David Ohreen

Mount Royal University | MT Royal · Department of General Education

The history of ethics often presupposes rationalist thinking on moral issues. An alternative to rationalism has been proposed by the social intuitionist model. This model suggests the bulk of our moral decisions are ‘gut reactions’ or intuitions. Unlike the rationalists, which support reasons and deliberation to draw moral conclusions, intuitionist...

Within the business and management literature, empathy has taken on increased importance as a central element to leadership, improving marketing strategies, corporate philanthropy, creating organizational connectedness, and as a strategy for preventing managerial wrongdoing. Although defining empathy is difficult, it is the identification with anot...

The Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky provides important theoretical underpinnings for an alternative to business ethics pedagogy. Although Vygotsky’s constructivist approach has been applied to other disciplines, such as cognitive development, moral development, and network analysis and learning, its application to business ethics ed...

Nonprofit organizations play a crucial role in society. Unfortunately, many such organizations are chronically underfunded and struggle to meet their objectives. These facts have significant implications for corporate philanthropy and Kant’s notion of imperfect duties. Under the concept of imperfect duties, businesses would have wide discretion reg...

The history of the conceptualisation of social responsibility reveals three main themes: The profitability of SR, SR as stakeholder theory, and ethics as a force in SR. In this paper, I will argue that all three themes are philosophically unsound and rest on suspicious assumptions. First, there is little evidence that SR increases profits; second,...

A Socio-Linguistic Approach to the Development of Folk Psychology One of the most interesting issues central to folk psychology is how it develops in humans. Over the past few decades, two distinct theories have emerged known as the Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory. Theory-theory supporters argue that children construct theories to explain behav...

Fodor: Language, Mind and PhilosophyCainMarkCambridge: Polity Press, 2002, ix + 240 pp., $62.95, $22.96 paper - Volume 43 Issue 2 - David Ohreen

Karsten Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences is an intriguing, systematic, and careful analysis of empathy: putting ourselves in another person's shoes. Over the past two decades, empathy as received considerable philosophical attention thanks to the contemporary interdisciplinary debate regarding the dev...