Developing best practices for the business ethics classroom is an ongoing endeavor. One area of interest is the influence of mindsets on teaching and learning business ethics. Various mindsets are proposed to increase student awareness of the body of business ethics knowledge and motivate them to incorporate ethical knowledge in the real world. This paper reviews the current dominant consumer mindset that is argued to have unproductive effects on pedagogical practices in business ethics. Because human beings are biological production systems (...) and live in a world of dynamic natural and human-made production processes, this paper proposes replacing the consumer mindset with Producer Mindset, a world view that is a far more natural way for humans to think, talk, and make decisions. A Producer Mindset framework is constructed for the business ethics classroom and details are provided as to how it can grow the cognitive and emotional capacity of students to independently produce ethical decisions in business and in their personal lives. (shrink)

This article inserts Aldous Huxley's Brave New World into a bioethical conversation about the value of old age and old people. Exploring literary treatments of bioethical questions can supplement conversations within bioethics proper, helping to reveal our existing assumptions and clear the way for more considered views; indeed, as Peter Swirski has argued, literary texts can serve as thought experiments that illuminate the ramifications of philosophical ideas. This essay examines the novel's representation of a society without old people in conjunction (...) with ideas about aging and life narratives put forward by philosophers and bioethicists such as Ezekiel Emanuel, Gilbert Meilaender, and Alasdair MacIntyre. While critics, and Huxley himself, view the Brave New World as dystopian primarily because of its depiction of a totalitarian society where art, truth, and meaning are sacrificed to pleasure and distraction and where the ruled are programmed not to question the values of their rulers, the novel also makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs. (shrink)

Abstract:“Blackness” and “resistance”: two words that often defy what is commonly understood about their conditions, meanings, terms, and articulations. Alone or together, these terms raise a host of questions about the value and limits of their representation, practice, and the traditions that subtend them. At the time of collating this special issue in 2020, what many observed as a “racial reckoning” took place in the U.S., in the form of protests against racialized state-sanctioned violence and black death at the hands (...) of law enforce¬ment. However, as the contributors of this special issue attest to in different ways, the precarity of black life has always and continues to pose a complex historico-political and psychical question concomitant to the gratuity of antiblackness—the long-standing his¬tory and disavowal of antiblackness that prefigure the symbolic semblances of civil soci¬ety, the nation state, art and culture, law, and politics, in the United States and globally. (shrink)

Abstract:Untranslatability and resistance are terms that have a longstanding place in psychoanalytic theory and philosophies of law. But how might these terms labor differently whence their conditions rest on the founding conditions of antiblackness that position blackness as a type of permanent errancy? Pursuing the question on the untranslatability of blackness, antiblackness, and the resistances therein and thereof, the article adumbrates on the strange and estranged forty-year gap between the anti-lynching legislation’s enactment and its first court hearing (1969) as well (...) as its second court hearing (1999)—cases which have translated the statute’s original legislative intent from anti-lynching to “self-lynching.” As the article considers the untranslatability of blackness in the various registers of “resistance” in law, representation, and the psychic economies of antiblackness, it also reflects on how the transience of such translation casts an impossible “self” via a mode of lynching in the juridical imaginary—a type of foreclosure that precedes and operates beyond the orders of de jure and de facto law. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)