The challenge for those responsible for funding, brokering and assessing the merit of proposed Indigenous research is to identify and then work co-operatively with appropriate representatives of Indigenous interests in order to increase the flow of benefits from research to Indigenous peoples. Experience in Australia has shown that this is not a straightforward process. In this paper we indicate some reasons why it is important for the research community to broker research with representative Indigenous organisations and to involve Indigenous peoples (...) in the ethical assessment and conduct of research. We then identify some barriers to the achievement of these objectives and outline recently developed interventions from the field of health research that aim to promote a more effective working relationship between Indigenous peoples and members of the research community. (shrink)

The introduction of the National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines for the ethical conduct of Indigenous health research: Values and Ethics: guidelines for ethical conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research (NHMRC, 2003), has prompted renewed debate about the ethical assessment of Indigenous health research in Australia. Concern has been expressed that these guidelines provide inadequate protection of Indigenous interests and that their introduction will result in a rolling back of important Indigenous research reform gains of the (...) past three decades. Another view is that the participatory focus of the Guidelines will help ensure that key Indigenous values are positioned as central to the development of research involving Indigenous interests. In this article we provide an overview of recent commentary on the Guidelines, and canvass practical proposals for their implementation into practice. In particular, we present a case for applying the Values and Ethics Guidelines as a foundation for establishing negotiated research agreements between Indigenous peoples and professional researchers at the local community level. The intention of this proposal is to give voice to the concerns and perspectives of Indigenous peoples through research, and to provide a framework for monitoring research after ethics approval has been granted. (shrink)

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is _different_ from, perhaps in some sense _better_ than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge.¹ At the same time, self- knowledge has also encountered its (...) share of skeptics – philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one _species_ of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences _phenomenal knowledge_. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other. (shrink)

Protestant Christian ethicist Timothy Jackson and secular feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay each explore the relationship between love or care and justice through the lens of human dependency. Jackson sharply prioritizes agape over justice, whereas Kittay articulates a more complex and integrated understanding of the relationship of care and distributive justice. An account of Christian love and its relation to justice must account for the gratuity, mutuality, and reciprocity that pervade human existence. Such an account must integrate provision for another's (...) basic needs, a feature of agape, with a distributive justice that fairly allocates the material prerequisites of care and the burden of caring labor. Kittay's treatment of care and justice is more adequate to the realities of human embodiment and the social organization of care than Jackson's, but neither offers a fully adequate ground for the moral personhood of all human beings, including deeply dependent persons. (shrink)

THE RECENT CONVERSATION WITHIN CHRISTIAN ETHICS ABOUT THE RELAtionship between universal obligations and particular, intensive relations—between agape and "special relations"—largely accepts Gene Outka's formulation that these are separate and competing moral claims that must be balanced within the Christian moral life. I examine the relationship between agape and special relations through the lens of dependency and dependent-care relations. Attention to dependent care and the material needs addressed within them raises questions about the sharp division between universal and particular obligations. Drawing (...) on the work of feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, I argue that an adequate understanding of Christian love must take account of both our fundamental human equality and the pervasiveness of dependency in human life. Such an understanding of Christian love reveals that agape is a matter of personal and social ethics. (shrink)

In this case analysis deception or lying to a dying patient is discussed within the context of different relationships: the relationship between the patient and her family doctor, the relationship between the patient and the surgeon and the relationship between the patient and her family. It is suggested that the principle of veracity is not only a core feature in the patient-doctor relationship but is also fundamentally connected with the basic element of trust between the patient and doctor. The surgeon, (...) in deceiving the patient, even at the request of her husband, betrayed her trust in violating the principle of veracity. The primary responsibility of the surgeon was towards his patient rather than her family. In lying to his patient the surgeon failed to give Mrs Fasper something she needed most: respect for her as a person. (shrink)

