Y Li

Most scholars engage in the free will and moral responsibility debate by examining its relationship with determinism. However, this debate remains trapped in conceptual analysis, showing no sign of resolution. Inspired by Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" (1962), I argue that Nietzsche offers a method to move beyond the compatibilism/incompatibilism dualism by analysing the development of conscience in response to moral expectations and punishment. In this account, conscience and guilt are corresponding attitudes to moral expectations and to be a free agent is a matter of competence, which hinges on one's ability to assume responsibility for oneself. I first focus on moral responsibility, suggesting that Nietzsche sees morality as a natural phenomenon evolving alongside moral practices. Through an analysis of its evolution, I argue that Nietzsche does not reject moral responsibility but instead advocates for a version promoting health, rooted in individuals' strong will to create values and hold themselves responsible based on pride and confidence in their ability to rectify misdeeds. To develop a positive account of Nietzschean free will, I claim that he explicitly defines free will as "the will to self-responsibility" (TI, Skirmishes, 39), a form of strong will. The elements shaping conscience and value creation—autonomy and amor fati—constitute Nietzsche's positive interpretation of free will. To support this, I analyse the origins of "freedom" and "the will" and examine how Nietzsche builds on Stoic ideas of fate and free will by emphasising the active embracing of suffering as essential to autonomy. Nietzsche's practical understanding of free will as a strong will in the practice of amor fati—one that actively creates its own values amid the constraints of existence—challenges traditional notions of free will and offers a new approach to the determinism-free will/moral responsibility debate. This also has the potential to free contemporary debates from endless conceptual analysis.

This study uses China’s Medicinal Product Procurement Reform (MPPR) as an exogenous negative shock to commercial kickbacks for Chinese pharmaceutical firms and examines the causal effect of commercial kickbacks on corporate aggressive tax avoidance. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we find a significant reduction in tax aggressiveness among firms affected by the MPPR. Mechanism analysis reveals that the reform leads to a notable decline in treated firms’ kickback-related expenses, including abnormal entertainment and travel costs and average sales personnel salaries. In line with this mechanism, we find that the suppressive effects of the MPPR on tax aggressiveness vary depending on firms’ pressures, rationalization, and opportunities for avoiding tax. These results highlight that firms engaged in unethical practices like commercial kickbacks are more likely to adopt other forms of misconduct, such as aggressive tax avoidance, thus emphasizing the need to address unethical behavior at its root cause to mitigate its broader consequences.

Many organizations still face significant challenges in document audits, such as contract reviews, accounting audits, and compliance checks, which require substantial manpower and time. Current Artificial Intelligence solutions struggle with ambiguous requirements, unclear standards, and complex documents, limiting their scalability and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel architecture, LLMES, designed to generate a concise and independent audit checklist. This approach allows Large Language Models to perform audits and produce results without prior fine-tuning. LLMES effectively integrates complex legal documents, expert knowledge, and mandatory regulatory guidelines with large language modeling to enhance artificial intelligence-assisted auditing. In our experiments auditing a medical device quality management system using a 292-item sampled checklist, LLMES achieved an F1 score of 0.895 on core datasets, significantly outperforming the 0.696 score of direct auditing. Additionally, LLMES attained an F1 score of 0.876 ± 0.034 across full datasets and 0.905 on a complete 1696-item checklist. The source code and datasets are publicly available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/lyxx3rd/LLMES.

To enhance the expressiveness of the interval temporal logic HS over branching interval models, this paper extends the language of HS by introducing quantifiers over paths. We also modify the original semantics of HS by evaluating formulas on pairs of intervals and paths, rather than on intervals alone. Our extension of HS aligns with the extension of CTL to CTL∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\texttt {CTL}^*}$$\end{document}. The resulting logic is called HS∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\texttt {HS}^{*}$$\end{document} in this paper. We show that HS∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\texttt {HS}^{*}$$\end{document} is strictly more expressive than HS, and we also demonstrate that HS∗\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\texttt {HS}^{*}$$\end{document} is a fragment of Monadic Path Logic, a monadic second-order logic where set quantification is restricted to paths.

