J. J. Lee

The relationship between ethics education and recent scholarship on social responsibility is crucial to explore. At times, ethics education has been designed to focus narrowly on compliance with rules and regulations. In contrast, other forms of ethics education emphasize direct attention to social responsibility and the types of obligations that future professionals have to society. In this chapter, we provide an overview of social responsibility, including some of its intellectual foundations, and discuss an important distinction to the realm of ethics education between personal and professional social responsibility. We also review some of the current social responsibility literature and describe connections between social responsibility and traditional approaches to ethics education. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for future research in the realm of social responsibility, including lessons learned from our own research. In particular, there is a need for further analysis of the long-term development of student social responsibility attitudes and their impact on professional practice.

Proof-theoretic semantics is a semantic framework that explains the meaning of sentences through the notion of proof. In proof-theoretic semantics, the validity of an argument is defined in such a way that, if the premises can be correctly asserted, then the conclusion can also be correctly asserted. This paper examines Dummett's definition of validity and elucidates its meaning by exploring the relationship between validity and the fundamental assumption. In addition, I clarify the relationship between the fundamental assumption and the thesis that self-justifying introduction rules fix the meaning of logical constants. In particular, by refuting Kürbis's criticism, I reaffirm the necessity of the fundamental assumption for the proof-theoretic definition of validity in formal language. On this basis, I claim that the fundamental assumption is a fundamental assumption.

How does gender shape who can successfully claim authority in science, and how does this vary across disciplines? Drawing upon theories of doing gender and feminist epistemologies, I examine a key mechanism through which scientific authority is established: novelty claims, defined as rhetorical statements that frame research as novel, distinct from actual novelty. These claims operate as gendered professional practices linking gender to scientific impact. Through analysis of 106,125 papers from SciSciNet and Microsoft Academic Graph databases, I find that novelty claims mediate gender gaps in citations differently across disciplines. In STEM fields, women first and last authors make fewer novelty claims than men, and this is associated with fewer citations. In humanities and social sciences, novelty claims remain positively associated with citations, but there are no gender differences in their use or in citations. These patterns persist after controlling for women’s representation in each field, indicating that gender hierarchy gets reproduced through deeper epistemic power relations rather than demographic imbalance.

The context of illness, plagues, and healing in early Christianity and late antiquity was a factor in the growth and expansion of early Christianity. The most prominent early images from early Christian art depict Christ healing. This essay will examine the historical context of plagues and the Christian response to show how the healing Christ affected the security of Christian ascendency. From this study, the essay offers insight into our present pandemic context of COVID-19 and evaluates the religious response.

The context of illness, plagues, and healing in early Christianity and late antiquity was a factor in the growth and expansion of early Christianity. The most prominent early images from early Christian art depict Christ healing. This essay will examine the historical context of plagues and the Christian response to show how the healing Christ affected the security of Christian ascendency. From this study, the essay offers insight into our present pandemic context of COVID-19 and evaluates the religious response.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing creative work, negotiating not only how artists create but also how they understand their own identity as creators. This study examines how art high school students navigate AI’s role in their creative processes, using identity formation theory as a framework. While existing research primarily focuses on AI’s technical benefits, such as efficiency and productivity, there has been little exploration of how AI alters young creators’ self-concept and autonomy. This study investigates whether students perceive AI as a mere tool, a collaborator, or a potential threat to their creative identity. It also explores how AI’s increasing presence affects students’ confidence in their originality, their sense of authorship, and their ethical concerns about AI-generated content, particularly regarding copyright and creative ownership. The findings reveal that students have mixed views on AI: some embrace it as a source of inspiration and efficiency, while others express discomfort about its potential to undermine human creativity. These results highlight the need for AI education that extends beyond technical training to include discussions on ethics, authorship, and career adaptability in an AI-driven creative industry. By understanding how students construct their creative identities in relation to AI, educators and policymakers can better support them in navigating an evolving digital landscape.

