CHR for Social Responsibility

Publicly traded corporations often operate against the public\u27s interest, serving a very limited group of stakeholders. This is counter-intuitive, since the public as a whole owns these corporations through direct investment in the stock-market, as well as indirect investment in mutual, index, and pension funds. Interestingly, the public\u27s role in the proxy voting process, which allows shareholders to influence their company\u27s direction and decisions, is essentially ignored by individual investors. We speculate that a prime reason for this lack of participation is information overload, and the disproportionate efforts required for an investor to make an informed decision. In this paper we propose a CHR based model that significantly simplifies the decision making process, allowing users to set general guidelines that can be applied to every company they own to produce voting recommendations. The use of CHR here is particularly advantageous as it allows users to easily track back the most relevant data that was used to formulate the decision, without the user having to go through large amounts of irrelevant information. Finally we describe a simplified algorithm that could be used as part of this model

Folk Theory of Mind: Conceptual Foundations of Social Cognition

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world

The social morality of John Chrysostom : the contribution of Adalbert Hamman (1910-2000)

While reflecting on the enormous contribution of Jacques-Paul Migne (1800-1875) on the centenary of his death, Adalbert Hamman (1910-2000) praises the perennial usefulness of "returning to the Fathers". He affirms that far from being "une excursion archeologique", such a retrieval of patristic texts has led to a far-reaching appreciation of dimensions in early Church life and in early theology which had been neglected for many centuries. Indeed, the patristic era of theology has been described by Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) as one possessing "une vitalite explosive". Despite the controversies which erupted from time to time and the sprouting of heretical movements, it is an age of enormous theological fertility. The "actualite des Peres", de Lubac insists, is indeed "une actualite de fecondation".peer-reviewe

Attributions as Behavior Explanations: Toward a New Theory

Attribution theory has played a major role in social-psychological research. Unfortunately, the term attribution is ambiguous. According to one meaning, forming an attribution is making a dispositional (trait) inference from behavior; according to another meaning, forming an attribution is giving an explanation (especially of behavior). The focus of this paper is on the latter phenomenon of behavior explanations. In particular, I discuss a new theory of explanation that provides an alternative to classic attribution theory as it dominates the textbooks and handbooks—which is typically as a version of Kelley’s (1967) model of attribution as covariation detection. I begin with a brief critique of this theory and, out of this critique, develop a list of requirements that an improved theory has to meet. I then introduce the new theory, report empirical data in its support, and apply it to a number of psychological phenomena. I finally conclude with an assessment of how much progress we have made in understanding behavior explanations and what has yet to be learned

"Regulating Healthcare Technologies and Medical Supplies: A Comparative Overview"

A complex relationship exists among EU regulations, current national practices and rules, institutional capacities to implement regulatory adjustments and the legacy of past health and regulatory policy and traditions. However, there is little empirical information on medical devices policy, the medical devices industry, and the assurance of medical device safety and usage. Drawing on a review of the secondary literature and on-going field work, the evidence suggests that the current mix of statecentric and self-regulatory traditions will be as important in determining the implementation and final outcomes of EU-rules as the new rules themselves. EU directives redesign rules, but they do not necessarily lead to institutional change, create institutional capacities, or alter old practices in the short term. Neither EU directives nor national regulatory adjustments determine the "man-machine/skill-experience" interface which is shaped and influenced by local medical traditions and the acceptance of these traditions by local publics

Media Philosophy— A Reasonable Programme?

It is beyond any doubt that media have an enormous impact on our media-culture societies. Media in?uence our perception and our knowledge, our memory as well as our emotions. They create public spheres and public opinions and give rise to media realities. Media shape our socialisation and our communality. They transform economy, politics, science, religion and law. “What we know about our society, even about our world we are living in, we know via the mass media.” (Luhmann 1996:9; my translation) Accordingly, “the media” have become a paramount subject of interdisciplinary discourses in the last decades all over the world. All these developments have become topics of scienti?c analyses as well as parts of media programmes. Since decades, various academic disciplines focused on an other-observation (“Fremdbeobachtung”) of the media from an external state, whereas the media increasingly tend to observe themselves as well as one another in order to transform this self-observation into parts of their respective programmes. The other-observation is carried out either by scholars of communication- and/or media theory or by philosophers; but whereas the former are organised in academic disciplines, no established discipline entitled “media philosophy” exists until today. Instead, the various approaches to philosophical analyses of media are heterogeneous and lack a solid theoretical basis as well as a disciplinary organisation. Some scholars even hold the view that media are not even within the province of philosophers. Some people deeply regret this deadlock regarding not only topics and discourses but also future jobs and positions for scholars of a discipline “media philosophy” to come. Others welcome this stalemate which gives room to creative solutions of thematic as well as of organisational matters. Let us have a short look at some of the foreseeable options. One of the actual media philosophical approaches concentrates its efforts on a reformulation of traditional philosophical topics in the framework of media ef?ciencies. The list of such topics is rather long and covers nearly all famous crucial subjects of philosophical discourses, reaching from reality, truth, culture, society, education or politics to time, space, emotion, subject or entertainment. This kind of rethinking or reformulating philosophical topics concentrates upon the question how—in the co-evolution of media systems and society—our daily experiences as well as our theoretical modellings of these topics have changed on the historical way from writing to the Internet

Protecting Human Rights in the European Union: An Argument for Treaty Reform

This Note argues that the European Community ( EC ) should amend the European Community Treaty to provide authority for EC accession to the European Court of Human Rights ( ECHR ) because the belief in and protection of human rights must be at the core of a thriving constitutional legal system. As the EC continues to grow geographically, its legal competences must also grow to deal with the challenges of building a singular, unified Europe from traditionally autonomous European states and EC institutions. Part I of this Note explains the institutions of the EC, examines the principles and objectives of the ECHR and its present application in the EC, and discusses current human rights protection in the EC. Part II considers the objectives of a unified Europe, the conflicting opinions regarding EC accession to the ECHR, and the present lack of codification of human rights legislation in the EC. Part III argues that the necessity of enumerated, uniformly enforceable human rights protections at the EC level overrides claims that the EC should not extend its competences to include accession to the ECHR. This Note concludes that the EC should amend the European Community Treaty to include a provision for accession to the ECHR