Even lawyers who obey the law often seem to act unethically--interfering with the discovery of truth, subverting justice, and inflicting harm on innocent people. Standard arguments within legal ethics attempt to show why it is permissible to do something as a lawyer that it would be wrong to do as an ordinary person. But in the view of most critics these arguments fail to turn wrongs into rights. Even many lawyers think legal ethics is flawed because it does not accurately (...) describe the considerable moral value of their work. In Lawyers and Fidelity to Law, Bradley Wendel introduces a new conception of legal ethics that addresses the concerns of lawyers and their critics alike.Wendel proposes an ethics grounded on the political value of law as a collective achievement that settles intractable conflicts, allowing people who disagree profoundly to live together in a peaceful, stable society. Lawyers must be loyal and competent client representatives, Wendel argues, but these obligations must always be exercised within the law that constitutes their own roles and confers rights and duties upon their clients. Lawyers act unethically when they treat the law as an inconvenient obstacle to be worked around and when they twist and distort it to help their clients do what they are not legally entitled to do. Lawyers and Fidelity to Law challenges lawyers and their critics to reconsider the nature and value of ethical representation. (shrink)

Even lawyers who obey the law often seem to act unethically--interfering with the discovery of truth, subverting justice, and inflicting harm on innocent people. Standard arguments within legal ethics attempt to show why it is permissible to do something as a lawyer that it would be wrong to do as an ordinary person. But in the view of most critics these arguments fail to turn wrongs into rights. Even many lawyers think legal ethics is flawed because it does not accurately (...) describe the considerable moral value of their work. In Lawyers and Fidelity to Law, Bradley Wendel introduces a new conception of legal ethics that addresses the concerns of lawyers and their critics alike.Wendel proposes an ethics grounded on the political value of law as a collective achievement that settles intractable conflicts, allowing people who disagree profoundly to live together in a peaceful, stable society. Lawyers must be loyal and competent client representatives, Wendel argues, but these obligations must always be exercised within the law that constitutes their own roles and confers rights and duties upon their clients. Lawyers act unethically when they treat the law as an inconvenient obstacle to be worked around and when they twist and distort it to help their clients do what they are not legally entitled to do. Lawyers and Fidelity to Law challenges lawyers and their critics to reconsider the nature and value of ethical representation. (shrink)

Can someone be a good person yet act in a professional role that may involve deception, procedural trickery, withholding information, and working on behalf of terrible people and institutions? This question is at the heart of legal ethics. Using cases from around the common-law world, W. Bradley Wendel looks at issues including confidentiality, the moral responsibility of lawyers, and truth and deception in advocacy. He then examines the classic questions of philosophy of law, including the nature of law, (...) positivism, natural law, the relationship between law and morality, unjust legal systems, and the obligation to obey the law. Finally, he considers the ethical issues surrounding the role of lawyers, including criminal defense and prosecution, civil litigation, counseling clients on the law, and representing corporations. Combining the theoretical, philosophical, and practical, his book will be of vital interest to students of law, the philosophy of law, ethics, and political philosophy. (shrink)

The hypothetical social contract between a profession and society exchanges the privilege of self-regulation for the profession's promise to regulate itself in the public interest. When it no longer appears that the profession is exercising its privilege responsibility, there will be pressure to reform the regulation of the market for legal services, for example by allowing non-lawyers to provide legal services, or permitting lawyers to practice in partnerships with non-lawyers. So far the American profession has been relatively successful at resisting (...) reform, and the American Bar Association's Ethics 20/20 Commission wrapped up its business by proposing only a few minor, technical changes to the rules of professional conduct. One way the profession has fended off attempts to enact more comprehensive reforms is by appealing to professional core values. This article presents several claims about professional core values and reform of professional regulation. First, the American profession has not been particularly rigorous in defining a set of core values that appeal to the interests of clients or the public interest and are not merely a rearguard attempt by the profession to protect its monopoly. Second, and related, professional core values are plural in nature and vary in application considerably according to the context. Third, there is no reason that reforms cannot be considered that better serve interests such as access to justice while also respecting core values. Fourth, regulatory form is rather far down the list of threats to professional core values, after forces such as the increasing power of in-house counsel. The conclusion is not that there is no such thing as core values, but that if the profession continues to appeal to them as a rhetorical makeweight, it may find itself overwhelmed by pressures for reform. (shrink)

