Motivated by the call for more research on students’ perceptions of their ethical development in business education programs, this study examines students’ reflections on how their understanding of ethics was challenged and/or changed, and what facilitated the development of ethical decision-making approaches in a first-year accounting course. The results indicate that students developed more sophisticated and contextualised views of ethical issues in business, government and social contexts including the need to consider their impact on various stakeholders. Students attributed this development (...) to the various elements in the integrated course design including the real cases sourced in current newspaper articles, an ethical decision-making framework with various ethical perspectives, the reflective journal component and the ability to work in groups. These findings have implications for the design of effective ethics education programs in business. (shrink)

Access to medicines faces a new legal threat: “border enforcement” of drug patents. Using Brazil as an example, this article shows how the right to health depends on international trade. Border seizures of generic drugs present human rights and trade institutions with a unique challenge. Can public health advocates rise to meet it?

Most new drugs are protected by pharmaceutical patents, which give the patent holder exclusive control over that drug’s supply for 20 years. When the patent term expires, the drug becomes available for generic production by any company. The resulting competition typically leads to dramatic reductions in price. In Brazil, generic drugs are on average 40% cheaper than reference or brand-name drugs. In the United States, the Federal Drug Administration reports up to 85% price differences. Consumers in India have witnessed more (...) than 100-fold price reduction for antiretroviral drugs due to generic production. Generics thus play a key role in broadening access to health care, mostly by driving costs down, both in the developing and developed world. (shrink)

This research is motivated by the criticism levelled at the academic community for its failure to incorporate sufficient ethics education into the accounting curriculum :53–71, 2004; Madison and Schmidt 2006). The inclusion of ethics decision-making frameworks by professional bodies in their codes of conduct or as a standalone tool and the encouragement of their use as a part of ethics education to help students to identify and think through ethical issues in a business context has been subject to very limited (...) research to date. The aim of this study is to provide evidence of the impact of providing a framework on its own and providing a framework as part of a comprehensive integrated ethics education component of a first-year unit of study, on accounting students’ ethical sensitivity and judgment. Results indicate that providing students with a framework only does not increase students’ ethical sensitivity but does support their ethical judgment. In contrast, the integrated ethics component does increase student’s ethical sensitivity, however, an unexpected finding of this study is that increases in students’ ethical judgement are greater if they have not been previously exposed to the framework. Taken together, our findings suggest that it is the framework that has a significant impact on students’ ethical judgment, while an integrated ethics education can expose students to a range of ethical issues and thereby improve their ethical sensitivity, a critical component which initiates the ethical decision-making process. (shrink)

Ofsted requires UK schools to help students understand the working world and gain employability skills. However, the aims of education are much broader: Education should enable flourishing long after leaving school. Therefore, students’ career decisions should be conducive to long-term flourishing beyond career readiness and educational attainment. In this mixed-methods study, we asked a representative sample of UK adults to reflect on their career decision-making processes at school and at university. We also measured current levels of self-reported objective (e.g., financial (...) security) and subjective (e.g., subjective well-being) flourishing. The open-ended career decision reflections were coded for three moral reasoning strategies: virtue ethical, consequentialist, and deontological. Using correlations and structural equation modelling, we examined the association between the propensity for using each moral reasoning strategy in past career decisions and current flourishing. Virtue ethical moral reasoning in relation to career decision-making predicted aspects of flourishing most strongly and frequently. Consequentialist reasoning weakly and infrequently positively predicted aspects of flourishing. Deontological reasoning either did not predict flourishing at all, or negatively predicted flourishing. Our results suggest that the reasoning strategy behind career decisions people take in school or university is important to consider in UK careers provision, and current best practice. (shrink)

SummaryPostponing the start of childbearing raises the question of fertility postponed versus fertility foregone. One of the limitations of previous studies of ‘How late can you wait?’ is that any observed decline in the probability of conception with age could be due to a decline in fecundability with age or due to a decline in coital frequency with age or due to both factors. Using data from a multinational longitudinal study conducted to determine the daily probability of conception among healthy (...) subjects, a discrete-time event history model with long-term survivors is used to study the relationship between age and fecundability for childless women, while controlling for the pattern of intercourse within a menstrual cycle. The findings suggest that women can wait until their early thirties to try for a first birth, providing that they are not already sterile, as the magnitude of the decline in fecundability is very modest and of little practical importance. (shrink)

