J. J. Lee

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.

This study examines the influence of some suspected sources of bias on perceptions of public sector corruption. These sources include dependence on two types of media as information sources about corruption: traditional and social media, positive perception of public employees, and social identification with public employees. Data were collected through a face‐to‐face survey of the general public in South Korea. The sample comprised 472 respondents evenly dispersed across the country. Through regression analysis, we found that dependence on traditional media—but not social media—significantly increased the perceived level of corruption. However, positive perceptions of and social identification with public employees were negatively associated with it, showing that these factors may skew respondents' perceptions of corruption. The results have implications for practitioners and researchers who design, implement, or evaluate anti‐corruption policies, suggesting the need for caution when making use of survey results.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) refers to policies, practices, and social norms aimed at promoting fair treatment and representation of people from historically disadvantaged groups, such as sexual, gender, and ethnic minorities. DEI’s institutionalization has been criticized by some as ineffective, wasteful and even antithetical to these aims, producing unintended negative side effects, such as threats to free speech and to the recognition of merit. Others maintain that DEI has had a net-positive influence, and that efforts to dismantle DEI programs in universities, business, and government are premature or unfounded. We reconcile these views by showing how critics and supporters of DEI alike could each advance their position if they (1) narrow the focus of debate to specific policies or programs, (2) evaluate how effectively programs or policies achieve their intended humanitarian outcomes through a targeted causal mechanism, and (3) build in the capacity to test for unintended negative consequences. Doing so avoids the mistake of overgeneralizing either the defense or condemnation of DEI by shifting focus to the strengths and failings of specific programs, and reveals novel avenues for researchers, policymakers, and the public to adjudicate the value of DEI programming.

According to the PubMed resource from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, over 750,000 scientific articles have been published in the ~5000 biomedical journals worldwide in the year 2007 alone. The vast majority of these publications include results from hypothesis-driven experimentation in overlapping biomedical research domains. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of information being generated by the biomedical research enterprise has made it virtually impossible for investigators to stay aware of the latest findings in their domain of interest, let alone to be able to assimilate and mine data from related investigations for purposes of meta-analysis. While computers have the potential for assisting investigators in the extraction, management and analysis of these data, information contained in the traditional journal publication is still largely unstructured, free-text descriptions of study design, experimental application and results interpretation, making it difficult for computers to gain access to the content of what is being conveyed without significant manual intervention. In order to circumvent these roadblocks and make the most of the output from the biomedical research enterprise, a variety of related standards in knowledge representation are being developed, proposed and adopted in the biomedical community. In this chapter, we will explore the current status of efforts to develop minimum information standards for the representation of a biomedical experiment, ontologies composed of shared vocabularies assembled into subsumption hierarchical structures, and extensible relational data models that link the information components together in a machine-readable and human-useable framework for data mining purposes.

Big data analysis is sweeping the natural sciences, industry, and the digital humanities, but what about business and society? The purpose of this session is to facilitate a conversation about the relationship of big data and data science analytics and their relevance to the business and society community in our roles as researchers, reviewers, editors, and scholars. We will discuss the benefits and challenges of big data analysis, and comparisons of big data methods with traditional quantitative and qualitative methods. We will offer a brief example of a topic modelling analysis, and will invite participants to consider the possibilities for using big data analysis in their business and society research.

This paper examines the Slack Resource Mechanism (SRM) in the Corporate Responsibility (CR) literature, proposing that when a firm has enough slacks, it is more likely to engage in CR activities, which eventually improve its financial performance. In order to assess whether or not, and in which contexts SRM really works, this paper reviews two research issues in SRM. Based on literature review, we empirically test two proposed hypotheses with a large-scale longitudinal dataset from 1997 to 2012. We find that firms become involved in CR activities for external stakeholders when they have enough slack resources, and that the slack-induced CR engagements are not favored by the stock market. Based on our research findings, we assure that SRM may need to be reconsidered and further developed.

This study examines whether embedding predicates’ semantic type affects the acceptability of internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs) in Korean. Existing studies on Korean IHRCs have primarily focused on their highly limited distribution, employing three research approaches to understand their restricted use: (i) explaining their formal restrictions using a set of rules; (ii) describing how they are used with naturally occurring data; (iii) refuting their existence as an independent construction in Korean by providing alternative explanations for how the interpretation of IHRCs is construed. Although these approaches have significantly enhanced the understanding of the use of IHRCs in Korean, whether a specific semantic type of embedding predicates renders an IHRC construal in a more acceptable manner has not been explored. To address this research gap, we conducted an acceptability judgment task. The results showed significantly higher acceptability, compared to the control condition, for predicates implying physical contact between entities but not for those that do not. This finding may indicate that Korean IHRCs serve as an example of a partially productive or verb-class-specific construction. This study contributes to the understanding of partial productivity or local generalization in language use and the interaction between a human and an object.

In this chapter, we consider three case studies of Character Education projects in England, each of which demonstrates a specific feature of the policy agenda. For each case study we describe the project and explore what is required of the young people, what they are intended to learn, and why this is supposed to work. We then move on to consider the evidence about the implementation of each project. Finally, we reflect on what each case study tells us about the preoccupations of character education, the ways in which it is being implemented and, in particular, the ways children and young people are situated within these programmes. The practice reflects the theoretical problems we outlined at the start of the book—such programmes are individualising, moralising, and de-politicising.

This chapter places character education in its historical context in Britain and argues that the importance of character-building for British policymakers increased significantly after 2010 when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power. The chapter traces arguments linking the need for character education both with concerns about a moral malaise among young people and with a desire to increase the academic success of students from deprived backgrounds, viewed as a key means of improving social mobility. It highlights the role played by a character education policy community in seeking to influence policy in this area and, in particular, the moralistic and individualistic approach to character education that it has advanced.

This chapter critically engages with the theoretical ideas underpinning character education. It argues that the notion of ‘education for character’ can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who argued that the ‘good life’—a life of ‘human flourishing’—requires above all the exercise of virtue. The chapter first summarises the core ideas of virtue ethics and argues that there are various problems with this ethical theory, most notably that it does not provide adequate guidance about what a person should do when faced with a specific moral dilemma. Second, it outlines the understanding of character education advanced by character educators in Britain in recent years and criticizes it for its emphasis on personal ethics rather than public ethics, and for its individualistic approach to addressing important moral and political issues.