Mindfulness has been linked to lower psychological distress. Yet, it remains unclear how, or the mechanism(s) by which, mindfulness reduces psychological distress, particularly during times of heightened, prolonged stress. The present research utilised secondary analysis of data from two independent studies to 1) assess whether greater trait mindfulness protected U.S. adults against psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) test whether negatively biased cognition (pessimism) mediated the association between trait mindfulness and psychological distress. Both studies utilised a two-wave longitudinal design with an initial survey conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and a follow-up survey conducted during the pandemic. Participants completed validated measures of trait mindfulness, negatively biased cognition (i.e. pessimism), and psychological distress (i.e. anxiety and depression symptoms). Across two studies, pre-pandemic levels of trait mindfulness prospectively predicted less psychological distress during the pandemic, controlling for pre-pandemic psychological distress. Further, lower pessimism during the pandemic mediated the association between greater pre-pandemic trait mindfulness and lower psychological distress during the pandemic. These findings suggest that mindfulness may protect against, or reduce, psychological distress by decreasing negatively biased cognition. As such, mindfulness and negatively biased cognition may be important targets for interventions aimed at promoting psychological health.

Kiji, kichi, and jizhi are the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese transliterations of the same classical Chinese term, 機智, which we translate here as “resourceful creativity.” We explore the concept of resourceful creativity, which we deem as important in all technoscientific practice, formal and vernacular. We believe that thinking through various vernacular practices of resourceful creativity, in particular, is one way to move beyond the inadequate binaries stemming from the West and the Rest, and converge with growing efforts to reevaluate the dominant narratives that celebrate innovation, productivity, growth, and efficiency in their narrow senses.

Recent advances in plant biology suggest that plants engage in complex behaviours once thought to require nervous systems. This article surveys the empirical foundations of plant cognition, covering research on goal‐directed movement, decision‐making, anticipatory behaviour, communication, phytoacoustics, and plant neurobiology. In addition, we examine evidence for systemic signalling and anaesthesia in plants, alongside parallels and contrasts with animal cognition. These findings indicate that cognition may not be restricted to neural organisms, challenging conventional boundaries of mind. Building on this empirical base, we explore the philosophical and ethical implications of attributing cognition to plants. The discussion engages classic debates about other minds, functionalism, multiple realisability, and the possibility of plant sentience. Even if plant sentience remains speculative, their cognitive complexity raises broader questions about ecological value, precautionary concern, and the scope of moral consideration. Taken together, these discussions highlight how empirical discoveries in plant biology intersect with enduring philosophical questions about mind, intelligence, and moral status. A companion article, Plant Cognition—A Methodological Primer, provides the necessary theoretical and methodological background, whereas this piece focuses on evidence and implications.

This focus issue considers the normative implications of the recent emergence in genome editing technology known as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) or CRISPR‐associated protein 9. Originally discovered in the adaptive immune systems of bacteria and archaea, CRISPR enables researchers to make efficient and site‐specific modifications to the genomes of cells and organisms. More accessible, precise, and economic than previous gene editing technologies, CRISPR holds the promise of not only transforming the fields of genetics, agriculture, and human medicine, but also heralding a new era of democratized biotechnology. However, the speed with which developments in the field have progressed threatens to overwhelm our normative sensibilities about the long‐term practical and ethical implications. The contributors to this focus issue attempt to think through some of the more salient moral and practical consequences of CRISPR in the context of religious ethics, particularly as they relate to themes of autonomy, human flourishing, social justice, and the ethics of enhancement.

Part I: What counts as cognition, and how can it be studied in organisms without nervous systems? The emerging field of plant cognition confronts these questions by integrating philosophy, plant science and comparative psychology. This article provides a methodological primer on the field. We first survey major theoretical approaches—computationalist and representationalist, radical embodied, and behaviour‐first—and consider how they might be integrated. We then examine methodological strategies, from comparative experimental paradigms to the role of philosophy in clarifying concepts and guiding research design. Finally, we address key epistemic challenges, including replicability, anthropomorphism and confirmation bias. Taken together, these discussions establish a conceptual and methodological foundation for plant cognition research. A companion article, Plant Cognition—An Empirical Primer, complements this survey by reviewing the empirical evidence and its philosophical implications.