Classical logics for strategic reasoning, such as Coalition Logic and Alternating-time Temporal Logic, formalize absolute strategic reasoning about the unconditional strategic abilities of agents to achieve their goals. Goranko and Ju in [5, 6] introduced a Logic for Conditional Strategic Reasoning ($\textsf{CSR}$). $\textsf{CSR}$ is a powerful logic, and its completeness is still an open problem. In this paper, we do some useful work towards showing the completeness of $\textsf{CSR}$. $\textsf{CSR}$ has three featured operators, and one of them has the following reading: for some action of A that guarantees the achievement of her goal, B has an action to guarantee the achievement of his goal. This operator makes good sense when A is cooperating with B, and the logic about this operator is called Logic for Cooperating Conditional Strategic Reasoning ($\textsf{CCSR}$). In this paper, we prove the completeness of two fragments of $\textsf{CCSR}$: the liability fragment and the ability fragment. The key ingredients of our proof approach include standard disjunctions, the validity-reduction condition of standard disjunctions, abstract game forms and their realization, and the derivability-reduction condition of standard disjunctions. The approach has good potential to be applied to the completeness of $\textsf{CSR}$ and other strategic logics.

Insider trading has long been scrutinized in corporate law, finance, and business ethics, yet whether politicians trade on insider information—and if so, whether this breaches their fiduciary duty—remains unsettled. Drawing on the perspectives of social contract theory and virtue ethics, this study examines the ethical implications of U.S. senators exploiting nonpublic, bill-related information for personal gain. We analyze a comprehensive dataset of senators’ equity trades from 2014 to 2021, matched with legislative bill data classified using natural language processing to identify key legislative milestones: introduction, engrossment, enrollment, and enactment. Our findings reveal that trades executed just prior to critical legislative events yield significant abnormal returns. We also document patterns consistent with stealth trading, in which senators sequentially trade leading up to legislative decisions. Furthermore, senators with greater legislative influence realize higher abnormal returns, highlighting the financial benefits of privileged information. To address these ethical concerns, we propose a “contingent freedom” framework, restricting senators’ trading during critical legislative periods. This approach aims to balance ethical integrity and individual financial autonomy by mitigating conflicts of interest.

International collaboration on genetic/genomic studies has expanded dramatically. Informed consent remains a cornerstone for protecting participant autonomy. Over the past few decades, guidelines, recommendations, and theoretical discussions have been published on the informed consent process in cross-cultural contexts, particularly in Africa. These resources suggest best practices—ranging from assessing participant comprehension to engaging local communities. However, it remains unclear how well the current practices address the full range of informed consent challenges encountered by the stakeholders. We performed a systematic literature review of empirical studies that explored stakeholders’ perspectives, primarily research participants and researchers, on informed consent in the context of international genetic/genomic research in countries of Africa. We followed the PRISMA guideline and used thematic analysis for data synthesis and analysis. Twenty-four relevant articles were identified and reviewed for five bioethical issues: (1) comprehension of consent information, (2) voluntary participation, (3) consent elements, (4) consent model, and (5) community engagement. Different levels of understanding and recall over different consent elements, and multiple factors associated with comprehension were observed. Voluntary participation could be influenced by misconception, monetary and healthcare compensation, and previously established trust with the research team. Many participants show less interest in certain consent elements, such as biobanking, data sharing, and future use, but more in the section on benefits. Returning results had potential advantages in building trust between participants and the research team; however, the most appropriate way to return results is under discussion. There was also conversation over consent models (broad, tired, and dynamic) on their balance between autonomy and practicality. Finally, many articles ascertained the value of community engagement and encouraged researchers to consider local cultural beliefs, social stigma, and decision-making habits when designing the consent process. We observed an increased interest in the ethical conduct of the informed consent process under international genetics/genomics studies in recent decades. Awareness and attention to these issues are needed to develop more appropriate consent strategies that could further safeguard the rights and welfare of local participants and support the smooth conduct of research.

Professor Gu Mingyuan’s thought of educational discipline construction is part of his overall educational thought. He is not only a practitioner, but also a thinker of educational discipline construction. He is one of the important founders of the comparative education discipline in China after the reform and opening up since the beginning of the 1980s and also the promoter, supporter, and guide of the development of educational disciplines. He was the leader of the Educational Discipline Review Group of the State Council Discipline Review Group. The development of China’s education discipline has made great progress under his leadership. He visited all universities undergoing educational discipline construction in China at that time, provided them support and guidance in the process of educational discipline construction.

This article mainly investigates whether common Bayesian confirmation measures are affected by stopping rules. The results indicate that difference measure d, log-ratio measure r, and log-likelihood measure l are not affected by non-informative stopping rules, but affected by informative stopping rules. In contrast, Carnap measure τ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\tau $$\end{document}, normalized difference measure n, and Mortimer measure m are affected by (non-)informative stopping rules sometimes but sometimes aren’t. Besides, we use two examples to further illustrate that confirmation measures d, r, and l are better than τ,n\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\tau,n$$\end{document}, and m.