Since World War II, US Catholic anti-abortion discourse has been framed in term of rights-language, ascribing civil and human rights to the prenate from the moment of conception. Yet many of those who would criminalize abortion have allied with anti-democratic political movements that buttress White supremacy and threaten civil rights. This contradiction exposes the theoretical inadequacy and epistemological hubris of current Catholic abortion discourse. While the Catholic Church and individual Catholics may subscribe to absolute moral norms against abortion, they should (...) not leverage rights-language to legislate such norms in a pluralistic democracy. Instead, Catholics should draw on our rich tradition of virtuous practical reasoning for an abortion ethic that honors the moral agency of pregnant persons and democratic citizens. (shrink)

A family reconstitution study of the Krummhörn population (Ostfriesland, Germany, 1720–1874) reveals that infant mortality and children’s probabilities of marrying or emigrating unmarried are affected by the number of living same-sexed sibs in farmers’ families but not in the families of landless laborers. We interpret these results in terms of a “local resource competition” model in which resource-holding families are obliged to manipulate the reproductive future of their offspring. In contrast, families that lack resources have no need to manipulate their (...) offspring and are more likely to benefit from allowing their offspring to capitalize on whatever opportunities to reproduce present themselves. (shrink)

By reflecting on a variety of cartoon representations of teachers and their work, this paper outlines a semiotic approach to undertaking research on teachers' professional cultures.

Understanding Computers and Cognition presents an important and controversial new approach to understanding what computers do and how their functioning is related to human language, thought, and action. While it is a book about computers, Understanding Computers and Cognition goes beyond the specific issues of what computers can or can't do. It is a broad-ranging discussion exploring the background of understanding in which the discourse about computers and technology takes place. Understanding Computers and Cognition is written for a wide audience, (...) not just those professionals involved in computer design or artificial intelligence. It represents an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about what it means to be a machine, and what it means to be human. Book jacket. (shrink)

Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, (...) and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals by Cristina L. H. TrainaSandra Sullivan-DunbarErotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals CRISTINA L. H. TRAINA Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 363 pp. $55.00In this ambitious and broadly interdisciplinary work, Cristina Traina begins from an experience that evades contemporary discussion: maternal sensual pleasure in the care of infants and young children. As Traina notes, (...) this experience puts two contemporary dogmas on a “collision course”: the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure is intrinsically good and the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure between unequals is intrinsically exploitative. As with other feminist turns toward neglected experience, this one calls for a recalibration of ethical models—in this case, a more complex and nuanced sexual ethic.Traina challenges readers to broaden notions of sexuality beyond androcentric models focused primarily on particular acts and on genital release. Such models are deeply graven in the Christian tradition and reinforced through reductive cultural appropriations of Freudian thought. But all human relations are embodied and involve desire, argues Traina, and are thus in some sense erotic, though most do not involve genital sexuality. Likewise, her readers are challenged to recognize the pervasiveness of relations of inequality in human life, when most Christian sexual ethics limit themselves to relations between equals, or at least understand a sexual ethic to aim at equality and mutuality.The book engages psychological resources demonstrating the human need for appropriate touch as well as the profound damage done by abusive touch. The need is so universal and foundational that Traina casts it as a human right; yet offering such touch appropriately is a subtle and challenging moral task beset with danger and the potential for self-deception.Traina diagnoses the sexual abuser as a fragmented self, one unable to perceive the concrete reality, needs, and experiences of her victim and bent on the doomed project of creating a whole self by appropriating and objectifying the other. Thus, at the heart of her ethic of sensuality between unequals is the notion of “attunement.” The attuned caregiver can acknowledge and fully experience inclinations, joys, and pains with a contemplative and compassionate awareness that allows considered and appropriate responses. The attuned care-giver lives with “unending, acknowledged desire” (177), a desire that glories in the goodness of the child in her care and, in so doing, creatively elicits subjectivity from her rather than manipulating her to meet the needs of the caregiver. [End Page 240]This ethical vision is developed in dialogue with a number of resources from Christian and secular sources. Traina helpfully nuances a Thomistic account of the virtue of temperance as a guideline for appropriate touch. She also develops revisionist accounts of Augustinian desire offered by Wendy Farley and Linda Holler. I found myself wondering whether some more traditional interpretations of Augustine might serve Traina’s project as well as or better than these revisionist understandings, which emphasize desire as a permanent state rather than directed toward final rest in God.Likewise, Traina works her way through the plethora of recent eros theologies, drawing in particular on recent interpretations of Plato’s Symposium that stress the creativity of eros in bringing to birth goodness and beauty as well as its potential for enabling a degree of other-regard. It seems to this reader that a contemporary ethic of sexuality between unequals calls for greater other-regard than the most generous interpretation of Plato’s ladder of love can suggest. However, Plato’s caution about the profound difficulty of directing eros toward the true good resonates with the difficulty of achieving the “erotic attunement” described by Traina.In any case, quibbles about the resources and interpretations that Traina mines to support her ethic do not lessen the originality, power, and importance of this book, which extends beyond sexual ethics to reframe questions about embodiment, (in)equality, and moral agency in profound and necessary ways.Sandra Sullivan-DunbarLoyola University, ChicagoCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This book engages Christian love theologies, feminist economics, and political theory to identify elements of a Christian ethic of dependent care relations.