The Life-Sustaining Treatment (LST) Decision-Making Act is a South Korean law that aims to empower patients by providing them with more autonomy in end-of-life care decisions. However, there are significant differences between the law’s intentions and its implementation in clinical practice. It is essential to understand the perceptions of current and future healthcare professionals regarding LST in order to improve education, policy and patient-centred decision-making. This study aimed to compare the knowledge, attitudes and perceptions of LST among practicing healthcare professionals and medical students with clinical exposure to LST decision-making. A cross-sectional survey was conducted from August to December 2023 at a tertiary hospital in South Korea. The participants included healthcare providers (physicians, trainees, and nurses) and medical students with clinical experience. The survey assessed self-reported knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of the LST Decision-Making Act. Group differences were analyzed using chi-square tests and logistic regression analyses. A total of 297 participants responded, including 204 healthcare providers and 93 medical students. Healthcare providers reported significantly higher self-perceived knowledge (88.7% vs. 52.7%) and confidence in participating in LST decisions (69.6% vs. 37.6%) than medical students (both p < 0.001). Both groups supported the ethical purpose of the Act and the need for advance directives, but their educational priorities differed. Providers emphasized procedural knowledge, whereas students prioritized ethical education. Perceptions regarding the timing, decision-makers, and withdrawal of treatment varied. Multivariate analysis revealed that professional roles were independently associated with perceived knowledge and competence. Many healthcare providers have reported systemic barriers, including complex documentation and limited patient or caregiver understanding. Notably, over 25% of providers indicated a continued reliance on Do-Not-Resuscitate forms because of procedural challenges. This study revealed substantial differences in perceptions of LST between healthcare providers and medical students. The findings underscore the need for improved educational programs and standardized protocols to effectively implement LST legislation and highlight significant implementation gaps.

While the “women’s rights are human rights” movement has significantly advanced women’s rights, it has paid insufficient attention to the establishment of political space for women’s political rights, and the need to strengthen women’s empowerment and democratic citizenship. This article aims to address these theoretical gaps by incorporating Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights.” Arendt’s political theory, while recognizing the importance of institutional mechanisms, effectively supplements these theoretical gaps by highlighting political agency and democratic citizenship as essential components in securing one’s fundamental dignity. This article explores the case of the Femizone during the 2016–17 Candlelight Movement in South Korea, where young feminists established autonomous spaces to counteract political exclusion. By analyzing how these activists followed the Arendtian political praxis, this article demonstrates that collective political action is a key element in protecting and claiming women’s political rights. Consequently, it suggests that the “women’s rights are human rights” movement should expand its focus beyond institutional protections to include women’s political agency. Finally, this study contributes to the field by incorporating Arendt’s theory into the domain of women’s rights discourse and expanding the “women’s rights are human rights” framework into a more comprehensive and inclusive norm.

In this paper, I examine J. Carroll's “Mirror Argument” against the Humean conception of law and H. Beebee's response to this argument. I will first show that Beebee's criticism is quite plausible if it is refined slightly. Then, I will propose a revised version of the Mirror Argument which is immune to criticisms like that of Beebee's. According to the Humean conception of law, I will argue, we should accept the existence of counterfactual dependence relation where there should not be such relation.

Since K. Fine’s influential criticism of modalism, many philosophers have agreed that we cannot understand the concept of essence with that of modality. However, some philosophers have resisted this mainstream position. In this paper, I examine N. Wildman’s claim that, unlike other versions of modalism, his version of modalism, namely Sparse Modalism can save modalism. I will argue first that if we introduce the notion of grounding into this debates, Wildman’s criticisms of other versions are significantly undermined. Next, I will argue that since Sparse Modalism has an implicit commitment to grounding Wildman cannot blame revising other versions modalism with the concept of grounding. From these claims, I will conclude that the prospect of the success of modalism in general is at best dubious. Without the concept of grounding no version of modalism can succeed and with the concept of grounding no version is well motivated.

This paper reveals various ethical perspectives and references of individuals to explain the gap between their espoused ethics and their ethics-in-use. A Q-methodology was used to inspect and observe ethical subjectivity in Korean business organizations. In interpreting and reasoning about the Q-factors, we built the ethical subjectivity cube (ESC) through the logic of abduction, and conceptualizing the position of Q-factors respectively as blind loyalist, institutional prosecutor, opportunist, conformist, and structural reformist.

Recent developments in neuroscience and comparative philosophy challenged the classical dichotomy between reason and emotion, revealing emotions as cognitive appraisals shaped by cultural norms. This paper examines how late Joseon litigation novels (The Tale of Eunae and The Tale of Sin Yeocheok) anticipate this insight through a Confucian model of “empathetic justice,” where emotions such as righteous anger serve as publicly ratified indicators for recognizing moral legitimacy when aligned with communal ethical standards. Contrary to Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, which regulates emotion through imaginative distance, Joseon-era thought valued the appropriateness (中節) and communal alignment of emotion as essential criteria for public reasoning. Analysis of royal verdicts and their fictional representations reveals how moral emotions, when ethically cultivated and publicly endorsed, functioned as both motivational forces and evaluative criteria for justice. This framework offers an alternative to Western models, with implications for contemporary debates on restorative justice and moral psychology.

