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  1. Beyond the Brave New Nudge: Activating Ethical Reflection Over Behavioral Reaction.Julian Friedland, Kristian Myrseth & David Balkin - 2023 - Academy of Management Perspectives 37 (4):297-313.
    Behavioral intervention techniques leveraging reactive responses have gained popularity as tools for promoting ethical behavior. Choice architects, for example, design and present default opt-out options to nudge individuals into accepting preselected choices deemed beneficial to both the decision-maker and society. Such interventions can also employ mild financial incentives or affective triggers including joy, fear, empathy, social pressure, and reputational rewards. We argue, however, that ethical competence is achieved via reflection, and that heavy reliance on reactive behavioral interventions can undermine the (...)
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  2. Reframing the Purpose of Business Education: Crowding-in a Culture of Moral Self-Awareness.Julian Friedland & Tanusree Jain - 2022 - Journal of Management Inquiry 31 (1):15-29.
    Numerous high-profile ethics scandals, rising inequality, and the detrimental effects of climate change dramatically underscore the need for business schools to instill a commitment to social purpose in their students. At the same time, the rising financial burden of education, increasing competition in the education space, and overreliance on graduates’ financial success as the accepted metric of quality have reinforced an instrumentalist climate. These conflicting aims between social and financial purpose have created an existential crisis for business education. To resolve (...)
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  3. From Homo-economicus to Homo-virtus: A System-Theoretic Model for Raising Moral Self-Awareness.Julian Friedland & Benjamin M. Cole - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 155 (1):191-205.
    There is growing concern that a global economic system fueled predominately by financial incentives may not maximize human flourishing and social welfare externalities. If so, this presents a challenge of how to get economic actors to adopt a more virtuous motivational mindset. Relying on historical, psychological, and philosophical research, we show how such a mindset can be instilled. First, we demonstrate that historically, financial self-interest has never in fact been the only guiding motive behind free markets, but that markets themselves (...)
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  4. The Hazards of Putting Ethics on Autopilot.Julian Friedland, B. Balkin, David & Kristian Myrseth - 2024 - MIT Sloan Management Review 65 (4).
    The generative AI boom is unleashing its minions. Enterprise software vendors have rolled out legions of automated assistants that use large language model (LLM) technology, such as ChatGPT, to offer users helpful suggestions or to execute simple tasks. These so-called copilots and chatbots can increase productivity and automate tedious manual work. In this article, we explain how that leads to the risk that users' ethical competence may degrade over time — and what to do about it.
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  5. When Gig Workers Become Essential: Leveraging Customer Moral Self-Awareness Beyond COVID-19.Julian Friedland - 2022 - Business Horizons 66 (2):181-190.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the extent to which economies in the developed and developing world rely on gig workers to perform essential tasks such as health care, personal transport, food and package delivery, and ad hoc tasking services. As a result, workers who provide such services are no longer perceived as mere low-skilled laborers, but as essential workers who fulfill a crucial role in society. The newly elevated moral and economic status of these workers increases consumer demand for corporate (...)
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  6.  91
    Caveat Censor: Review of J.P. Messina's Private Censorship.Julian Friedland - forthcoming - Philosophy of Management.
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  7. Uncovering the Moral Heuristics of Altruism: A Philosophical Scale.Julian Friedland, Kyle Emich & Benjamin M. Cole - 2020 - PLoS ONE 15 (3).
    Extant research suggests that individuals employ traditional moral heuristics to support their observed altruistic behavior; yet findings have largely been limited to inductive extrapolation and rely on relatively few traditional frames in so doing, namely, deontology in organizational behavior and virtue theory in law and economics. Given that these and competing moral frames such as utilitarianism can manifest as identical behavior, we develop a moral framing instrument—the Philosophical Moral-Framing Measure (PMFM)—to expand and distinguish traditional frames associated and disassociated with observed (...)
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  8. AI Can Help Us Live More Deliberately.Julian Friedland - 2019 - MIT Sloan Management Review 60 (4).
    Our rapidly increasing reliance on frictionless AI interactions may increase cognitive and emotional distance, thereby letting our adaptive resilience slacken and our ethical virtues atrophy from disuse. Many trends already well underway involve the offloading of cognitive, emotional, and ethical labor to AI software in myriad social, civil, personal, and professional contexts. Gradually, we may lose the inclination and capacity to engage in critically reflective thought, making us more cognitively and emotionally vulnerable and thus more anxious and prone to manipulation (...)
