The norms that mediate our responses to accidents play a critical role in facilitating social cooperation. My dissertation explores these norms with an eye towards what they can tell us about the nature of moral responsibility. Drawing on Adam Smith's brief, but important discussion of moral luck, I argue that our responses to accidents reveal the extent to which the obligations we incur and the moral appraisals we make of one another are often appropriately influenced by fortune. In particular, I show how making sense of these responses requires us to embrace the idea that we can sometimes be morally responsible for things without being culpable, and I argue that doing so need not do violence to our moral intuitions.

In my dissertation, I experimentally examine whether and how the reporting model a firm uses to guide its corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures can influence managers’ capital allocation decisions. Chapter 1 provides an overview of my research question, why this research question is important, what I predict I will find, and the main results of my experiment. In Chapter 2, I briefly review the CSR literature generally and in accounting specifically, touching particularly on what has catalyzed the recent growth in CSR disclosure, how it influences behavior, and the emerging role of CSR reporting models as well as differences among these models. Two key features that differ among available reporting models are the intended users of the disclosures (e.g., capital providers or all stakeholders) and the disclosure location (e.g., MD&A or Sustainability Report). In Chapter 3, I draw upon research in social psychology on the social contingency model to hypothesize that differences in the intended users and the disclosure location jointly influence the extent to which managers’ capital allocations are weighted toward financial versus social benefits. I also hypothesize that this influence is mediated by how accountable managers feel for financial and social performance. Chapter 4 outlines the experimental design and method I use to test my hypotheses. The results of my experiment and related statistical analyses are reported in Chapters 5 and 6, in which I find support for my predictions across two different participant populations I use as proxies for managers. Specifically, I find that participants allocate capital to social benefits across all conditions, but that their overall allocations are largely driven by financial considerations. That is, they weight financial benefits more heavily than social benefits. However, when the reporting model disconnects CSR disclosure from a more traditional financial reporting setting (i.e., when the CSR disclosures are made to all stakeholders in a Sustainability Report), participants’ weight on financial benefits is reduced. In addition, I find that these results are driven by changes in perceived accountability for both financial and social performance. I also find evidence that the influence of the CSR disclosure location is contingent on whether the disclosure audience’s preferences are perceived to uniformly favor financial benefits. Chapter 7 concludes and reiterates the important implications of my dissertation. Namely, the results of my study help inform standard setters, regulators, stakeholders, and managers about the consequences of alternative CSR reporting models and highlight the potential effects of CSR disclosure standards on stakeholder welfare.

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In Forgiveness and Responsibility, I investigate the nature and norms of moral forgiveness. The standard account of forgiveness claims that forgiving is (or at least requires) the overcoming of resentment. I argue, however, that there is no single way to forgive and so no non-trivial set of necessary and sufficient conditions for forgiveness. I identify the prototypical manifestation of forgiveness, using it to explain the diversity of our forgiveness practices. Prototypical manifestations of forgiveness are cases of directed forgiveness, in which one takes up a certain kind of forgiving attitude towards a wrongdoer and overtly manifests that attitude, most notably by a speech act. This speech act crucially involves the victim relinquishing certain of her rights to blame the wrongdoer, as well as releasing the wrongdoer from certain kinds of personal obligations to the victim. Other modes of forgiveness are understood as extensions of the prototype to the extent that they share either the interior, psychological features or the exterior, behavioral features of directed forgiveness. I conclude by arguing that in order to preserve certain intuitive views about the norms bearing on forgiveness, our best theories of forgiveness should hold that: (1) forgiving is prototypically under one's voluntary control; (2) wrongdoers cannot obligate their victims to forgive them; and (3) forgiving alters the norms of interaction between victim and wrongdoer.

Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility, socialt ansvarstagande, hållbarhet

The purpose of this developmental research was to test the new way of working when the students were to take part in planning of cooking during the lessons in home and consumer studies, because the aim of the school is to teach the students to take the responsibility for their studies. The two first lessons should be used by students in the group to plan and organize their meal. During the third lesson the students must be responsible for cooking ready their meal and afterwards they must evaluate the results. The results of this new way of working was new for the students and they thought it was fun to be responsible for cooking during these lessons in home economics. The students in the groups were of wixed ability and they developed their knowledge from the levels of their ability. Due their experience the students gain delight and possibility to cook different meals which do not have to cost much, at the same time to learn to co-operate whit others in the group and create a lifelong learning. / Syftet med detta utvecklingsarbete var att prova ett nytt arbetssätt där eleverna blir delaktiga i planeringen av de måltider som ska tillagas under hem- och konsumentkunskaps lektioner, eftersom skolans mål är att eleverna ska ta eget ansvar för sina studier. Arbetssättet som eleverna kommer att arbeta med planeras och testas under tre lektioner. De första två tillfällena ska eleverna planera och organisera sin måltid. Vid tredje tillfället ska eleverna ansvara för att måltiden tillagas, därefter ska de även utvärdera sitt resultat. Resultatet av detta arbetssätt blev för eleverna ett nytt sätt att arbeta och de tyckte det var roligt att vara delaktiga i vad som tillagas under hem- och konsumentkunskapen. Eftersom eleverna befinner sig på olika kunskapsnivåer utvecklas de utifrån sina befintliga förmågor. Genom praktisk erfarenhet får eleveverna lust och möjlighet att prova på olika sorters maträtter som inte behöver kosta så mycket, samtidigt som det ska vara roligt för dem. De ska även lära sig att samarbeta med varandra och att skapa ett livslångt lärande.

With the rise of Internet and a changing social environment corporations legitimacy has been questioned (see Palazzo and Scherer, 2006). Frauds and scandals, both financial and environmental has put pressure on corporations to communicate their business operations and increase transperancy. Food retail inSweden have had several crises, the most recent the so called horesemeat scandal. This study starts in a literature review and describes some theories in CSR and legitimacy. The aim of the study is to investigate how consistent corporate communication is in regard to legitimacy. A framework adapted from Castello and Lozano(2011) was used to perform a content analysis. CEO statements and sustainability policies has been studied from three Swedish food retailers, Axfood, Coop and ICA. The study argues that there is a high degree of inconsistency in corporate communication when these two documents are analysed. This might indicate that sustainable development has not entered the board rooms in effect. It also indicates that while CEO’s are communicating pragmatic and institutional legitiamacy, the sustainability policies are moving into moral legitimacy.

Much of the literature on ethical consumption focuses on the potential of individual actions, such as buying fair trade products, to produce large-scale change. This thesis instead examines collective actions by exploring the discourses and interactions of alternative food movements in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Drawing on interviews with members of these networks, it argues that ethical consumption initiatives encourage the circulation of particular social and ethical values through the community. Community identity and place are made and marketed through networks of value that foster responsibility in and for the food system. Collective identity alters daily routines of consumption in order to channel benefits back into the local economy. A sense of place that includes responsibility for the food system sometimes leads to collective political action, but it also creates tension among and between different organizations and individuals who make claims to “the local” as a moral, social and geographical space.

Mental disorders are among the most prevalent of chronic diseases, and high rates of these disorders have been consistently found in jails and prisons. This study was a retrospective case series that described the population of adults charged with a criminal offense who were court ordered to undergo a psychiatric assessment within the Medical Legal Service in Santiago, Chile from 2005-2006. Chi-square tests were used to assess differences in the distribution of variables by sex and by criminal responsibility. Exploratory analyses using polytomous logistic regression were conducted in order to assess variables that might be predictive of the outcome of criminal responsibility as recommended by the psychiatrist. Of the evaluated offenders, approximately 84% were considered by a psychiatrist to be criminally responsible for their crime, 7% were regarded as having diminished criminal responsibility, 4% were considered to be not criminally responsible for their crime, and 4% were cases where criminal responsibility was not applicable. The following variables were found to be significant in the exploratory model: sex, age, occupational status, psychiatric pathology, recommendation of treatment, and recommendation of hospitalization. An offender determined by the psychiatrist to have a psychiatric pathology had the highest increase in odds of being considered to have diminished criminal responsibility or of being considered not criminally responsible. Results from this investigation will contribute to international knowledge about forensic psychiatry and mental health in Latin America. / Thesis (Master, Community Health & Epidemiology) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-23 12:52:55.423

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