Elaborating the analogy between the sun and the good, Plato's Socrates tells Glaucon to divide a line αβ into two unequal segments at γ. The result is that αγ represents what is intelligible and γβ what is visible.1 Then Glaucon is to divide each of the two segments by the same ratio as he used in the original division.2 Whatever proportion he used to make the cuts γ, δ, and ε in the divided line, generating its four segments, the geometrical (...) implication is that the two middle segments must be equal in length. As both Nicholas D. Smith and Richard Foley have emphasized, when Socrates reiterates the characteristics of the line at 534a3–5, transposing δγ and γε, there should be no doubt that Plato... (shrink)

This paper examines social network size in contemporary Western society based on the exchange of Christmas cards. Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex. Age, household type, and the relationship to the individual influence network structure, although the proportion of kin remained relatively constant at around 21%. (...) Frequency of contact between network members was primarily determined by two classes of variable: passive factors (distance, work colleague, overseas) and active factors (emotional closeness, genetic relatedness). Controlling for the influence of passive factors on contact rates allowed the hierarchical structure of human social groups to be delimited. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is ‘oft-invoked but ill-defined’. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: an all-purpose denunciatory category; ‘the way things are’; an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; a dominant ideology of global capitalism; a form of governmentality and hegemony; and a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It (...) is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978–9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault’s account of historical change complementing Max Weber’s work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms. (shrink)

“Thinking from the perspective of women’s lives makes strange what had appeared familiar, which is the beginning of any scientific inquiry.” Seeing as strange what had appeared familiar is the beginning of any inquiry, I think. I do not question my drinking water until it smells of chlorine. I do not ask why I was given the correct amount of change; I do not ask why I am treated with respect. In philosophical inquiry, I do not ask “What is a (...) cat?” but “What is Being?” Similarly, in the political realm, one does not question a social order which works well. Here the question arises, “Works well for whom?” Well, for those who aren’t troubled by it, those who do not question it, those for whom it does not seem strange. (shrink)

This study explores differences between executives in the U.S. and Spain in their perceptions of ethical issues in pricing, specifically comparing a domestic firm's actions affecting a foreign market versus a foreign firm's actions affecting the domestic market. Overall, Spanish and American executives provided somewhat different responses to the scenarios. Findings indicate that ethical judgments and intentions among Spanish executives did not vary based on which country was harmed. U.S. executives generally perceived that a morally questionable act directed at a (...) foreign country was more unethical than a morally questionable act directed at the United States. Possible explanations for these findings are suggested. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

