that secures negative freedom.     

From Consumerism to Stewardship: The Troublesome Ambiguities of an Attractive Option1

Abstract : Problems with consumerism may lead Christians to project the idea of responsible stewardship as an alternative. But this would be highly problematic. Although a part of many American Christians’ experience, and apparently bolstered by the authority of Jesus himself, the construct resists normative theological definition. It is too closely allied in our culture with “the spirit of capitalism” and tends to re‐enforce secular understandings of private property. The construct stewardship, therefore, should be used sparingly, if at all, in church circles.     

The Insufficiency of Integrity

As part of its evolving notions of self, contemporary Western culture has come to regard integrity as a preeminent public and private virtue. The meanings now given to integrity appear to cluster around its form, which is personal coherence, and its content, which is standing for something important. Building on Stephen Carter's explication of integrity, and in response to its veneration as a moral panacea, three limitations of integrity are discussed. First, integrity does not guarantee that right and wrong have actually been discerned, only that an attempt has been made, that moral reflection has occurred. Second, integrity does not necessarily engender or even preserve interpersonal peace, but instead frequently causes conflict it is then unable to resolve. Third, integrity does not always precipitate or prevent the reform of social structures and organizations, because it remains subject to the exercise of interpersonal power.     

The Houdini Transformation: True,but Illusory

Molenaar (2003, 2011) showed that a common factor model could be transformed into an equivalent model without factors, involving only observed variables and residual errors. He called this invertible transformation the Houdini transformation. His derivation involved concepts from time series and state space theory. This article verifies the Houdini transformation on a general latent variable model using algebraic methods. The results show that the Houdini transformation is illusory in the sense that the Houdini-transformed model remains a latent variable model. Contrary to common knowledge, a model that is a path model with only observed variables and residual errors may, in fact, be a latent variable model.