Moral disengagement and the motivational gap in climate change

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly

Lean Six Sigma Leadership in Health Care Organizations

The reason for choosing this topic was the want to change the current employee settings in health care organizations. Using Lean Six Sigma Leadership has been a proven method to increasing staff satisfaction and empowering lifelong learning. The research for Lean Six Sigma ideologies came from reputable sources of literature, actual Lean Six Sigma training, and other publications. The want for providing information on the benefits of using this leadership program comes from future problems in health care administrators communicating to clinical staff and other employee bases. The findings were significant enough to create a compelling argument for the benefits of entire program in health care organization settings

Breaking the Constitutional Deadlock: Lessons from Deliberative Experiments in Constitutional Change

This work provides comparative insights into how deliberation on proposed constitutional amendments might be more effectively pursued. It reports on a new nationwide survey of public attitudes to constitutional reform, examining the potential in Australia of innovative Canadian models of reform led by Citizens' Assemblies. Assembly members are selected at random and are demographically representative of the wider public. They deliberate over reforms for several months while receiving instruction from experts in relevant fields. Members thus become 'public-experts': citizens who stand in for the wider public but are versed in constitutional fundamentals. The author finds striking empirical evidence that, if applied in the Australian context, public trust would be substantially greater for Citizens' Assemblies compared with traditional processes of change. The article sets these results in context, reading the Assemblies against theories of deliberative democracy and public trust. One reason for greater public trust in the Assemblies' may be an ability to accommodate key values that are otherwise in conflict: majoritarian democratic legitimacy, on the one hand, and fair and well-informed (or 'deliberatively rational') decision-making, on the other. Previously, almost no other poll had asked exactly how much Australians trust in constitutional change. However, by resolving trust into a set of discrete public values, the polling and analysis in this work provide evidence that constitutional reform might only succeed when it expresses, at once, the values of both majoritarian and deliberative democracy

Inequity aversion and team incentives

We study how the optimal contract in team production is affected when employees are averse to inequity in the sense described by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). By designing a reward scheme that creates inequity of the desired equilibrium, the employer can induce employees to perform effort at a lower total wage cost than when they are not inequity averse. We also show that the optimal output choice might change when employees are inequity averse. Finally, we show that an employer can gain, and never lose, by designing a contract that accounts for inequity aversion, even if employees have standard preferences

The architecture of the hierarchical triple star KOI 928 from eclipse timing variations seen in Kepler photometry

We present a hierarchical triple star system (KIC 9140402) where a low mass eclipsing binary orbits a more massive third star. The orbital period of the binary (4.98829 Days) is determined by the eclipse times seen in photometry from NASA's Kepler spacecraft. The periodically changing tidal field, due to the eccentric orbit of the binary about the tertiary, causes a change in the orbital period of the binary. The resulting eclipse timing variations provide insight into the dynamics and architecture of this system and allow the inference of the total mass of the binary ($0.424 \pm 0.017 \text{M}_\odot$) and the orbital parameters of the binary about the central star.Comment: Submitted to MNRAS Letters. Additional tables with eclipse times are included here. The Kepler data that was used for the analysis of this system (Q1 through Q6) will be available on MAST after June 27, 201

Interactions of technology and society: Impacts of improved airtransport. A study of airports at the grass roots

The feasibility of applying a particular conception of technology and social change to specific examples of technological development was investigated. The social and economic effects of improved airport capabilities on rural communities were examined. Factors which led to the successful implementation of a plan to construct sixty small airports in Ohio are explored and implications derived for forming public policies, evaluating air transportation development, and assessing technology

Religious Culture in Mental Health Issues: An Advocacy for Participatory Partnership

Religion constitutes an important element in every society as regards coping with the demands as well as vicissitudes of life. Mental health issues are becoming a recurrent decimal in societies overwhelmed by stress and other social factors. This paper examines how the presence of religious beliefs affects how some Christians respond to cases that have to do mental health. At the same time, it surveys how a near absence of religious attitude, that is, clinical medicine approach to mental health issues betters the state of those suffering from these psychopathologies. This work sees participatory partnership approach as an effective means of correcting unhealthy biases that prevent a better understanding of mental health care. Sociological theory of structural functionalism will be used in assessing how religion can reinvent itself in areas that are associated with mental health. Ethnographic methodology through quantitative analysis of administered questionnaire is used as a research tool for this research. Three persons were also interviewed. The research findings show that religion is a crucial agent of socialization that can change how religious beliefs impact on mental health and there is need for medical professionals to collaborate with pastoral agents

The Pigou-Dalton Principle and the Structure of Distributive Justice

The Pigou-Dalton (PD) principle recommends a non-leaky, non-rank-switching transfer of goods from someone with more goods to someone with less. This Article defends the PD principle as an aspect of distributive justice --- enabling the comparison of two distributions, neither completely equal, as more or less just. It shows how the PD principle flows from a particular view, adumbrated by Thomas Nagel, about the grounding of distributive justice in individuals\u27 claims. And it criticizes two competing frameworks for thinking about justice that less clearly support the principle: the veil-of-ignorance framework, and Larry Temkin\u27s proposal that fairer distributions are those concerning which individuals have fewer complaints. The Article also clarifies the relation between the PD principle and prioritarianism. Prioritarians will surely endorse the PD principle (with the good individual well-being), but they are also committed to a distinct axiom of separability: the moral value of someone¹s well-being change does not depend upon her position relative to others. The PD principle neither implies separability, nor is implied by it. Although prioritarianism is very plausible, the case for the PD principle is yet more compelling than for the combination of that principle with separability. In discussing prioritarianism, we should differentiate between these two, logically independent aspects of the view

Using Out-of-Sample Mean Squared Prediction Errors to Test the Martingale Difference

We consider using out-of-sample mean squared prediction errors (MSPEs) to evaluate the null that a given series follows a zero mean martingale difference against the alternative that it is linearly predictable. Under the null of no predictability, the population MSPE of the null "no change" model equals that of the linear alternative. We show analytically and via simulations that despite this equality, the alternative model's sample MSPE is expected to be greater than the null's. For rolling regression estimators of the alternative model's parameters, we propose and evaluate an asymptotically normal test that properly accounts for the upward shift of the sample MSPE of the alternative model. Our simulations indicate that our proposed procedure works well.