This paper reports on an investigation of issues surrounding the use of ethical codes/codes of conduct in Irish based companies. Using a comprehensive questionnaire survey, the paper examines the incidence, content and enforcement of codes of conduct among a sample of the top 1000 companies based in Ireland. The main findings indicate that the overall usage of codes of conduct amongst indigenous Irish companies has increased significantly from 1995 to 2000. However, in line with prior research, these codes focus primarily (...) on issues surrounding company and employee protection as opposed to society protection. Almost half of all codes are written by company personnel or provided by head office. Revisions of codes are common but formal ongoing methods of instructing new staff about codes are not prevalent. Less than one-third of companies with codes have formal channels for reporting violations but a high percentage have formal disciplinary procedures in place for breaches of codes. (shrink)

In 'Law as a Leap of Faith' Gardner's analogy of faith in law to faith in God may seem outlandish. But consider the implications of the positions Gardner's jurisprudential views assemble: law can give us reason to do what we would otherwise not have reason to do - in fact it can give us reason to do what would otherwise be immoral. This is the implication of a commitment to law's capacity to give exclusive reasons, on one hand, together with (...) the commitment, on the other, that any given law is valid because of its sources and not its moral merits. (shrink)

Four predictors were posited to affect business student attitudes about the social responsibilities of business, also known as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Applying Forsyth's (1980, "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" 39, 175–184, 1992, "Journal of Business Ethics" 11, 461–470) personal moral philosophy model, we found that ethical idealism had a positive relationship with CSR attitudes, and ethical relativism a negative relationship. We also found materialism to be negatively related to CSR attitudes. Spirituality among business students did not significantly predict (...) CSR attitudes. Understanding the relationship between CSR attitudes and the significant predictors has important implications for researchers and teachers in particular. (shrink)

Drawing on an analysis of complaint files that we conducted for the Irish Medical Council, this paper offers three possible explanations for the gap between the ubiquity of official commitments to taking patients’ complaints seriously and medical professional regulators’ dismissal—as not warranting an inquiry—of the vast majority of complaints submitted by members of the public. One explanation points to the “regulatory illiteracy” of many complainants, where the remit and threshold of seriousness of regulators is poorly understood by the general public. (...) Another points to possible processes of “institutional epistemic injustice” that unjustly undermine the credibility of certain complainants, such as those with low levels of formal education. A third explanation highlights the marginalization of the general public from “symbolic power” to define what matters in medical professional regulation. The paper is offered in a spirit of ideas in progress and raising questions rather than definitive insights into the regulatory process. (shrink)

Both advocates and opponents of the animalist view that we are fundamentally biological organisms have typically assumed that animalism is incompatible with intuitive verdicts about cerebrum isolation and transplantation. It is argued here that this assumption is a mistake. Animalism, developed in a natural way, in fact strongly supports these intuitive verdicts. The availability of this attractive resolution of a central puzzle in the personal identity debate has been obscured by a range of factors, including the prevalence in contemporary metaphysics (...) of a certain conception of the nature of organisms. I end by explaining how the animalist can use intuitive verdicts, usually thought to present a difficulty for the view, as positive evidence for claims about the persistence conditions of the relevant kind of organism. (shrink)

Rankings of politicalparties are often used to map the multiple party preference of the electorate. This article shows how the obtained rankings may be analysed by means of the exploded logit-technique, which allows for testing both the difference between the rankings and the effect of either categorical or quantitative independent variables on the rankings. An analysis of the effect of age on the party preference rankings of the christian democratie electorate in the 1991 Belgian parliamentary election shows that the older (...) CVP-voters tend to rank the liberal and the socialist party equally, white the younger voters hesitate between the liberal and the green party. The younger CVP-voters are also significantly less averse of the far-right Vlaams Blok. (shrink)

This article sets out a framework for distinguishing three kinds of norms governing past sexual (mis)conduct and our responses to it: wrongfulness norms, excusability norms, and accountability norms. The framework provides conceptual tools for making sense of (and understanding the limits of) three distinct responses commonly offered by those accused of past sexual misconduct: “But that used to be okay!” “But everybody used to think that was okay!” and “But that was so long ago!”.