Human dignity is a crucial concept in contemporary ethical, political and legal studies. Protecting human dignity is a core value in modern human life. However, people have different, even opposite understandings of human dignity, which has caused lots of confusion in related discourses. The Confucian notion of human dignity provides an important perspective for reflecting various theories of human dignity. In Confucian ethics, the basis of human dignity is the moral potential that every human being naturally has. Moral potential grants everyone universal dignity, while the development of moral potential grants people acquired dignity. Since all human beings have moral potential to the same extent, everyone owns universal dignity equally. Different people develop their moral potential to different extents. One’s acquired dignity is positively associated with the development of her moral potential. Universal dignity is a moral status but acquired dignity is not. To pursue acquired dignity is the moral demand of universal dignity and protects people’s universal dignity. Confucian discussions on human dignity provide a promising way to justify the equality of human moral status, also, it reveals why the equality of humanity relies on the integrity of the human species. The Confucian concept of human dignity constitute a reliable theoretical basis for coping with ethical issues caused by technologies today.

The rulers of the Han Dynasty tried to establish rules over people’s minds, so they took a series of important moves that heavily influenced academic development. During the Earlier Han, the first move was Emperor Wen’s (reigned 179–157 BC) resumption of the boshi institution of the Qin Dynasty. The second move was Emperor Wu’s (reigned 140–87 BC) esteeming Confucianism only while deposing all other schools of learning according to Dong Zhongshu’s suggestion. The third move was Emperor Wu’s building the Tai Xue (or the Imperial College) in 135 BC and allowing only the Confucian 5-Classics to be taught in it. The fourth move was Emperor Xuan’s (reigned 73–49 BC) holding meetings on the Confucian 5-Classics at the Shiquge (or Stone Canal Hall) in 52 BC. The fifth move was that in 26 BC, Emperor Cheng (reigned 32–7 BC) ordered Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin to collate books preserved in the imperial libraries. The rulers of the Later Han continued these measures and made them deeper and wider. Emperor Guangwu (reigned 25–57 AD) even talked about the Confucian 5-Classics himself in the imperial court, so Confucianism reached its peak time thereafter. Emperor Zhang (reigned 76–88 AD) summoned the meeting at the Baihuguan (White-tiger Pavilion) to discuss the meaning of each Confucian Classic. The collation of books and the local school system were both institutionalized in the Later Han.

The Han Dynasty was an important stage in China’s academic history, in which not only many brilliant academic achievements emerged but also three main features of traditional Chinese academics took form. The first feature was the comprehensiveness due to the unity of dao (or the law of the universe) and qi (or things). Namely, all traditional Chinese academics had the trait of encyclopaedia. The second feature was political-function-centered humanistic pragmatism. Politics was a very important part of human life and was certainly a vital part of traditional Chinese academics. However, it was the Han scholars who placed the most value on the political function of all studies. The third feature was continuity through interpretation. Traditional Chinese academics continued for thousands of years partly due to the interpretation of classic books. Han scholars initiated “xungu” or Chinese hermeneutics to interpret Confucian Classics. These interpretations not only preserved the original classic texts but also provided the standard meaning of the classic texts and allowed the classics to survive history by meeting the needs of the new times.

The Scholars of the Han Dynasty have made brilliant academic achievements in China’s history. These were never accidental achievements but instead resulted from abundant academic achievements of the pre-Qin times, as well as from the specific social and political background of the Han Dynasty. This chapter will discuss the historical background of academic achievements in the Han Dynasty from three aspects. First, the deep roots and driving forces of these academic achievements in the Han Dynasty were the radical social changes and transformations that took place in the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC) and the Warring States period (475–221 BC), when significant incidents such as economically abandoning “the well-field system” and politically abandoning the royal Zhou House and waging wars for hegemony occurred. Second, the direct foundation for the academic achievements in the Han Dynasty was the booming academic activity in the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, which constituted the “axial period” together with Greece and India of the same time, when various new thoughts and different academic schools appeared, and the “Contention of Hundred Schools of Thought” became a popular phenomenon. Third, the specific social and political setting of the Han Dynasty conceived and stimulated new enormous needs for academic development, especially to support “Grand Unity” and to settle and develop imperial society; therefore, many new moves were employed to promote academic activities.