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  9. Beat the Simulation and Seize Control of Your Life.Julian Friedland & Kristian Myrseth - 2023 - Psychology Today 12 (26).
    The simulation hypothesis can reinforce a cynical dismissal of human potential. This attitude can allow online platform designers to rationalize employing manipulative neuromarketing techniques to control user decisions. We point to cognitive boosting techniques at both user and designer levels to build critical reflection and mindfulness.
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  10. Expanding the Motivations for Altruism: A Philosophical Perspective.Julian Friedland - 2013 - Journal of Organizational Behavior 34 (8).
    We argue that attempts to extrapolate moral motives for non-egoistic behavior in organizational behavior often interpret results empathically or deontically, while leaving other moral motivational frames, such as the utilitarian and virtue ethical, under-examined. We encourage the creation of experimental measures to distinguish various philosophical frames.
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  11. Philosophy Is Not a Science.Julian Friedland - 2012 - The New York Times 1.
    The intellectual culture of scientism clouds our understanding of science itself. What’s more, it eclipses alternative ways of knowing — chiefly the philosophical — that can actually yield greater certainty than the scientific. While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science. Rather, we should underscore the fact that various disciplines we ordinarily treat as science are at least as (...)
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  12. Retrieving Philosophy in Management and Organization Science.Julian Friedland - 2016 - Philosophy of Management 15 (2):161-169.
    Like any social science, management and organization sits astride two literary and epistemic disciplines; the empirical and the conceptual. I argue that emphasizing the former to the detriment of the latter, as is often the case in management and organization research, creates a conceptual blindness that compromises progress in the field. I show how adopting a more philosophically attuned methodology buttresses the conceptual tools of management and organization research via deduction, induction, normative grounding, and overcoming the illusion of unanimity.
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  13. PushediN: The Next Step in Social Media Marketing?Julian Friedland - 2018 - Sage Business Cases.
    This case takes place in the context of a small to medium-sized retail clothing firm. It examines the latest trends in social media marketing technology and the potential ethical issues regarding privacy infringement and behavioral control of teenagers and young adults that such technology presents. The scenario invites students to consider how much, if at all, such marketing practices should be resisted going forward.
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  14. Avoiding Anthropomoralism.Julian Friedland - 2024 - Between the Species 27 (1).
    The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation, which has been endorsed by hundreds of influential academic ethicists, calls for establishing a vegan economy by banning what it refers to as all unnecessary animal suffering, including fishing. It does so by appeal to the moral principle of equal consideration of comparable interests. I argue that this principle is misapplied by discounting morally relevant cognitive capacities of self-conscious and volitional personhood as distinguished from merely sentient non-personhood. I describe it as a kind of (...)
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  15. Beyond Empiricism: Realizing the Ethical Mission of Management.Julian Friedland - 2012 - Business and Society Review 117 (3):329-356.
    Research into the proper mission of business falls within the context of theoretical and applied ethics. And ethics is fast becoming a part of required business school curricula. However, while business ethics research occasionally appears in high‐profile venues, it does not yet enjoy a regular place within any top management journal. I offer a partial explanation of this paradox and suggestions for resolving it. I begin by discussing the standard conception of human nature given by neoclassical economics as disseminated in (...)
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  16. No, Science Won't Solve the Great Problems of Philosophy.Julian Friedland - 2020 - Medium.
    A popular positivistic line of thinking seems to be cropping up again, declaring that the sciences are on the verge of a paradigmatic shift. One that will merge science and philosophy to finally answer all the great big questions once and for all. Questions such as What is life? What is consciousness? What makes individuals who they are? Why does our universe seem fine-tuned for our existence? How did it all begin? While such questions are undoubtedly important, the truth is, (...)
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  17. A Fairness Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century.Julian Friedland - 2021 - Areo.
    Michael Goldhaber, who popularized the term the attention economy, said of the US Capitol insurrection: “It felt like an expression of a world in which everyone is desperately seeking their own audience and fracturing reality in the process. I only see that accelerating.” If we don’t do something about this, American democracy may not survive. For when there is no longer any common ground of evidence and reason, history shows that misinformation will eventually overwhelm public discourse and authoritarianism can take (...)
