Despite revisions to curriculum in ethics education in business schools, there continues to be high profile examples of unethical decision making regularly spotlighted in the media. Rather than simply teaching about behaviors and how they might impact decision makers and stakeholders, we describe a suite of activities used to highlight various behaviors and biases that impact the decisions individuals might make. These activities are intertwined with course materials regarding ethics and corporate governance to remind and help students better understand how (...) decision making can be influenced and challenged by personal ethics. We provide lesson planning suggestions including adapting to remote delivery, and student handouts. This suite of activities can be incorporated into any undergraduate or graduate level course that has content dealing with ethical decision making. (shrink)

Letters commenting on Hardwig, J "Is There a Duty to Die?" with a reply to those letters by the author.

Personal observations and survey data are used to examine the future of the village in a restructured food and agricultural sector in the former Soviet Union. Specific comparisons are made between the subjective quality of life of residents in two villages in the former Soviet Union (one in southern Russia and one in eastern Ukraine) and two villages in northwest Missouri. Residents of the Russian and Ukrainian villages have substantially lower assessments of specific domains of their lives than do American (...) villagers. Respondents in the Russian and Ukrainian sample express an interest in some aspects of privatization of services and consumer goods but, by and large, exhibit little interest in replacing the collective farms with household-level private farming. Historical factors, different incentive structures, and the possibilities for different institutional arrangements are discussed. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

Many philosophers have discussed problems of additive aggregation across lives. In this article, I suggest that anti-additive aggregationist principles sometimes apply within lives, as well as between lives, and hence that we should reject a widely accepted conception of individual self-interest. The article has eight sections. Section I is introductory. Section II offers a general account of aggregation. Section III presents two examples of problems of additive aggregation across lives: Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, and my Lollipops for Life Case Section (...) IV suggests that many may have misdiagnosed the source and scope of anti-additive aggregationist considerations, due to the influence of Rawls's and Nozick's claims about the separateness of individuals. Accordingly, many leave Sidgwick's conception of self-interest—which incorporates an additive aggregationist approach to valuing individual lives—unchallenged. Section V suggests that the separateness of individuals may have led some to conflate the issues of compensation and moral balancing. Section VI argues that an additive aggregationist approach is often deeply implausible for determining the overall value of a life. Section VII discusses a Single Life Repugnant Conclusion, first considered by McTaggart. Section VIII concludes with a summary, and a brief indication of work remaining. (shrink)

We typically think of prosecutorial ethics as encompassing a special set of obligations for prosecutors during the pretrial and trial stages of a criminal case. In the literature and in rules of professional responsibility much attention is paid to the charging function, contact with unrepresented persons, plea negotiations, discovery, and courtroom decorum. Our concern with prosecutorial ethics at these stages is rooted primarily in due process and fairness to the accused. [W]hile he may strike hard blows, the Supreme Court wrote (...) in Berger v. United States, [a prosecutor] is not at liberty to strike foul ones. Whether it is a recognition that the prosecutor acts as a representative of the sovereign or that he or she possesses extraordinary power over people's lives, we speak about the prosecutor's ethical duties as special or additional to those of ordinary lawyers. By preventing a prosecutor from litigating unfairly, the aim is to protect a criminal defendant from an unjust or unwarranted conviction. What, then, are the ethical duties of prosecutors after the defendant has had his fair shot at trial, but lost? The literature and standards are surprisingly silent, with rare exception, on the post-conviction ethics of prosecutors. Constraints on the prosecutorial function seem to reach their apex at trial. Why? Are the reasons for special or additional ethics for prosecutors non-existent on appeal? Is the vast discretion, present at the pretrial and trial stages and thought by some to justify special ethical duties, absent on appeal? As a recent case from Texas illustrates, ethical issues still abound even after a jury returns a verdict of guilty. Nevertheless, the traditional discourse on pre-conviction duties can help us determine how prosecutorial discretion should be exercised after a conviction has been obtained. (shrink)