The purpose of the two studies reported here was to develop an integrated model of the scientific reasoning process. Subjects were placed in a simulated scientific discovery context by first teaching them how to use an electronic device and then asking them to discover how a hitherto unencountered function worked. To do this task, subjects had to formulate hypotheses based on their prior knowledge, conduct experiments, and evaluate the results of their experiments. In the first study, using 20 adult subjects, (...) we identified two main strategies that subjects used to generate new hypotheses. One strategy was to search memory and the other was to generalize from the results of previous experiments. We described the former group as searching an hypothesis space, and the latter as searching an experiment space. In a second study, with 10 adults, we investigated how subjects search the hypothesis space by instructing them to state all the hypotheses that they could think of prior to conducting any experiments. Following this phase, subjects were then allowed to conduct experiments. Subjects who could not think of the correct rule in the hypothesis generation phase discovered the correct rule only by generalizing from the results of experiments in the experimental phase.Both studies provide support for the view that scientific reasoning can be characterized as search in two problem spaces. By extending Simon and Lea's (1974) Generalized Rule Inducer, we present a general model of Scientific Discovery as Dual Search (SDDS) that shows how search in two problem spaces (an hypothesis space and an experiment space) shapes hypothesis generation, experimental design, and the evaluation of hypotheses. The model also shows how these processes interact with each other. Finally, we interpret earlier findings about the psychology of scientific reasoning in terms of the SDDS model. (shrink)

Hyperlink cinema is an emergent film genre that seeks to push the boundaries of the medium in order to mirror contemporary life in the globalized community. Films in the genre thus create an interacting network across space and time in such a way as to suggest that people’s lives can intersect on scales that would not have been possible without modern technologies of travel and communication. This allows us to test the hypothesis that new kinds of media might permit us (...) to break through the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships we can manage in the conventional face-to-face world. We used network analysis to test this hypothesis with data from 12 hyperlink films, using 10 motion pictures from a more conventional film genre as a control. We found few differences between hyperlink cinema films and the control genre, and few differences between hyperlink cinema films and either the real world or classical drama (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays). Conversation group size seems to be especially resilient to alteration. It seems that, despite many efficiency advantages, modern media are unable to circumvent the constraints imposed by our evolved psychology. (shrink)

When doctors become aware of a threat to public health, they have a professional duty to try to mitigate the threat. Climate change is a recognized major threat to planetary and public health that...

America is driven by vengeance in Terry Aladjem's provocative account – a reactive, public anger that is a threat to democratic justice itself. From the return of the death penalty to the wars on terror and in Iraq, Americans demand retribution and moral certainty; they assert the 'rights of victims' and make pronouncements against 'evil'. Yet for Aladjem this dangerously authoritarian turn has its origins in the tradition of liberal justice itself – in theories of punishment that justify inflicting (...) pain and in the punitive practices that result. Exploring vengeance as the defining problem of our time, Aladjem returns to the theories of Locke, Hegel and Mill. He engages the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche, Paine and Foucault to challenge liberal assumptions about punishment. He interrogates American law, capital punishment and images of justice in the media. He envisions a democratic justice that is better able to contain its vengeance. (shrink)

Methodological triangulation is the use of more than one method to investigate a phenomenon. Nurse researchers investigate health phenomena using methods drawn from the natural and social sciences. The methodological debate concerns the possibility of confirming a single theory with different kinds of methods. The nursing debate parallels the philosophical debate about how the natural and social sciences are related. This article critiques the presuppositions of the nursing debate and suggests alternatives. The consequence is a view of triangulation that permits (...) different methods to confirm a single theory. The article then explores the consequences for the philosophy of social sciences. (shrink)

Unravels the many different definitions of ideology, explores the history of the concept from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and interprets the works of ...

Little is known about how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in lesser developed countries. In order to address this knowledge gap, we used Chile as a test case and conducted a series of in-depth interviews with leaders of CSR initiatives. We also did an Internet and literature search to help provide support for the findings that emerged from our data. We discovered that while there are similarities in the drivers of CSR in developed countries, there are distinct differences (...) as well. In particular, we found that different sectors drive CSR in Chile. In contrast to other geographies where consumer demand and government regulation provided the impetus for CSR efforts, multinational companies (MNCs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are key actors in Chile. MNCs imported their CSR beliefs, skills, and processes into Chile. Their efforts resulted in a virtuous cycle. Once large domestic firms felt pressured by their MNC rivals, they too adopted CSR initiatives. The ability to manage relationships with multiple stakeholders and perceptions of authenticity were also critical to the success of CSR in Chile. Using network theory as a lens, we suggest that network density and centrality largely determine whether CSR efforts will be authentic. Based on these contentions, we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)