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  18. Capitalism After Covid: How the pandemic might inspire a more virtuous economy.Julian Friedland - 2020 - The Philosophers' Magazine 2 (89):12-15.
    Today, dramatically increasing economic inequality, imminent climatological calamity, and a global pandemic now place the timeless debate over capitalism into stark relief. Though many seek to pin the blame on capitalism’s excesses, they would do well to recall the historical record of socialism’s deficiencies, namely, stifling innovation, lumbering inefficiency, and stagnation. Fortunately, our moral psychology affords a middle way between these two extremes. For while economic incentives have a tendency to let our civic and prosocial impulses atrophy from disuse, these (...)
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  19. (1 other version)A Ghost Workers' Bill of Rights: How to Establish a Fair and Safe Gig Work Platform.Julian Friedland, David Balkin & Ramiro Montealegre - 2020 - California Management Review 62 (2).
    Many of us assume that all the free editing and sorting of online content we ordinarily rely on is carried out by AI algorithms — not human persons. Yet in fact, that is often not the case. This is because human workers remain cheaper, quicker, and more reliable than AI for performing myriad tasks where the right answer turns on ineffable contextual criteria too subtle for algorithms to yet decode. The output of this work is then used for machine learning (...)
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  20. Wittgenstein and the Aesthetic Robot's Handicap.Julian Friedland - 2005 - Philosophical Investigations 28 (2):177-192.
    Ask most any cognitive scientist working today if a digital computational system could develop aesthetic sensibility and you will likely receive the optimistic reply that this remains an open empirical question. However, I attempt to show, while drawing upon the later Wittgenstein, that the correct answer is in fact available. And it is a negative a priori. It would seem, for example, that recent computational successes in generative AI and textual attribution, most notably those of Donald Foster (famed finder of (...)
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  21. Less Than Mighty Fresh: Confronting Supermarket Food Waste.Julian Friedland - 2018 - Sage Business Cases.
    This case study takes place in the context of a small urban supermarket chain. It examines the extent to which such firms should work to lower food waste on sustainability and human rights grounds. The scenario examines structural inefficiencies along the supply chain from food production to consumption, asking students to consider what power supermarkets have to correct these inefficiencies, and what ethical responsibility this may create for them to do so. Government regulations written to encourage or require food purveyors (...)
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  22. The Utility of Offshoring: A Rawlsian Critique.Julian Friedland - 2005 - Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies 10 (1):9-13.
    Most prominent arguments favoring the widespread discretionary business practice of sending jobs overseas, known as ‘offshoring,’ attempt to justify the trend by appeal to utilitarian principles. It is argued that when business can be performed more cost-effectively offshore, doing so tends, over the longterm, to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. This claim is supported by evidence that exporting jobs actively promotes economic development overseas while simultaneously increasing the revenue of the exporting country. After showing that offshoring might (...)
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  23. Minds that Matter: Seven Degrees of Moral Standing.Julian Friedland - 2004 - Between the Species 13 (4).
    Prominent non-speciesist attempts to determine the amount of moral standing properly attributable to conscious beings argue that certain non-human animals should be granted the highest consideration as self-conscious persons. Most of these theories also include a lesser moral standing for the sentient, or merely conscious, non-person. Thus, the standard approach has been to advocate a two-tiered theory—'sentience' or 'consciousness' and 'self-consciousness' or 'personhood'. While the first level seems to present little interpretative difficulty, the second has recently been criticized as a (...)
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  24. ITM's No-Tolerance Sexual Harassment Policy.Julian Friedland - 2018 - Sage Business Cases.
    This case study takes place in the context of a large corporate technology services firm. It explores the question of what constitutes sexual harassment as well as how best to draft a no-tolerance policy. The scenario examines behaviors that may or may not be considered illegal, the responsibility of all employees to foster a harassment-free environment, and what an effective no-tolerance policy might look like that minimizes possible conflicts of interest. Students are given an opportunity to reflect on several issues, (...)
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  25. The Interstellar Stakes Against God.Julian Friedland - 2015 - The Humanist 1:6-8.