Why do consumers who profess to be concerned about the environment choose not to buy greener products more regularly or even at all? This study explores how consumers’ perceptions towards green products, consumers and consumption practices contribute to our understanding of the discrepancy between green attitudes and behaviour. This study identified several barriers to ethical consumption behaviour within a green consumption context. Three key themes emerged from the study, ‘it is too hard to be green’, ‘green stigma’ and ‘green reservations’. There is currently a perception, based on a number of factors, that it is too hard to be green, which creates a barrier to purchasing green products. Furthermore, some consumers were reluctant or resistant to participate in green consumption practices due to their unfavourable perceptions of green consumers and green messages. This article suggests that green perceptions may influence consumers’ intention to purchase green products. Accordingly, it discusses the implications, and suggests avenues for future research.

Managers of for-profit corporations are required to seek profits, which entails organizing the corporation’s activities for the sake of realizing a profit. This prioritization of profit-seeking seems to invert the proper ordering of ends, thus undermining the possibility of managing the for-profit corporation with virtue. This article argues that such a threat can be avoided without jettisoning the traditional virtue ethics framework by envisioning profit-seeking as a practice that aims at engaging in a collective deliberation with market participants to promote an improvement in the way we allocate resources in society.

Present-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive events to be located in the present rather than the non-present, and for negative events to be located in the non-present rather than the present. Very little attention has been given to present-bias in the contemporary literature on time biases. This may be because it is often assumed that present-bias is not a distinctive psychological kind; that what explains people’s being present-biased is just what explains them displaying various other time-biases. According to this view, there is no need to investigate present-bias independently of investigating these other biases, since present-bias is really just a manifestation of these other biases. We call this the manifestation thesis. We take up the question of whether the manifestation thesis is true, and argue that it is not. Thus, by failing to investigate present-bias in its own right we are failing fully to understand the spectrum of ways in which people display time biases. In turn, we suggest, this may have implications for the ways we evaluate whether present-bias is rationally permissible.

This paper explores parallels between the Liar and various aspects of philosophical reasoning. It begins by analyzing the liar sentence, “This sentence is false”, by highlighting its self-referential nature and alternating truth values. The paper then draws connections between the Liar and Hegel’s speculative sentence, proposing it as a ‘quasi-speculative sentence’ that mirrors dialectical reasoning. Subsequent sections examine the logocentric predicament, Zeno’s paradox, the realism vs. anti-realism debate, and determinism, illustrating how they embody similar self-negating structures. The analysis sheds light on the underlying structure of our philosophical reasoning.

Straipsnyje tiriamos paralelės tarp melagio teiginio ir įvairių filosofinio mąstymo aspektų. Pradedama tiriant melagio teiginį „Šis teiginys yra klaidingas“ ir išryškinant jo autoreferentinį pobūdį bei kintančias tiesos vertes. Tuomet straipsnyje atskleidžiamos paralelės tarp melagio teiginio ir Hegelio spekuliatyvaus teiginio bei siūloma melagio teiginį interpretuoti kaip „kvazispekuliatyvų teiginį“, kuris atspindi dialektinį mąstymą. Tolesniuose teksto skyriuose tiriami logocentrizmo problema, Zenono paradoksas, ginčas tarp realizmo ir antirealizmo ir determinizmas, parodant, kaip šie įkūnija panašias save neigiančias struktūras. Straipsnyje išryškinama pamatinė filosofinio mąstymo struktūra.

Drawing on the themes of men and masculinity, this article examines texts in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of local multinational enterprises (MNEs) in South Korea, an emerging economy. This article explores how Korean male hegemony is hidden and naturalized in CSR reporting. Focusing on the discursive construction of gender identity, we analyze how CSR reports portray gendered identities in ways that may foster gender inequality by examining how the texts reflect the inferior position of women and marginalized male workers in the workplace. We review 15 CSR reports from Korean MNEs as a primary data source for examining corporate policies and disclosure on gender‐equality issues in the workplace. We explore the inherently embedded meaning of CSR reports to evaluate the masculine tone of gender relations in these texts. To deepen our understanding, we retrieved the original text segments, coded them by using a categorical framework and revisited our data to critically examine our interpretation of the narrative structures that we argue reflect and reproduce certain discourses of masculinity, through the (in)visibility of women, the marginalization of women and (part‐time) men, and the silencing of their voices by the Korean male hegemony.