Nobody’s Perfect: Moral Responsibility in Negligence

Given the unwittingness of negligence, personal responsibility for negligent conduct is puzzling. After all, how is it that one is responsible for what one did not intend to do or was unaware that one was doing? How, therefore, is one’s agency involved with one’s negligence so as to ground one’s responsibility for it? Negligence is an unwitting failure in agency to meet a standard requiring conduct that falls within one’s competency. Accordingly, negligent conduct involves agency in that negligence is a manifestation of agency failure. Now, nobody’s perfect. Human agency is innately fallible, and a measure of agency failure is, therefore, unavoidable. The more one’s negligence manifests failure in one’s agency as an individual, the more one is responsible for it. In contrast, the more one’s negligence involves the shortcomings innate to all human agency the less responsible one becomes, because one’s agency as an individual is less and less involved in one’s failure. Determinative of the measure of individual and of human failings mixed into an instance of negligent phi-ing is the background quality of one’s agency at meeting one’s competency at phi-ing. That is, how able one is at delivering on what one is able to competently do. The more able, the less one’s occasional instances of negligence involve manifestations of failures of one’s agency as an individual – nobody’s perfect – and are more manifestations of one’s agency’s innate human fallibility, making one less and less responsible for one’s negligence

Legal Luck

Explaining the notion of legal luck and exploring its justification. Focusing on how legal luck relates to moral luck, legal causation and negligence, and to civil and criminal liability

An investigation of brand image and its role in brand development

The main objective of this research is to investigate the most vital issue in the realm of branding - what makes a brand powerful, from the perspective of brand image. This concept has yet to gain due recognition as relatively little recent original research has been published on brand image. The research was undertaken in the fragrances industry in the UK. This research explores the brand image concept as a determinant of brand success; therefore, first and foremost, this concept has to be defined in terms of the nature of image - conveyed approach versus received approach, the notion of components structure and in terms of the concept elements. The original definition proposed is described as the "Three Dimensions' Brand Image" model (functional needs, nonfunctional needs and brand personality) and has been built from the assumption of creating a practical facet, where the marketer will be able to identify the meaning of each dimension and reinforce every one of them in his attempt to create brand image strategy. Therefore, a number of hypotheses have been tested with regard to the model structure as follows: the importance of brand personality dimension and non-functional dimension in high and low brand image situations in comparison to other dimensions was explored in revealing the notion's component structure, and the importance of price and special feeling elements in comparison to other brand image elements was researched in revealing the concept's elements. Finally, the link between brand image concept and brand success phenomenon was explored to define this concept in terms of a managerial marketing concept. This research focuses on men's and women's fragrances product groups because apart from the tangible facet of brand in these product groups, there is a significant meaning to brand personality facet, which makes this very appropriate for this research into "image". The research method for data collection was firstly based on focus groups interviews, and then on a survey (personal interviews) which took place during the months of March and April 1997 in four department stores of Debenhams in which 320 respondents participated. The findings of the research show evidence of the proposed "Three Dimensions' Brand Image" model existence, where the concept brand image is described as an amalgamation of two schools of thought, one which emphasizes the dependence of brand image creation upon the individual psyche, and the other which sees the marketers as the image creators. In addition, the findings show that in high and low brand image situations the functional dimension is perceived as the most important one, the next one is the non-functional dimension and the least important is the brand personality dimension. The research's findings show evidence of existence between brand image and brand success where high brand image leads to high brand success and low brand image leads to low brand success. The most important contribution of the proposed model as a new definition of brand image is its ability to act as an applied marketing concept for creating and managing the image of a brand, and by doing so it ceases to be purely a theoretical concept

Classification of finite congruence-simple semirings with zero

Our main result states that a finite semiring of order >2 with zero which is not a ring is congruence-simple if and only if it is isomorphic to a `dense' subsemiring of the endomorphism semiring of a finite idempotent commutative monoid. We also investigate those subsemirings further, addressing e.g. the question of isomorphy.Comment: 16 page

Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One's Place

What justifies practices of “standing”? Numerous everyday practices exhibit the normativity of standing: forbidding certain interventions and permitting ignoring them. The normativity of standing is grounded in facts about the person intervening and not on the validity of her intervention. When valid, directives are reasons to do as directed. When interventions take the form of directives, standing practices may permit excluding those directives from one’s practical deliberations, regardless of their validity or normative weight. Standing practices are, therefore, puzzling – forbidding giving reasons and, if given, permitting disregarding such reasons. What justifies standing practices are the values that they protect, including privacy, autonomy, independence, valuable relationships, and equal respect. These values count in favor of standing’s duty against certain interventions and, when these duties of non-intervention are breached, the values underpinning those duties count in favor of standing’s permission to discount or exclude those interventions from one’s practical deliberations – the normative weight of those interventions notwithstanding

Why \u27Nonexistent People\u27 Do Not Have Zero Well-Being but No Well-Being at All

Some believe that the harm or benefit of existence is assessed by comparing a person’s actual state of well-being with the level of well-being they would have had had they never existed. This approach relies on ascribing a state or level of well-being to “nonexistent people,” which seems a peculiar practice: how can we attribute well-being to a “nonexistent person”? To explain away this oddity, some have argued that because no properties of well-being can be attributed to “nonexistent people” such people may be ascribed a neutral or zero level of well-being, setting the baseline for comparatively assessing the harm or benefit of coming into existence. However, this line of argumentation conflates the category of having zero well-being with the category of having no well-being. No Ф, unlike a zero level of Ф, is not comparable to levels of Ф – neutral, positive, or negative. Considering the nature of well-being and the fact that “nonexistent people” cannot (metaphysically or conceptually) have well-being determinative properties, it follows that “nonexistent people” have no well-being rather than zero well-being