    Pope Francis takes the Big Bang as supplying empirical evidence for God’s existence, going so far as to credit God’s will as the force behind natural selection. So if natural selection is the emanation of divine will, then so too is what Richard Dawkins calls the “selfish gene” underlying it. The trouble is that the natural forces of self-interest may win out over the better angels of our nature, spelling disaster for the human species—and the planet sustaining it. For the (...)
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  26. Another Thing to Worry About.Julian Friedland - 2022 - Boston Globe 20 (1):K2.
    Use of the word “worry” is on the rise. Does that reflect our anxious time — or make it worse?
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  27. Compassion As a Means to Freedom.Julian Friedland - 1999 - The Humanist 59 (4):35-39.
    To pursue the cultivation of a compassionate disposition is often perceived as an external demand, constraining one's individual freedom. Some might think of it as a necessary burden for the benefit of society, while others may exercise it only in the most convenient occasions. This most common view is gravely impoverished. Compassion is in fact a cognitive disposition with a certain historical life that actually frees us from our own perceptive constraints.
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  28. Ideation and Appropriation: Wittgenstein on Intellectual Property.Julian Friedland - 2001 - Law and Critique 12 (2):185-199.
    This paper provides a critique of the contemporary notion of intellectual property based on the consequences of Wittgenstein's “private language argument”. The reticence commonly felt toward recent applications of patent law, e.g., sports moves, is held to expose erroneous metaphysical assumptions inherent in the spirit of current IP legislation. It is argued that the modern conception of intellectual property as a kind of natural right, stems from the mistaken internalist or Augustinian picture of language that Wittgenstein attempted to diffuse. This (...)
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  29. Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Ethical Value.Julian Friedland - 2006 - Ethic@ - An International Journal for Moral Philosophy 5 (1):91-102.
    This paper develops Wittgenstein’s view of how experiences of ethical value contribute to our understanding of the world. Such experiences occur when we perceive certain intrinsic attributes of a particular being, object, or location as valuable irrespective of any concern for personal gain. It is shown that experiences of ethical value essentially involve a characteristic ‘listening’ to the ongoing transformations and actualizations of a given form of life—literally or metaphorically speaking. Such immediate impressions of spontaneous sympathy and agreement reveal ethics (...)
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  30. Sustainability, Public Health, and the Corporate Duty to Assist.Julian Friedland - 2015 - Business and Professional Ethics Journal 34 (2):215-236.
    Several European and North American states encourage or even require, via good Samaritan and duty to rescue laws, that persons assist others in distress. This paper offers a utilitarian and contractualist defense of this view as applied to corporations. It is argued that just as we should sometimes frown on bad Samaritans who fail to aid persons in distress, we should also frown on bad corporate Samaritans who neglect to use their considerable multinational power to undertake disaster relief or to (...)
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  31. Wittgenstein and the Challenge of Global Ethics.Julian Friedland - 2011 - In Claus Dierksmeier (ed.), Humanistic ethics in the age of globality. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 210-22.
    This paper describes Wittgenstein's pre-theoretical transcendentalist conception of ethics and the challenge it presents for the kind of global cosmopolitan perspective required of any multinational social responsibility strategy. It is argued that this challenge can be overcome through establishing a sense of solidarity with all stakeholders via a corporate social compact rooted in what Wittgenstein refers to as spontaneous agreement and sympathy. Contemporary examples of successful strategies are provided.
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  32. Compassion as a Means to Freedom From Constraint.Julian Friedland - 1994 - Dissertation, San Francisco State University
    This paper challenges the assumption that to consider the subjective interests of others is to take on a burden that constrains our personal freedom. The nature of compassion will be examined as a disposition to have a certain subjective insight into a given social atmosphere. The inquiry will develop by showing the role that this emotive quality plays in freeing the will from perceptive constraints. The discussion will take place within the context of both Analytic and Buddhist philosophies of moral (...)
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  33. Review of Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers, by Brian McGuinness and Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, by David Bloor. [REVIEW]Julian Friedland - 2004 - Essays in Philosophy 5 (1):164-168.
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  34. (1 other version)Review of Irving Singer, Feeling and Imagination and Explorations in Love and Sex. [REVIEW]Julian Friedland - 2003 - Philosophy in Review 23 (1):69-71.
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  35. The Intellectual's New Clothes: Review of Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline and Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization. [REVIEW]Julian Friedland - 2003 - APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy 12.
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