Kyle Scott

This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change.

Stoicism offers an account of virtue ethics that grants individual’s agency over their dispositions and their actions. This makes virtue independent of other factors which distinguishes the Stoics from Aristotle, who is the most commonly referenced source for virtue ethicists. This paper accordingly uses Cicero to articulate a Stoic version of virtue ethics within the business context. The paper argues that the Stoic account, by acknowledging individual agency, offers a more actionable and instructive form of virtue ethics. To develop the Stoic account of virtue ethics the paper examines the Stoic’s use of reason, intentions, indifferents, and sociability. Throughout the paper comparisons are made to Aristotle to demonstrate areas of overlap and divergence. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research as well as the limitations within this paper’s examination of Stoic virtue ethics.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems facilitate entrepreneurship, but they can also facilitate the destructive dark side of entrepreneurship if virtue is not cultivated by the ecosystem. The traditional entrepreneurial ecosystem incentivizes behaviors which can erode virtue and disincentivize safeguards to constrain normatively undesirable behaviors. This paper provides a framework for understanding the interplay between the members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the normative justification for virtue within the ecosystem. The framework is anchored to reciprocal determinism to show how values and norms develop within ecosystems. The paper then pairs the virtue of humility with innovation and reverence with risk taking, to argue that absent virtue, these two characteristics of entrepreneurship can be destructive. The paper concludes with pathways for future research.

Concerning religious matters there are a wide variety of views held that are often contradictory. This observation creates a problem when it comes to thinking about the rationality of religious belief. Can religious belief be rational for those who are aware of this widespread disagreement? This is a problem for a view in religious epistemology known as reformed epistemology. Alvin Plantinga, one of the leading defenders of this view, has argued that there is no successful argument to show that religious belief is irrational or in any other way epistemically unacceptable – he calls these arguments de jure arguments. I respond to this claim by seeking to develop two new versions of de jure argument that Plantinga has not dealt with. The first of these I call the return of the Great Pumpkin; and the second, the problem of religious disagreement. The return of the Great Pumpkin is an objection that develops an earlier objection that Plantinga has considered called, simply, the Great Pumpkin objection. This objection is that Plantinga’s methodology for defending the rationality of religious belief could be adopted by anyone, no matter how strange their beliefs – even someone who believed in the Great Pumpkin could use it. I develop this objection further by showing that it would be possible for a person with clearly absurd beliefs to find themselves in the same situation as the hypothetical Christian whom Plantinga is seeking to defend. There is, however, a response available to Plantinga, which involves showing how the historical and sociological context in which the person finds themselves makes a difference to the rationality of some of the beliefs that they hold. This discussion naturally leads into the second version of the de jure argument which asks whether knowledge of several religious communities who hold incompatible beliefs undermines the rationality of religious belief. This discussion engages with work in religious epistemology, but also more widely with the literature on the epistemology of disagreement. I consider whether, and in what circumstances, finding out that others disagree with you could ever rationally require you to give up one or more of your beliefs. This issue involves discussion of epistemic peers and defeaters. One of the arguments I consider is that if a religious believer continues to hold on to her religious beliefs in the face of disagreement then that will give her a reason to think that she is epistemically superior, which will lead to dogmatism, and a sort of epistemic arrogance. I respond to such an argument by showing that there is a problem with the inference involved in this argument.