The Confucian Moral Community of the Clan Association in the Chinese Diaspora: A Case Study of the Lung Kong Tin Yee Association

Using the Lung Kong Association as a case study, this article explores the cultural and socio-religious significance of the clan association in overseas Chinese societies. It argues that the Chinese diaspora has continually endeavored to utilize Confucian resources, via the clan association, to construct a “moral community” for the facilitation of their internal solidarity and external identity.

Rorty and Addams

Despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing limited commentary on Jane Addams, this chapter illuminates their distinctive shared contribution to pragmatist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite sympathetic understanding with the cultivation of social ethical responsibility and orient their ethical projects explicitly toward responsiveness to marginalized or excluded others. Its chief claims are: first, that Rorty can be read as extending Addams’s project of creating a democratic moral community; and second, that a constructive dialogue between Rorty and Addams reveals key points of complementarity that, when taken together, generate a more robust conception of democratic social ethics than Addams’s alone. Reading Rorty alongside Addams elucidates the ethical commitments implicit in his more familiar epistemological critiques, including how Rorty’s understanding of the social practice of justification can be understood as a philosophical defense of Addams’s notion of a “social test.”

What Would You Do? Types of Ethical Challenging Situations Depicted in Vignettes Published in the Veterinary Literature from 1990 to 2020

Veterinary team members encounter a wide range of ethically challenging situations (ECS) in their work. Inability to resolve ECS in accordance with their values may negatively impact the wellbeing of veterinary team members. We sought to determine the types of ECS described in published ethical vignettes in the veterinary literature. We performed a strategic literature search, followed by a thematic analysis of vignettes published in the veterinary literature from 1990–2020. We identified 567 published vignettes in 544 publications. In the majority of vignettes, the protagonist was a veterinarian (61.6%) and the most common categories of animal involved were dogs (28.0%), livestock in general (10.8%), and cattle (10.6%). The primary type of ECS was coded for each scenario, generating 29 themes. These findings extend knowledge about types of ECS that may be encountered by veterinary team members. These themes can help to inform curricula and better prepare veterinary team members to navigate ECS. They may also highlight factors that contribute to ECS that can be addressed on a broad scale, such as through regulation, continuing professional development, or stakeholder education. Knowing that others may experience similar ECS may help veterinary team members feel part of a moral community.

Robot Responsibility and Moral Community

It is almost a foregone conclusion that robots cannot be morally responsible agents, both because they lack traditional features of moral agency like consciousness, intentionality, or empathy and because of the apparent senselessness of holding them accountable. Moreover, although some theorists include them in the moral community as moral patients, on the Strawsonian picture of moral community as requiring moral responsibility, robots are typically excluded from membership. By looking closely at our actual moral responsibility practices, however, I determine that the agency reflected and cultivated by them is limited to the kind of moral agency of which some robots are capable, not the philosophically demanding sort behind the traditional view. Hence, moral rule-abiding robots (if feasible) can be sufficiently morally responsible and thus moral community members, despite certain deficits. Alternative accountability structures could address these deficits, which I argue ought to be in place for those existing moral community members who share these deficits.

Love, Religion, and Secularity

McCaffree's challenge to traditional definitions of religion, and his suggestion that religiosity is about individual integration into a moral community are discussed. This is taken as an opportunity to examine difficulties in defining religion, and attempts to go around the definition issues by offering analogies. Religious emotion, as discussed by William James and Emile Durkheim, is found to be no different than strong emotions directed at our secular commitments. Devotion, and self-sacrifice are discussed in both religious and secular context. The denial of death and fantasies about an afterlife are central to religion, and are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future.

Humanizing Stakeholders by Rethinking Business

Can business humanize its stakeholders? And if so, how does this relate to moral consideration for stakeholders? In this paper we compare two business orientations that are relevant for current business theory and practice: a stakeholder orientation and a profit orientation. We empirically investigate the causal relationships between business orientation, humanization, and moral consideration. We report the results of six experiments, making use of different operationalizations of a stakeholder and profit orientation, different stakeholders (employees, suppliers, labor unions), and different participant samples. Our findings support the prediction that individual stakeholders observing a stakeholder-oriented firm see the firm’s other stakeholders as more human than individual stakeholders observing a profit-oriented firm. This humanization, in turn, increases individual stakeholders’ moral consideration for the firm’s other stakeholders. Our findings underscore the importance of humanization for stakeholders’ moral consideration for each other. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the firm as a moral community of stakeholders. Specifically, we move away from a focus on managers, and how they can make business more moral. Instead we direct attention to (other) stakeholders, and how business can make these stakeholders more moral.