Judgment on rightness and wrongness of beliefs and behaviors is a main issue in bioethics. Over centuries, big philosophers and ethicists have been discussing the suitable tools to determine which act is morally sound and which one is not. Emerging the contemporary bioethics in the West has resulted in a misconception that absolute westernized principles would be appropriate tools for ethical d...

There is much more involved in the nature/nurture debate than an abstract theoretical disagreement among dispassionate scientists. Each side of thetheoretical disagreement among dispassionate scientists. Each side of the debate leads logically to significantly different views of the social order and holds different implications for social policy. In this paper I shall argue that Boas’ Anthropol...

In an attempt to question the ascendency of today’s relativism, this essay asks two different but interrelated questions: (1) Does the celebration of cultural differences guarantee the disappearance of ethnocentric universalism? (2) Is it possible to envision a universalism that is not ethnocentric? Answering the first question negatively and the second question affirmatively, this essay analyz...

Here is a simple and inviting picture: the semantic values of sentences, relative to contexts, are sets of possible worlds. These are the truth conditions of assertions of those sentences in contexts. They are thus the contents of assertions, or the objects of attitudes we might take towards such contents. There have been many questions raised about the simple picture. For instance, sets of wor...

F. Correia and A. Iacona (eds.), Around the Tree: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues Concerning Branching and the Open Future, Synthese Library 361, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5167-5_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract In his paper “Future Contingents and Relative Truth,” John MacFarlane argues for truth relativism on the basis of the possibility of the open future. He defend...

this research probes the impact of instruments of globalization on the religious identity. this is why the theories that are used here include: the implant theory of george gerbne, the relevant theory as developed by teriandis, the theory of cultural coexistence, the theories relating to the american consumer culture, and the spread of western modernity. today globalization through intensificat...

Exotic Becomes Erotic: Explaining the Enigma of Sexual Orientation Daryl J. Bem Cornell University In this address, I outline my “Exotic-Becomes-Erotic" theory of sexual orientation (Bem, 1996) , which provides the same basic account for both opposite-sex and same-sex erotic desire—and for both men and women. It proposes that biological variables do not code for sexual orientation per se but fo...

The purpose of this study is to explore cross-cultural differences between U.S. and Chinese business students in their rationales for ethical decision-makingwith respect tocommon information-related ethical dilemmas. Wefound thatthe dimensions (i.e., moral equity, relativism, egoism, contractualism, and utilitarianism) of the multidimensional ethics scale (MES) had varying influences on the eth...