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) provided both a powerful framework for analyzing public opinion and a highly influential account of the role of political elites in shaping public opinion. Zaller's subsequent work has focused less on the mechanics of opinion change than on the role of public opinion in the broader political process. This evolution has entailed sustained attention to V. O. Key, Jr.'s concept of ?latent opinion??the opinion politicians are likely to face in the next election, (...) as distinct from what is currently measureable in surveys. It has also entailed a downgrading of the importance attached to Media Politics??the attempt to govern on the basis of words and images that diffuse through the mass media??relative to Party Politics??the substance of party performance.? In recent work, Zaller and his colleagues have emphasized the key role of interest groups and activists in shaping parties' policy choices, largely free of effective constraint by the mass public. This work provides a rather more pessimistic take on ?The Question of Elite Domination of Public Opinion? than does the epilogue to The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. (shrink)

Americans have been obsessed about the mechanics of perfectibility. Perfectibility is built into the constitutive documents of the American Republic. The expression of that perfection is Law, and Government provides the means. The mechanics of perfectibility lies in philosophy and theology. Through these mechanics Americans can discern the spirit of perfection - as God or as the genius of the American community made manifest. The essay considers these notions in the context of two cases, Swift v. Tyson (1842) and Erie (...) Railroad Co. v. Tomkins (1938), which provide both the antipodes of American conceptions of the sources and hierarchy of law, and also suggest the mechanics of a mandatory perfectibility in American. But the judge is not the only intermediary between perfection and its expression in law. The essay suggests the way the political branches also seek the role of privileged (and uniquely privileged) intermediaries between the people and perfection. The essay ends with a consideration of the value of the theology of faith and reason in the elaboration of American jurisprudence. (shrink)

A constitution is, as Article VI of the United States Constitution declares, the fundamental law of the land, supreme as a legal matter over any other nonconstitutional law. But that almost banal statement raises a number of theoretically vexed issues. What is law? How is constitutional law to be distinguished from nonconstitutional law? How do morality and moral rights fit into the picture? And what are the implications of the answers to these questions for such questions as how and by (...) whom should constitutions be interpreted? These are the issues that I shall address.Alexander proceeds as follows: In section I he takes up law's principal function of settling controversies over what we are morally obligated to do. In section II he then relate law's settlement function to the role of constitutional law. In particular, he discusses how constitutional law is distinguished from ordinary law, and he also discusses the role of constitutions in establishing basic governmental structures and enforcing certain moral rights. In section III he addresses the topic of constitutional interpretation, and in section IV the topic of judicial review. Finally, in section V, he discusses constitutional change, both change that occurs through a constitution's own rules for amendments and change that is the product of constitutional misinterpretations and revolutions. (shrink)

Abraham Kaplan once suggested that Dewey’s “magic number” was two. His observation seems to be supported by the titles Dewey gave to his books, such as Experience and Nature. But in making this observation, Kaplan hedged a bit. Perhaps it would be better, he added, to say that Dewey had two magic numbers: he seemed to look for twos in order to turn them into ones. Looking back over the notes I have pencilled in the margins of Dewey’s Collected Works (...) over the years, I am struck with the number of times “1, 2, 3” appears. In some cases these passages are reminiscent of Peirce’s categories. In other cases, they recall Hegel’s dialectic. Dewey’s “magic numbers” are tools that can help us understand the structure and content of his work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on the Translational Work of BioethicsElizabeth Lanphier and Larry R. ChurchillRecent essays in Perspectives and Biology and Medicine, including "Can Clinical Ethics Survive Climate Change" by Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce and "Ethical Maxims for a Marginally Inhabitable Planet" by David Schenck and Larry R. Churchill, both appearing in the Autumn 2021 issue, inspired conversations between us, among our colleagues, and (...) with various contributors to this symposium. We asked of ourselves and each other: where can, should, or must bioethics as a field go to make what bioethicists know and publish about in the academic literature relevant to public policy decisions, health and technological innovation, and a general public? In other words, where do we, practically speaking, go with our bioethical insights and discoveries to make a tangible impact on issues like climate change—though that is only one of the various topics that the authors in this symposium tackle.This translational work of connecting scholarly innovation back to overt practical innovation is often peripheral to academic bioethics. It is not the work the academy typically recognizes in its credit system. Yet this translational work is becoming a critical, central duty of bioethics for the 21st century, while the kinds of work the academy most valorizes may be the least important at this time. In particular, the need for translational initiatives is increasingly evident as pandemics linger into a new normal, the long history and ongoing impacts of racism become even more evident at institutional levels, and the devastating health implications of global warming emerge. [End Page 515]Bioethicists function in privileged proximity to the deleterious effects of failed health and social policy, as well the interplay between seemingly personal health choices, such as those related to diet or lifestyle, and inequitable conditions that impact the options available to individuals and groups. We are increasingly distressed by what we see from this privileged window into health. The COVID-19 pandemic has made preexisting social and policy inequities impacting health impossible to ignore. At the same time, the patterns of carbon pollution portend health crises of unprecedent severity and magnitude in the near future—and will likely deepen inequities and disparities already occurring between those most contributing to, and those most harmed by, climate change.As a field, bioethics has, since its start, been at the intersection of theory and practice. But it is not sufficient for the field to reside passively at this crossroads. The field must be constantly innovating new byways and highways, new offshoots from existing pathways and connector roads between them, that build out both the theory and practice of bioethics in a mutually innovative relationship to each other. Bioethics does not make sense without attention to the real-world practices and the lived realities of health and care. The practical engagement is what deepens and enriches theory, in ways that are more responsive to the real world in which bioethicists toil. But it also is not enough to merely contribute to the body of bioethics scholarship. The translational bioethics we envision is also about using novel theories and concepts to actively shape practices and realities; it is a bioethics in which theory and practices mutually influence each other, each reaching out to generate and change the other.This collection of essays, drawn from a diverse number of scholars, offers several promising paths forward. The essays were written in the spring of 2022, two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, two years after the murder of George Floyd and international attention to the movement for Black lives, and for the most part in the weeks just prior to a set of US Supreme Court decisions with enormous impacts on health, including the June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and the June 30 West Virginia v. EPA decisions.The authors are diverse in age, spheres of work, discipline, sex, race, and ethnicity. They expand our vision for what bioethics can and should be. While we have grouped the essays by subject matter, most of the pieces speak to the field as a whole and invite cross-fertilization. We hope readers will find new ideas, old ideas... (shrink)