Professional roles are often thought to bring role-specific permissions and obligation, which may allow or require role-occupants to do things they would not be permitted or required to do outside their roles, and which as individuals they would rather not do. This feature of professional roles appears to bring them into conflict both with 'ordinary' or non-role morality, and with personal integrity which is often thought to demand some form of personal endorsement of one's conduct. How are we to reconcile (...) the demands of roles with ordinary morality and with personal integrity? This collection draws together a set of papers which explore these questions as they bear upon a number of different professional roles, including those of the lawyer, the judge and the politician, and from a variety of perspectives, including contemporary analytic moral theory, jurisprudence, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and contextualism, and, more broadly, from philosophy and legal academia and practice. (shrink)

The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in (...) the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, virtue ethics, or fiduciary theory. (shrink)

The discipline of mathematics has not been spared the sweeping critique of postmodernism. Is mathematical theory true for all time, or are mathematical constructs in fact fallible? This fascinating book examines the tensions that have arisen between modern and postmodern views of mathematics, explores alternative theories of mathematical truth, explains why the issues are important, and shows how a Christian perspective makes a difference. Contributors: W. James Bradley William Dembski Russell W. Howell Calvin Jongsma David Klanderman Christopher Menzel Glen (...) VanBrummelen Scott VanderStoep Michael Veatch Paul Zwier. (shrink)

Compiling empirical work from management and social science disciplines, the Research Companion to Ethical Behavior in Organizations provides an entry point for academic researchers and compliance officers interested in measuring the moral dimensions of individuals. Accessible to newcomers but geared toward academics, this detailed book catalogs the varied and nuanced constructs used in behavioral ethics, along with measures that assess those constructs. With its cross-disciplinary focus and expert commentary, a varied collection of learned scholars bring essential studies into one volume, (...) creating a resource that promises to enhance the burgeoning field of behavioral ethics"--Publisher's web site. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are widespread ways by which people make sense of unsettling or disturbing cultural events. Belief in CTs is often connected to problematic consequences, such as decreased engagement with conventional political action or even political extremism, so understanding the psychological and social qualities of CTs belief is important. CTs have often been understood to be “monological”, displaying the tendency for belief in one conspiracy theory to be correlated with belief in (many) others. Explanations of monologicality invoke a nomothetical (...) or “closed” mindset whereby mutually supporting beliefs based on mistrust of official explanations are used to interpret public events as conspiracies, independent of the facts about those events (which they may ignore or deny). But research on monologicality offers little discussion of the content of monological beliefs and reasoning from the standpoint of the CT believers. This is due in part to the “access problem” (Wood & Douglas, 2015): CT believers are averse to being researched because they often distrust researchers and what they appear to represent. We used several strategies to address the access problem, and investigated the symbolic resources underlying CTs by reconstructing a conspiracy worldview - a set of beliefs held by CT believers about important dimensions of ontology, epistemology, and human agency. To do this, we analysed media documents, conducted field observation, and engaged in semi-structured interviews,. We describe six main dimensions of a conspiracy worldview: Views of the nature of reality, the self, the outgroup, the ingroup, action, and the future. We also describe a typology of five types of CT believers, which vary according to their positions on each of these dimensions. Our findings converge with prior explorations of CT beliefs but also revealed novel aspects: A sense of community among CT believers, a highly differentiated representation of the outgroup, a personal journey of conversion, variegated kinds of political action, and optimistic belief in future change. These findings are at odds with the typical image of monological CT believers as paranoid, cynical, anomic and irrational. For many, the CT worldview may rather constitute the ideological underpinning of a nascent pre-figurative social movement. (shrink)

