Background This study assessed patient perceptions of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act and opinions toward physicians who receive gifts and/or payments from pharmaceutical or medical device companies. Methods During their office visit, patients attending different specialty clinics volunteered to complete our survey. The survey asks if the patient knows what the Sunshine Act is, then asks questions on 5-point response scales to assess the patient's opinions toward physicians who receive compensation from companies, their self-rated knowledge of physician compensation, and how (...) they believe this compensation affects the cost of care. Results Over 13 months, 523 responses were collected: 8.6% of patients reported having knowledge of the Sunshine Act, 56.8% rated their knowledge of physician compensations as “poor,” and 67.1% agreed with the statement that patients should be aware of the compensation physicians receive. When asked how their opinion toward their physician would change if they learned the physician received free meals or gifts from companies, 58.9% replied “not at all,” and 36.11% of patients did not believe their cost of care would increase if their physician received compensation from companies. Conclusions Most patients were unfamiliar with the Sunshine Act, and believe their knowledge of physician compensation is poor. Over half of the respondents would not change their opinion of their physician based on knowledge of their physician receiving payments/gifts from companies, and over one-third of respondents did not believe such compensation increased the cost of care. The majority of respondents agreed that patients should be aware of payments/gifts to physicians. (shrink)

What drives organisations to engage in socially responsible purchasing initiatives? To investigate this important question, this article uses a case-study approach to examine the context within which supplier diversity programmes have emerged in both the U.S. and U.K. The analysis identifies legislative and policy developments, economic imperatives, stakeholder pressures and ethical influences as forces shaping organisational responses. It reveals important contextual differences between U.K. and U.S. experience and offers an empirical and theoretical explanation of corporate behaviour.

Rebb Binyamin (pseudonym of Yehoshua Radler-Feldman; 1880–1957) was a leading figure in movements that called for the establishment of a joint Jewish-Arab political framework in Palestine and that sharply criticized the Zionist cooperation with the British colonial authorities. In the early 1920s, he began exploring the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) as the basis for his critical approach toward the hegemonic Zionist discourse. In his writings Rebb Binyamin emphasized Gandhi’s refusal to reconcile himself to the British colonial “divide and (...) rule” policies by creating divisions between Hindus and Muslims, the Indian anticolonial struggle that he led, and the way this struggle inspired the development of anticolonial movements in the Middle East. These aspects of Gandhi’s political repertoire were considered by Rebb Binyamin as a framework for the critical discussion of the ways in which the British colonial authorities perceived the Zionist movement as their representative and pointed to the fact that the Zionist-colonial partnership was an obstacle to the crystallization of Jewish-Arab cooperation. This article focuses on the ways in which Rebb Binyamin’s reading of Gandhi served as the basis for his critique of hegemonic Zionist discourse and practices. (shrink)

There are many possible approaches to describing the effects and uses of music in a particular society. It would be a mistake to assume that music in the Bible is not the cement of social life and has no liturgical significance. The present study seeks to explore how people in ancient times employed music using the harp and the ram's horn , to cope with roles that were open or never-ending in their demands. In particular, it focuses upon the role (...) played by music in secular life as well as religious rituals, as described in the Bible. The method used was an extensive literature study of the Old and New Testament, textbooks and relevant peer reviewed journals, with a focus on both secular and religious reasons for singing, dancing and playing instruments. It was found that the Bible described the use of the harp and the ram's horn associated with singing and dancing during celebrations, for military use, as well as mourning or lamentation. It was concluded that music using different instruments, including the harp and shofar, helped people to cope with the demands of everyday life and thus played an important role in both secular life and religious rituals in biblical times. (shrink)

Increasingly, national governments across the globe are prioritizing investments in neuroscience. Currently, seven active or in-development national-level brain research initiatives exist, spanning four continents. Engaging with the underlying values and ethical concerns that drive brain research across cultural and continental divides is critical to future research. Culture influences what kinds of science are supported and where science can be conducted through ethical frameworks and evaluations of risk. Neuroscientists and philosophers alike have found themselves together encountering perennial questions; these questions are (...) engaged by the field of neuroethics, related to the nature of understanding the self and identity, the existence and meaning of free will, defining the role of reason in human behavior, and more. With this Perspective article, we aim to prioritize and advance to the foreground a list of neuroethics questions for neuroscientists operating in the context of these international brain initiatives. (shrink)

This paper explores one aspect of the political in the early Hegel, that of criminal action and its relationship to the concept of recognition in the System of Ethical Life. While it is clear that in this work Hegel thinks that criminal action plays an important role in the transformation of simple ethical communities, it is not clear that, for Hegel, the formal character of crime in the struggle for recognition is anything but negative. I attempt to show how this (...) role for crime leads Hegel to a legalistic conception of Right that has no solid connection with recognition as a social force. (shrink)

The unknown nature of tomorrow’s research makes informed consent in biobank research a challenge. Whether the consent given by biobank participants is ‘broad’ or ‘narrow’, the ever present question remains the same: are new activities covered by the original consent? In this article, we focus on the meaning of, and the relation between, broad consent and re-consent in biobank research. We argue that broad consent should be understood as consenting to a framework—a framework which covers aims, core conditions for acceptable (...) use, governance and how these affect participants. Changes that alter the framework in a fundamental way call for re-consent. Three biobank cases of current international interest are used to debate when re-consent is an ethical necessity: whole-genome sequencing, data sharing and commercial utilization. These reflections give us a more nuanced view on what consent is for. We claim that the introduction of broad consents in biobank research has not represented a betrayal of individual participant interests, as some critics have asserted. Broad consents combined with the possible use of re-consent are in certain settings not inferior, but rather ethically superior to narrow consents. In population-based research biobanks, they allow for a reconciliation between individual interest and public matters in society at large. (shrink)

Moral licensing theory suggests that observers may liberate actors to behave in morally questionable ways due to the actors’ history of moral behaviors. Drawing on this view, a scenario experiment with a 2 (high vs. low ethical)×2 (internal vs. external motivation) between-subject design (N = 455) was conducted in the current study. We examined whether prior ethical leader behaviors cause subordinates to license subsequent abusive supervision, as well as the moderating role of behavior motivation on such effects. The results showed (...) that when supervisors demonstrated prior ethical behaviors, subordinates, as victims, liberated them to act in abusive ways. Specifically, subordinates showed high levels of tolerance and low levels of condemnation towards abusive supervision and seldom experienced emotional responses to supervisors’ abusive behaviors. Moreover, subordinates tended to attribute abusive supervision, viewed as a kind of mistreatment without an immediate intent to cause harm, to characteristics of the victims and of the organization rather than of the supervisors per se. When supervisors behaved morally out of internal rather than external motivations, the aforementioned licensing effects were stronger. (shrink)

Languages and writing systems result from satisfying multiple constraints related to learning, comprehension, production, and their biological bases. Orthographies are not optimal because these constraints often conflict, with further deviations due to accidents of history and geography. Things tend to even out because writing systems and the languages they represent exhibit systematic trade-offs between orthographic depth and morphological complexity.