The legacy of totalitarianism thwarts discourse and practice of academic freedom in post-Soviet universities. For legacy-holders, “academic freedom” causes disorientation, irresponsibility, demoralization and inequity. They see more threats than benefits from empowering decision-makers who are non-compliant with local bureaucracy. For innovators, freedoms enhance flexibility and creativity. However, granting such freedom also reinforces value clashes on campuses and tends to intensify feelings of guilt and shame in regard to actions which show a disrespect of authority and tradition. While both legacy-holders and (...) innovators endeavour to redefine their practices and norms in their teaching, they appear to still struggle to shed their predispositions to a paternalistic and colonial philosophy of education. Presumably curative, their engagement with international networks of scholarship exposes their particular positions of vulnerabilities to that end. Both groups continue to push patriotism and cultural idiosyncrasy in order to hedge their power and status in the global marketplace of ideas. As in the past, a discourse of anti-westernization prevails, shoring up legacies of regulative thinking, indoctrination, and insularity. Progressive academics succeed primarily by taking bold steps to go above and beyond the dominant discourses and norms within their universities and policy-building communities. This article explicates why, in turn, a “surrogate academic freedom” tends to emerge as a conundrum across the post-Soviet higher education space. (shrink)

t. 1. Dialog s V. V. Davydovym -- t. 2. Nereshennye problemy razvivai︠u︡shchego obrazovanii︠a︡.

In this paper, we draw on Alfred Schutz’s theoretical framework to better understand how oppression is enacted through discriminatory acts. By closely examining the role of typifications and relevances in our experience of others, and by supplementing this analysis with contemporary social scientific resources, we argue that a Schutzian perspective on oppression yields important phenomenological insights. We do this in three key steps. Firstly, we contextualise Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World within Schutz’s broader body of work, (...) elucidating his central conditions of discrimination. Secondly, we highlight the limitations of Schutz’s account, in how it fails to capture more peripheral, subtle, and implicit oppressive practices. Finally, we introduce two underexplored insights derived from Schutz’s framework: the role of relevances in understanding the motivational underpinnings of implicit biases, and the connection between self-typification and stereotype threat. With this multidimensional approach, we hope to enhance our understanding of oppression whilst bridging gaps in Schutz’s original conceptualization. (shrink)

(This insularity was further promoted by the guileless duplicity of scholars in other fields, who were all too prepared to bequeath "the problem of ...

Temkin's book is a very original and deeply unsettling work of skeptical philosophy that mounts an important new challenge to contemporary ethics.