The purpose of this descriptive and exploratory study was to measure the perceptions regarding a variety of science, technology, and society (STS) topics among a sample of Uruguay underclassmen college students. These perceptions were compared with the viewpoints of a group of professional scientists. It was found that, for some STS topics, such as the role of humans in global climate change, the perceptions of Uruguay underclassmen and scientists were statistically identical. For topics, such as the problem of human overpopulation, (...) both groups find themselves on the same side of the issue but with a statistically significant gap between them. Uruguay underclassmen and professional scientists have opposite views on STS topics such as the use of animals for scientific research. A sizable proportion of Uruguay underclassmen were not familiar with several STS topics, such as the scientific work of the International Space Station. Implications for formal and informal STEM education efforts are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines interpersonally sensitive exchanges in two calls for information to the call centre of a public transport company. In order to provide relevant information and facilitate sequence progressivity, the agents need to go through specific steps. Although this is typical of institutional settings, customers may not necessarily be aware of them. The excerpts examined in this paper show how the customers’ lack of knowledge of the institutional steps the agents have to go through to attend to their requests (...) and customers’ claims to product knowledge, coupled with the agents’ labour intensive work at the call centre, provide fertile ground for the agents’ verbal outbursts which are oriented to as interpersonally sensitive by the customers in so far as they are interpreted as inappropriate and potentially impolite. The analysis draws on the notion of face and incorporates a variety of concepts from pragmatics and Conversation Analysis. (shrink)

This paper analyses video recorded interactions between police officers and drivers in traffic stops in Russia. The interactions were recorded via cameras installed on the drivers’ car dashboards, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube; a practice to which over one million Russian motorists have resorted to counterbalance perceived high levels of bribery and corruption. The analysis focuses on responses to opening requests for identification in five different encounters. These show that the drivers repeatedly engage in potentially interpersonally sensitive activities in which (...) the vulnerability of face, especially that of the police officer, is interactionally manifested by launching counter requests in return. The organisation of the request–counter request sequences highlights how face and identity related concerns are interwoven in the participants’ attempts to contest each other’s authority. (shrink)

