The purpose of this study is twofold. The first objective is to examine the impact of an individual’s ethical ideology and level of professional commitment on the earnings management decision. The second objective is to observe whether the presence of a personal benefit affects an individual’s ethical orientation or professional commitment within the context of an opportunity to manage earnings. Using a sample of 375 undergraduate business majors, our results suggest a significant relationship between an individual’s ethical orientation and decision-making. (...) Further, participants with higher levels of professional commitment seem to be less likely to engage in earnings management behavior and less likely to behave opportunistically. These results have the potential to add to our understanding of certain behaviors in entry-level personnel and should be of interest to managers, practitioners, academicians, and researchers. (shrink)

In this response to the critiques of Fontaine and Hughes and Evans, we touch on main points of consensus and contention, and offer some suggestions for future programs of research.

:In a recent paper in Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics on the necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research David DeGrazia and Jeff Sebo claim that the key requirements for morally responsible animal research are an assertion of sufficient net benefit, a worthwhile-life condition, and a no-unnecessary-harm condition. With regards to the assertion of sufficient net benefit, the authors claim that morally responsible research offers unique benefits to humans that outweigh the costs and harms to humans and animals. In this (...) commentary we will raise epistemic, practical, and ethical challenges to DeGrazia and Sebo’s emphasis on benefits in the prospective assessment of research studies involving animals. We do not disagree with DeGrazia and Sebo that, at the theoretical level, the benefits of research justify our using animals. Our contribution intends to clarify, at the practical level, how we should understand benefits in the prospective assessment and moral justification of animal research. We argue that ASNB should be understood as an assessment of Expectation of Knowledge Production in the prospective assessment and justification of animal research. EKP breaks down into two further claims: that morally responsible research generates knowledge worth having and that morally responsible research is designed and executed to produce generalizable knowledge. We understand the condition called knowledge worth having as scientists’ testing a hypothesis that, whether verified or falsified, advances an important interest, and production of generalizable knowledge in terms of scientific integrity. Generalizable knowledge refers to experimental results that generalize to a larger population beyond the animals studied. Generalizable scientific knowledge is reliable, replicable, and accurately descriptive. In sum, morally responsible research will be designed and carefully executed to successfully test a hypothesis that, whether verified or falsified, advances important interests. Our formulation of EKP, crucially, does not require further showing that an experiment involving animals will produce societal benefits. (shrink)

The Hague Conference on Private International Law currently has a Parentage/Surrogacy Project, which evaluates the legal status of children in cross-border situations, including situations involving international contract pregnancy. Should a convention focusing on international contract pregnancy emerge from this project, it will need to be consistent with the Hague convention on Intercountry Adoption. The latter convention prohibits adoptions unless, among other things, ‘the competent authorities of the receiving State have determined that the prospective adoptive parents are eligible and suited to (...) adopt’. Included in it, therefore, is a parental vetting or licensing requirement. In our view, a similar requirement must also appear in any Hague Convention on international contract pregnancy if the two conventions are to be ethically consistent with one another. In particular, there should be a licensing requirement in such a convention for at least some of the prospective parents in contract pregnancy arrangements. We consider several arguments against this conclusion, and argue that none of them is successful. (shrink)

Through close readings of Frost's poetry and often ignored prose, Mark Richardson argues that Frost's debates with Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, and H. L. Mencken informed his poetics and his poetic style just as much as did his deep identification with earlier writers like Emerson and William James.

An overview of the philosophical and bioethics literature on conscientious refusals by health care professionals to provide abortion and contraceptive services.