We investigate the dynamics of sensory integration for perceiving musical performance, a complex natural behavior. Thirty musically trained participants saw, heard, or both saw and heard, performances by two clarinetists. All participants used a sliding potentiometer to make continuous judgments of tension (a measure correlated with emotional response) and continuous judgments of phrasing (a measure correlated with perceived musical structure) as performances were presented. The data analysis sought to reveal relations between the sensory modalities (vision and audition) and to quantify (...) the effect of seeing the performances on participants' overall subjective experience of the music. In addition to traditional statistics, functional data analysis techniques were employed to analyze time-varying aspects of the data. The auditory and visual channels were found to convey similar experiences of phrasing but different experiences of tension through much of the performances. We found that visual information served both to augment and to reduce the experience of tension at different points in the musical piece (as revealed by functional linear modeling and functional significance testing). In addition, the musicians' movements served to extend the sense of phrasing, to cue the beginning of new phrases, to indicate musical interpretation, and to anticipate changes in emotional content. Evidence for an interaction effect suggests that there may exist an emergent quality when musical performances are both seen and heard. The investigation augments knowledge of human communicative processes spanning language and music, and involving multiple modalities of emotion and information transfer. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page W15-W16.

Historians of the eugenics movement have long been ambivalent in their examination of the links between British hereditary researchers and Nazi Germany. While there is now a clear consensus that American eugenics provided significant material and ideological support for the Germans, the evidence remains less clear in the British case where comparatively few figures openly supported the Nazi regime and the left-wing critique of eugenics remained particularly strong. After the Second World War British eugenicists had to push back against the (...) accusation that their science was intrinsically dictatorial or totalitarian and, as a result, many of their early perceptions of the Nazis were ignored or rationalised away. Further, historians in recent years have focused more directly on the social reformist elements of eugenics, discussing the links between hereditary science and the birth control and feminist movements in addition to others. While undoubtedly making valuable contributions to the scholarly understanding of the eugenic milieu in the interwar years, these studies have neglected to recontextualize the sentiments of British eugenicists who did indeed view the Nazi government positively in the early years of the 1930s. This article argues that there was a significant, though not numerically sizable, faction in the British eugenics movement, though mostly outside the Eugenics Society itself, in the early 1930s that viewed the Nazi Germany as an admirable state for its implementation of eugenic principles. One of these figures was later interned by his own government for being too closely aligned with the German regime, though he argued that this affinity was driven by the quest for scientific truth rather than politics. Eugenics in Britain thus contained a greater diversity of views toward Germany than scholars have previously assumed, warranting more research into the individuals and organizations harbouring these views. (shrink)

John Maynard Keynes was the most important economist of the twentieth century. He was also a philosopher who wrote on ethics and the theory of probability and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. In this volume contributors from a wide range of disciplines offer new interpretations of Keynes's thought, explain the links between Keynes's philosophy and his economics, and place his work and Keynesianism - the economic theory, the principles of economic policy, and the (...) political philosophy - in their historical context. Chapter topics include Keynes's philosophical engagement with G. E. Moore and Franz Brentano, his correspondence, the role of his General Theory in the creation of modern macroeconomics, and the many meanings of Keynesianism. New readers will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Keynes currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Keynes. (shrink)

Glial cells play a central role in the development and function of complex nervous systems. Drosophila is an excellent model organism for the study of mechanisms underlying neural development, and recent attention has been focused on the differentiation and function of glial cells. We now have a nearly complete description of glial cell organization in the embryo, which enables a systematic genetic analysis of glial cell development. Most glia arise from neural stem cells that originate in the neurogenic ectoderm. The (...) bifurcation of glial and neuronal fates is under the control of the glial promoting factor glial cells missing. Differentiation is propagated through the regulation of several transcription factors. Genes have been discovered affecting the terminal differentiation of glia, including the promotion glial–neuronal interactions and the formation of the blood–nerve barrier. Other roles of glia are being explored, including their requirement for axon guidance, neuronal survival, and signaling. BioEssays 23:877–887, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)