This paper explores how understandings of sociality influence the way members of two different social groups discursively animate moral conflicts. It examines how moral conflicts are constructed in life-story interviews by Chinese and Latin American migrants as they reflect on patterns of sociation with co-ethnics in London. These interviews typify the kind of conflicts that emerged across a 102 interview database where a discrepancy between expectations of how contextually-situated interpersonal relations are established and how they should unfold are. The transnational (...) setting that we focus on inevitably draws our attention to the importance of the larger relational context where interpersonal relations among migrant co-ethnics are entrenched. In this context, rights and obligations towards one another are often reconfigured to adapt to the circumstances of the new environment. This paper turns the pragmatic lens on transcultural relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bridge From Analysis to Action:Psychodynamic Analyses of Religion and Michael S. Hogue's American ImmanenceAJ Turner (bio)I. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to work constructively with Michael S. Hogue's groundbreaking American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World to demonstrate how psychodynamic analyses of religion are essential theoretical allies in the fight for resilient democracy. The "revolution in mind"1 that psychodynamic approaches contribute, especially in their analyses of religion, (...) both complements and complicates socio-political theory as a whole. In the improvisational spirit of "yes-and," the goal here is not to identify and decry the failures and shortcomings of Hogue's theopolitical vision but rather to inspire the recovery of a sibling discourse—a kind of "rebirth of a forgotten alternative"2—that also draws deeply from the American immanental tradition in order to add psychodynamic depth to Hogue's timely and important analysis. Psychodynamic theories of religion shed light on how symbolic identifications, including and especially ultimate concerns, structure personal and collective experience. By engaging religion and theology sympathetically, constructively, and creatively, theorists such as Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Ernest Becker departed from the skepticism, reductionism, and dismissal that characterized psychoanalytic analyses of religion in the wake of Freud.3 Each of these figures, and especially Becker whose work will be a focus in this essay, are noteworthy interlocutors for extending Hogue's theopolitical theorizing of resilient democracy, particularly in how they drew unique inspiration from the American immanental tradition [End Page 44] in their social analyses. In this respect, they provide a more robust theorization of the psychosocial conditions of the associational ethos needed to connect Hogue's conception of resilient democracy with forms of agonistic organization and democratic activism. Briefly stated, psychodynamic approaches are a helpful bridge for connecting these proposals to strategies of organization, their impediments, and collective action.In this way, both psychodynamic analyses of religion and Hogue's theopolitical innovation insist that no revolutionary political change is possible, and certainly not of the kind or scale needed to counter our wickedly entangled global crises, without a deep engagement with theological imaginaries. They differ, however, in their theoretical aims. Whereas Hogue compellingly argues for the political upshot of a theology deriving from the American immanental tradition, psychodynamic analysts of religion focus on the function of ultimate concerns in individual and collective life. In other words, American Immanence rests on a methodology of analyzing the philosophical and theological assumptions that have contributed to our climate crises and then presenting clear and compelling articulation of an alternative paradigm meant to open up new ways of being. In contrast psychodynamic analyses leverage conceptual clarity of psychic reality for the fundamentally therapeutic aim of transformation. At their best, both approaches share what could be called an etiological orientation to ontological questions in order to provide liberative alternatives through rational understanding and clarification, but the terrain, and thus the problems they hope to mitigate in their analyses are focused differently. Extending the visual metaphor, they are different lenses highlighting different areas of the same landscape. Furthermore, it must be said that neither are sufficient in themselves, but the psychodynamic theorists of religion to be highlighted in this essay share deeply with Hogue's heading in American Immanence.II. A Problematic AssumptionIn emphasizing and attempting to explain4 the role of non-rational processes in the both individual and social processes of perception and organization of experience, psychodynamic theories confound a widely held and problematic assumption that the triumph of rational analysis is the hallmark for building the society to which we should aspire. Political theory in general, [End Page 45] especially as it has taken its cues from a rationalist legacy about the inherently liberating force of Reason, has been weighted toward an assumption that its task of exposing the mystifications of power would suffice in inspiring more "rational" and therefore necessarily equitable social organization. This speaks to the longstanding socio-political interest in "consciousness raising" tactics, which are often meant to dispel "false consciousness." It even comes across in the emphases of Deweyan pragmatists on education. Psychologists of all stripes point out that this approach... (shrink)

A. W. Price explores the varying ways in which context is relevant to our reasoning about what to do.

Publicación compilatoria que recoge los avances que en los últimos tiempos se han producido en materia normativa sobre acceso a los recursos genéticos, en un intento por implementar los principios del Convenio sobre la Diversidad Biológica (1992).

For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence for Christian (...) beliefs. (shrink)

The Human A Priori is a collection of essays by A. W. Moore, one of them previously unpublished and the rest all revised. These essays are all concerned, more or less directly, with something ineliminably anthropocentric in our systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making. Part I deals with the nature, scope, and limits of a priori sense-making in general. Parts II, III, and IV deal with what are often thought to be the three great exemplars of the systematic pursuit of (...) such sense-making: philosophy in the case of Part II, ethics in the case of Part III, and mathematics in the case of Part IV. Much of the attention throughout is devoted to the work of other philosophers: Kant and Wittgenstein feature prominently, and five of the essays take the form of reviews or critical notices of recent work in philosophy. But the interest in never purely exegetical. One of the lessons that emerges from the essays, either in opposition to the views of these other philosophers or by invocation of their views, is that we humans achieve nothing of real significance in philosophy, ethics, or mathematics except from a human point of view, and hence that all three of these pursuits can be said to betoken what may reasonably be called 'the human a priori'. (shrink)

The philosophy of Epictetus, a freed slave in the Roman Empire, has been profoundly influential on Western thought: it offers not only stimulating ideas but practical guidance in living one's life. A. A. Long, a leading scholar of later ancient philosophy, gives the definitive presentation of the thought of Epictetus for a broad readership. Long's fresh and vivid translations of a selection of the best of Epictetus' discourses show that his ideas are as valuable and striking today as they were (...) amost two thousand years ago. This is a book for anyone interested in what we can learn from ancient philosophy about how to live our lives. (shrink)