This chapter will continue to discuss books and scholars as academic carriers through the Han Dynasty. For the books, both the Earlier Han and the Later Han continued the policy of “collecting books” employed at the beginning of the Han Dynasty. Many libraries were built in the imperial capital, which were divided into “outside books” libraries for officials in various offices and “inside books” libraries for royal members in the royal court. In addition to official libraries, private libraries owned by ordinary families became increasingly popular, especially after Cai Lun invented paper. As for the scholars, most of them were actively engaged in teaching. The imperial government stressed education, especially the teaching of Confucianism, so it built colleges in the imperial capital and local schools of different levels all over the empire. Often, the teaching of one Classic developed into different schools or the “shifa”, which then developed further into different parties or the “jiafa”. Han scholars were also actively engaged in collating books; thus, many of our present versions of classics were actually determined by Han scholars. Most significantly, Han scholars were also actively engaged in writing books. They wrote books not only to interpret the Classics but also to study new social and natural phenomena.

This chapter will focus on the content of the main academic schools and discuss their development and changes in the Han Dynasty. The main academic schools in the Han Dynasty were actually the extension and development of the pre-Qin schools, which underwent great changes in the Han Dynasty. First, Confucianism became Neo-Confucianism. This was best demonstrated by Dong Zhongshu’s thoughts, who advocated such ideas as “the induction between Heaven and Human”, “the sovereign being chosen by the Heaven”, the “3-Gang” and the “5-Chang”, as well as the “Grand Unity”. Second, Daoism, which still had important influence in the Han Dynasty, had already turned into Neo-Daoism in the Qin Dynasty, which changed from escaping the world to entering the world, from criticizing Confucianism and Mohism to absorbing both, and creatively applied ideas such as the “ziran” and “wuwei” into politics. Third, the monopoly of Confucianism had great influence upon all schools in the Han Dynasty. The Confucian Classic Study, or the Jingxue, became increasingly booming. While all other schools declined. Daoism was dwarfed to the secondary place; Mohism disappeared completely; and Logicism, Legalism and Political Strategism turned into secret teachings. Fourth, the monopoly of Confucianism also led to most pre-Qin books undergoing revision and reconstruction to different degrees according to the dominant ideology through teaching and book collations in the Han Dynasty.

There must be academic carriers so that human knowledge and thoughts can exist and spread. There were mainly two types of academic carriers in ancient China: scholars and books. However, after the incident of the “burning books and burying Confucians” in the Qin Dynasty, as well as the peasant uprisings and the wars for imperial throne in the last years of the Qin Dynasty, both carriers suffered great losses. Therefore, the new regime of the Han Dynasty took many measures to protect the academic carriers so that the official and private academic carriers recovered gradually. This chapter will focus on the situation of scholars and books during the early years of the Han Dynasty. First, the scholars resumed their freedom of holding books and teaching activities soon after the Han Dynasty was founded; many of them took office in government or taught in the official schools, even serving as the boshi, while even more of them taught privately among the civilians, who were the disciples of various schools of teaching, especially of the Confucian school, who continued their teaching of the Confucian 6-Classics. Second, the imperial government and many local officials paid much attention to collecting and acquiring lost books from civilians so that countless lost books returned to the official book storage.

ABSTRACT Although peer support is documented as a predictor of adolescents’ prosocial behavior, the influencing mechanism of peer support on prosocial behavior among adolescents from low-income families has not been fully researched. The current research conducted two studies to examine the influencing mechanism of peer support on prosocial behavior among adolescents from low-income families. Study 1 (N = 579) investigated the influencing mechanism of peer support on prosocial behavior with a longitudinal dataset. Study 2 (N = 228) investigated the effect of peer support priming on money donation with an experimental approach. The results of Study 1 and Study 2 consistently demonstrated that communal social goals mediated the association between peer support and prosocial behavior among adolescents from low-income families, and cumulative family risk moderated this indirect link. The positive effect of peer support on prosocial behavior through communal social goals might be weakened if adolescents experience more risk factors in the family context.

This article compares scholars’ reflections on May Fourth in Beijing and Shanghai in 1989, when China faced a series of large-scale protests. Although both groups of scholars commemorated the same event that happened seventy years ago, they had different interpretations of its significance due to their different concerns. Based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons,” this comparison shows that the same May Fourth event yielded different meanings when the past was understood from the present.

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed.

In Art and Cosmotechnics Yuk Hui embarks on a groundbreaking philosophical journey to explore the relationship between art, technology, and cosmology in the context of contemporary thought. By stepping outside the standard West-East, past-present dichotomies to offer a rich, cross-cultural perspective--greatly informed by Daoist thought, but coupled with other philosophical traditions as well (both Greek and cybernetic)--the author provides an engaging analysis of the changing nature of art in our emerging post-philosophical context, one that is constantly destabilized and transformed by technology.This is not just an examination of art in the traditional manner, but a bold endeavor to offer alternative ways of... Read More.

