Shlomo Sher

Like many other foreign students, Chinese students studying at American universities face special challenges in value-centered humanities courses as cultural outsiders. Moral and political philosophy can be particularly difficult, since these subjects focus on delicate issues of great personal significance, yet rely on cultural norms, discourse contexts, and basic assumptions that Chinese students may not share, understand, or feel comfortable discussing. Programs that invite American professors to teach summer classes to such students in China for American university credit allow for interesting new opportunities to circumvent some of the learning obstacles these students face in the United States. This essay reflects upon general teaching strategies that take advantage of these opportunities, and presents promising approaches to three sensitive topics in this teaching context: cultural relativism as a normative moral theory, diversity, and human rights. Many of the approaches and examples discussed may also be applicable to teaching Chinese students in the U.S. or discussing key issues with them in office hours

A longstanding debate exists in both academic literature and popular culture about whether non-informative marketing tactics are manipulative. However, given that we tend to believe that some marketing tactics are manipulative and some are not, the question that marketers, their critics, and consumers need to ask themselves is that of how to actually determine whether any particular marketing tactic is manipulative and whether a given manipulative tactic is, in fact, immoral. This article proposes to operationalize criteria that can be used by marketers for making such determinations and attempts to provide some clarification toward our under- standing of the concept of manipulation and the conditions for the moral acceptability of manipulative marketing practices. It argues that a marketing tactic is manipulative if it is intended to motivate by undermining what the marketer believes is his/her audience’s normal decision-making process either by deception or by playing on a vulnerability that the marketer believes exists in his/her audience’s normal decision-making process. Such a tactic is morally objectionable on several grounds, which make it morally impermissible unless outweighed by sufficient “redemptive” moral considerations