The term "false memories" has been used to refer to suggestibility experiments in which whole events are apparently confabulated and in media accounts of contested memories of childhood abuse. Since 1992 psychologists have increasingly used the term "false memory" when discussing memory errors for details, such as specific words within word lists. Use of the term to refer to errors in details is a shift in language away from other terms used historically (e.g., "memory intrusions"). We empirically examine this shift (...) in language and discuss implications of the new use of the term "false memories." Use of the term presents serious ethical challenges to the data-interpretation process by encouraging over-generalization and misapplication of research findings on word memory to social issues. (shrink)

— We prescnt here a comparative study on the decay of chlorophyll a fluorescence yield in thylakoid membranes and photosystem 11 ‐enriched samples, measured with multifrequency cross‐correlation phase fluorometry. These measurements confirm the general conclusions of Van Mieghem ef al., obtained with a flash method, on the effects of reduction of the primary quinone acceptor on ChI a fluorescence yield of PSI. Different states of the reaction centers of PSII were produced by: pretreatment with sodium dithionite and mcthyl viologen followed (...) by laser illumination: the doubly reduced QA centers: with laser illumination or pretreatment with diuron: QA‐ centers; and the addition of micromolar concentration of dichlorobenzoquinonc : oxidized QA centers. The data were analyzed with Lorentzian distribution as well as with multiexponential fluorescence decay functions. The analysis with Lorcntzian distribution function showed that upon formation of QA. the major lifetime distribution peak shifted to longer lifetimes: from 0.25 ns to 1.66 ns and from 0.24 ns to 1.31 ns. However, when QAHZ was formed, the lifetime distribution peaks shifted back to shorter lifetimes both in thylakoids and PSIl membranes. Multiexponential analysis showed three lifetime components: fast, middle and slow. When QA was formed in PS11 centers, the amplitude of the fast Component decreased, but both thc amplitude and the lifetime of the middle component increased severalfold. However, when QA was doubly reduccd, the amplitude of the fast component increased and the amplitude of the middle component decreased: in addition, the lifetime of the slow component increased. All of the above results are consistent with the conclusions that PS11 charge separation is decreased when QA is formed and increased when doubly reduced QA is formed. Copyright © 1993, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) writings, both in public magazines and in her important books, are still widely studied today. She made original contributions in political thinking that still astound readers and critics alike. The subject of several films and numerous books, colloquia, and newspaper articles, Arendt remains a touchstone in innumerable debates about the use of violence in politics, the responsibility one has under dictatorships and totalitarianism, and how to combat the repetition of the horrors of the past. The Bloomsbury Companion (...) to Arendt offers the definitive guide to her writings and ideas, her influences and commentators, as well as the reasons for her lasting significance, with 66 original essays taking up in accessible terms the myriad ways in which one can take up her work and her continuing importance. These essays, written by an international set of her best readers and commentators, provides a comprehensive coverage of her life and the contexts in which her works were written. Special sections take up chapters on each of her key writings, the reception of her work, and key ways she interpreted those who influenced her. If one has come to Arendt from one of her essays on freedom, or from yet another bombastic account of her writings on Adolph Eichmann, or as as student or professor working in the field of Arendt studies, this book provides the ideal tool for thinking with and rediscovering one of the most important intellectuals of the past century. But just as importantly, contributors advance the study of Arendt into neglected areas, such as on science and ecology, to demonstrate her importance not just to debates in which she was well known, but those touched off only after her death. Arendt's approaches as well as her concrete claims about the political have much to offer given the current ecological and refugee crises, among others. In sum, then, the Companion provides a tool for thinking with Arendt, but also for showing just where those thinking with her can take her work today. (shrink)

In this adventurous contribution to the project of combining philosophy and biology to understand the mind, Carolyn Price investigates what it means to say that mental states--like thoughts, wishes, and perceptual experiences--are about things in the natural world. Her insight into this deep philosophical problem offers a novel teleological account of intentional content, grounded in and shaped by a carefully constructed theory of functions. Along the way she defends her view from recent objections to teleological theories and indicates how (...) it might be applied to notable problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

(2006). A ‘Retro‐version’ of Power: Agamben via Foucault on Sovereignty. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 445-459.

Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment ofmoral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences (...) were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged. (shrink)