Regulatory intervention is important in shaping corporate behaviour, especially in markets with relatively weak property rights. Using a sample of publicly listed companies in China from 2006 to 2021, this study investigates the impact of regulatory intervention in managers’ misconduct on the corporate idiosyncratic risk. Using a difference-in-differences design, we explore the idiosyncratic risk change after inspections of a manager’s misconduct to that of their counterparts who are not involved in misconduct activities. We find that inspections of corporate managers’ misconduct significantly reduce their firms’ risk by reducing investors’ heterogeneous beliefs and improving corporate transparency. This effect is more pronounced in firms with lower levels of information transparency and greater external attention pressure, suggesting that regulatory interventions could improve corporate information environment.

This paper argues that Hans Blumenberg’s theory illuminates a novel interpretation of the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld—as a world sustained by myths and their receptions. This paper combines two central themes in Blumenberg’s philosophy: his interpretation of Edmund Husserl and his aesthetics, especially his theory of the novel and of myth. My claim to originality is to offer a mythology of the lifeworld with the help of one of Blumenberg’s less-known texts, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos.” In the first part, I will examine a crucial aspect in Blumenberg’s reading of Husserl’s notion of the lifeworld, namely the unorthodox view that the lifeworld, as the foundation for sciences and their logos, itself has no need to resort to language. To put it mythically: the lifeworld is an expressionless state of naivety. To support this deconstructive reading, I will then turn to Blumenberg’s theory of the novel. As has been noticed by Blumenberg and his colleagues, the underlying meaning structure of the novel, or its “concept of reality,” has a typically modern character, and largely overlaps with the phenomenological idea of the world and lifeworld. However, in the second part, I will radicalize Blumenberg’s discussions about reality, and show that the novelistic reality can never fully supersede that of myth. Mythology has a persistent existence, and, in Blumenberg’s argument, the history of mythical reception reveals a perpetual movement of human struggle against terror. In this Blumenbergian philosophy of mythology, a new image of the lifeworld presents itself, a world made by the myth-telling humans, by their active and aesthetic use of words, instead of slumbers of naivety.

People routinely use facial expressions to communicate successfully and to regulate other’s behaviour, yet modelling the form and meaning of these facial behaviours has proven surprisingly complex. One reason for this difficulty may lie in an over-reliance on the assumptions inherent in existing theories of facial expression – specifically that (1) there is a putative set of facial expressions that signal an internal state of emotion, (2) patterns of facial movement have been empirically linked to the prototypical emotions in this set, and (3) static, non-social, posed images from convenience samples are adequate to validate the first two assumptions. These assumptions have guided the creation of datasets, which are then used to train unrepresentative computational models of facial expression. In this article, we discuss existing theories of facial expression and review how they have shaped current facial expression recognition tools. We then discuss the resources that are available to help researchers build a more ecologically valid model of facial expressions.

Based on upper echelon theory, we employ machine learning to explore how CEO characteristics influence corporate violations using a large-scale dataset of listed firms in China for the period 2010–2020. Comparing ten machine learning methods, we find that eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) outperforms the other models in predicting corporate violations. An interpretable model combining XGBoost and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) indicates that CEO characteristics play a central role in predicting corporate violations. Tenure has the strongest predictive power and is negatively associated with corporate violations, followed by marketing experience, education, duality (i.e., simultaneously holding the position of chairperson), and research and development experience. In contrast, shareholdings, age, and pay are positively related to corporate violations. We also analyze violation severity and violation type, confirming the role of tenure in predicting more severe and intentional violations. Overall, our findings contribute to preventing corporate violations, improving corporate governance, and maintaining order in the financial market.

As climate change intensifies, climate risk has become an unavoidable factor in corporate operations and has a significant impact on corporate environmental management activities. This paper takes China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2022 as a sample to empirically analyze the impact of Confucian culture on corporate environmental information disclosure quality under the background of climate risk. The research found that: (1) Confucian culture mainly drives the improvement of the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure through two channels: promoting taking sustainability certification and improving public environmental concerns, (2) climate risk has a positive regulatory effect on the role of Confucian culture, (3) the driving role of Confucian culture in improving the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure is more obvious in non-state-owned enterprises, companies with good operating conditions, low levels of industry competition, and in regions with a low degree of openness to overseas. Overall, this research provides valuable insights into environmental information disclosure systems and informal systems of culture.