Trung Nguyen

My study of moral justice in Scottish Enlightenment thought shall focus on the ways in which the Scottish thinkers tackled the issue of the dual aspect which characterises justice, namely the legal and ethical dimensions inherent in the idea of justice. The literati were particularly interested in the problematic implications underlying this aspect and were concerned with reconciling the two dimensions. Their discussion emerged out of the fact that the literati did not all agree about the nature, origin and characteristics of justice. They also debated on whether or not, and if so on what grounds, being just deserves admiration and praise. Further, the literati sought to account for the development of the individual virtue of justice into an institutionalised practice in the social sphere, and they examined the decisive role played by the juridical and political institutions. However, the Scottish moralists warned against the risks and dangers of allowing institutions to wield too much authority, among which, the risk of disobedience on the part of individuals and the danger of political corruption on the part of the government. To resolve these issues, the Scots put forward instead a compromise in which the government and the citizens could cooperate. Lastly, the Scottish moralists proposed to re-define the idea of justice, in terms of equity and fairness as opposed to defining justice in terms of equality. Doing so would enable the governmental institutions to regain legitimacy. The purpose of my study is to outline the debates that took place in eighteenth-century Britain as regards the idea of justice and to account for the major approaches offered by the literati on the matter. The wider concerns addressed by the literati are found in different branches of ethics and law: I intend to show how those different branches are related to one another.

A critical issue in executive control is how the nervous system exerts flexibility to inhibit a prepotent response and adapt to sudden changes in the environment. In this study, force measurement was used to capture “partial” unsuccessful trials that are highly relevant in extending the current understanding of motor inhibition processing. Moreover, a modified version of the stop-signal task was used to control and eliminate potential attentional capture effects from the motor inhibition index. The results illustrate that the non-canceled force and force rate increased as a function of stop-signal delay, offering new objective indices for gauging the dynamic inhibitory process. Motor response was a function of delay in the presentation of novel/infrequent stimuli. A larger lateralized readiness potential amplitude in go and novel stimuli indicated an influence of the novel stimuli on central motor processing. Moreover, an early N1 component reflects an index of motor inhibition in addition to the N2 component reported in previous studies. Source analysis revealed that the activation of N2 originated from inhibitory control associated areas: the right inferior frontal gyrus, pre-motor cortex, and primary motor cortex. Regarding partial responses, LRP and error-related negativity were associated with error correction processes, whereas the N2 component may indicate the functional overlap between inhibition and error correction. In sum, the present study has developed reliable and objective indices of motor inhibition by introducing force, force-rate and electrophysiological measures, further elucidating our understandings of dynamic motor inhibition and error correction.

For consciousness to exist, an entity must have prerequisite characteristics and attributes to give rise to it. We explore these “building blocks” of consciousness in detail in this paper, which range from perceptive to computational to meta-representational characteristics of an entity’s cognitive architecture. We show how each cognitive attribute is strictly necessary for the emergence of consciousness, and how the building blocks may be used for any entity to be classified as being conscious. The list of building blocks is not limited to human or organic consciousness and may be used to classify artificial and organisational conscious entities. We further explore a list of attributes that seem intuitively necessary for consciousness, but on further investigation, are neither required nor sufficient. The building blocks do not represent a theory of consciousness but rather a meta-theory on the emergence and classification of consciousness.

Despite receiving a great deal of research attention, the effect of corporate philanthropy on shareholder value remains inconclusive. To address this issue, the present paper examines emotionality as an important factor based on which investors infer about the firm’s motive as well as the beneficiary’s worthiness and react accordingly. Consistent with attribution theory, our event study shows that announcements with more emotional expressions are associated with higher cumulative abnormal stock returns and the effect is stronger when investor attention is greater. We further find that the positive interaction effect between emotionality and investor attention is more pronounced for scandal-free firms than for firms with corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). The empirical evidence remains consistent under various robustness tests. The paper concludes with implications for future research and managerial practices.