Value of Organizational Ethics Training: A Two-Fold Benefit

The terms “business ethics” or “moral leadership” are regularly considered oxymorons (Gini, 2004). However, nearly all members of an organization want their leaders and the entities they lead to behave ethically (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011). Additionally, given the power and influence leaders have over their followers, ethics is critical to the process of leadership (Northouse, 2013). Leaders are at the pinnacle of organizational ethics, yet they fail for a variety of reasons, necessitating organizational ethics training. First, comprehensive ethics training provides clarity of an individual’s values, providing the foundation for sound ethical decision-making. Second, ethics training that transcends simple right and wrong misconduct scenarios provides a lasting framework from which to evaluate the multiple responses and outcomes of formulating an ethical decision. Using detailed cases that enable the trainees to examine and discuss the mental models used to make their decisions enhances ethical training effectiveness (Brock et al., 2008). Ultimately, the ethics training program must first assist all team members in clarifying their individual values and then make them aware of the common ethical biases that normally operate outside of their awareness. Then the training program must address the psychological level of ethical decisions to enable the individuals to make a habit of thinking ethically in every decision

Dr. Laura: Ruminations from a Listener

This essay is a discussion of the radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger. It is an assessment of the moral advice that she dispenses her radio show, and kinds of criticisms to which she has been subjected

Forgiving as emotional distancing

:In this essay, I present an account of forgiveness as a process of emotional distancing. The central claim is that, understood in these terms, forgiveness does not require a change in judgment. Rationally forgiving someone, in other words, does not require that one judges the significance of the wrongdoing differently or that one comes to the conclusion that the attitudes behind it have changed in a favorable way. The model shows in what sense forgiving is inherently social, shows why we should be pluralists about it, and provides a basis for arguing against the existence of necessary conditions of forgiving

Teaching About Religion in Public Schools: Where Do We Go From Here?

Takes a close look at how religion is currently treated in the U.S. public school curriculum and explores how and where study about religion should take place in the curriculum

Resisting the Great Endarkenment: On the Future of Philosophy

Elijah Millgram’s book The Great Endarkenment takes philosophy to task for failing to note the kinds of creatures we are (serial hyperspecializers) and what that means for philosophy. In this commentary, I will complicate the picture he draws, while suggesting a more hopeful path forward. First, I argue that we are not actually serial hyperspecializers. Nevertheless, we are hyperspecializers, and this is the main source of the looming endarkenment. I will suggest that a proper understanding of expertise, particularly the requirement that experts (at least experts whose success is not readily assessable) be required to explicate their judgments helps to mitigate the threat of siloed expertise and endarkenment. Further, I argue that grappling directly with the institutional structures that encourage narrow and isolated hyperspecialists in academia can be a way to avoid endarkenment problems. The current landscape of academia, with its valorization of narrow disciplinary expertise, is neither necessary nor sustainable. In order to change this landscape, we need to understand how current incentives construct epistemic niches, and what we might change in order to reshape the ecology of academia

Tasks, cognitive agents, and KB-DSS in workflow and process management

The purpose of this paper is to propose a nonparametric interest rate term structure model and investigate its implications on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities. The nonparametric spot interest rate process is estimated from the observed short-term interest rates following a robust estimation procedure and the market price of interest rate risk is estimated as implied from the historical term structure data. That is, instead of imposing a priori restrictions on the model, data are allowed to speak for themselves, and at the same time the model retains a parsimonious structure and the computational tractability. The model is implemented using historical Canadian interest rate term structure data. The parametric models with closed form solutions for bond and bond option prices, namely the Vasicek (1977) and CIR (1985) models, are also estimated for comparison purpose. The empirical results not only provide strong evidence that the traditional spot interest rate models and market prices of interest rate risk are severely misspecified but also suggest that different model specifications have significant impact on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities.