This best-selling anthology of readings with case studies provides insightful and comprehensive treatment of ethical issues in medicine. Appropriate for courses taught in philosophy departments, bioethics programs, as well as schools of medicine and nursing, the collection covers such provocative topics as biomedical enhancement, clinical trials in developing countries, animal research, physician-assisted suicide, and health care reform. The text's effective pedagogical features include chapter introductions, argument sketches, explanations of medical terms, headnotes, and annotated bibliographies.

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique (...) effects, controlling for other variables. (shrink)

This study investigates the differences in individuals'' ethical decision making between Canadian university business students and accounting professionals. We examine the differences in three measures known to be important in the ethical decision-making process: ethical awareness, ethical orientation, and intention to perform questionable acts. We tested for differences in these three measures in eight different questionable actions among three groups: students starting business studies, those in their final year of university, and professional accountants.The measures of awareness capture the extent to (...) which respondents felt that a particular action was unethical according to each of several ethical criteria. We found few differences between the two student groups on these measures, suggesting that their education had minimal effect on raising their awareness of the ethical issues in the vignettes. Indeed, overall, the graduating student''s scores were marginally lower than those of the entry-level students. However, the professionals viewed some actions as significantly less ethical than did the graduating students. (shrink)

Stawarczyk, Bezdek, and Zacks offer neuroscience evidence for a midline default network core, which appears to coordinate internal, top‐down mentation with externally‐triggered, bottom‐up attention in a push‐pull relationship. The network may enable the flexible pursuance of thoughts tuned into or detached from the current environment.

The use of remember–know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember–know and confidence judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study , but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments . Instead, high-confidence judgments were more likely (...) than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection , but still included recollection from the study context . Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details. (shrink)

We survey the development of “California Phenomenology”, both as a philosophical movement originating with Dagfinn Føllesdal’s formulation of a Fregean, analytic reading of Husserl in the late 1950s and 1960s, and as an evolving network of philosophers working throughout California, who have met under the auspices of several groups in a more or less continuous way since that time. We trace the history of these groups in detail, provide an overview of debates that occurred between “West Coast” approaches to Husserlian (...) phenomenology and other approaches, and survey the broad panorama of more recent work. (shrink)

Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990) proposed and refined a multidimensional ethics scale. This study replicates and extends their work by examining the generalizability of the scale beyond marketing to accounting, and to subjects from across the United States and other countries. Results indicate that, in general, the scale holds for this different sample and context. However, an additional utilitarian construct emerged in the current study as important for accounting academics in their ethical decision-making. We also found that when we refined (...) Reidenbach and Robin's measure of intention to make a particular choice, a social desirability bias or halo effect was identified. Methodological implications for business ethics research are also presented. (shrink)

As part of a larger study eliciting Canadian producer and non-producer views about animal welfare, open-ended, semi-structured interviews were used to explore opinions about animal welfare of 20 Canadian pig producers, most of whom were involved in confinement-based systems. With the exception of the one organic producer, who emphasized the importance of a “natural” life, participants attached overriding importance to biological health and functioning. They saw their efforts as providing pigs with dry, thermally regulated, indoor environments where animals received abundant (...) feed, careful monitoring and where prospective disease outbreaks could be minimized and controlled. Emphasis was also placed on low-stress handling and agreeable working conditions which were believed to promote good animal care. The fact that pigs tend to respond to such conditions with steady growth reinforced the belief that good welfare was provided. Participants supported the use of sow gestation stalls, but with some reservations, and expressed concern about welfare problems that could occur if sows were grouped. Invasive procedures (castration, tail-docking, teeth clipping) were recognized as painful but were accepted because they were seen as: (1) necessary for sales or management; (2) satisfactory trade-offs to prevent worse welfare problems such as injury or infection; or (3) sufficiently short-term to be relatively unimportant. Participants were adamantly opposed to animal neglect and some welcomed actions of animal protectionists that expose poor care. Producers also welcomed natural-science-based approaches to improving animal welfare. The findings contribute to a broader effort to identify overlapping values among different stakeholder groups as a basis for formulating mutually agreeable, farm animal care and handling polices. (shrink)

The overlap and differences between the parallel regulatory systems for research create ample room for confusion and missteps, as discussed by Barbara Bierer and Mark Barnes in their report in this supplement. In practice, beyond the inherent differences in the two systems of regulations themselves, there are many issues that further complicate the application of these regulations. These include the variation in size of the institutions receiving PHS funding, the increased prevalence of multisite research, the allocation of research conduct and (...) oversight to external organizations, and the variability in assignment of human subject protection roles between the IRB and the institution. (shrink)

Key ethical challenges for healthcare workers arising from the COVID-19 pandemic are identified: isolation and social distancing, duty of care and fair access to treatment. The paper argues for a relational approach to ethics which includes solidarity, relational autonomy, duty, equity, trust and reciprocity as core values. The needs of the poor and socially disadvantaged are highlighted. Relational autonomy and solidarity are explored in relation to isolation and social distancing. Reciprocity is discussed with reference to healthcare workers’ duty of care (...) and its limits. Priority setting and access to treatment raise ethical issues of utility and equity. Difficult ethical dilemmas around triage, do not resuscitate decisions, and withholding and withdrawing treatment are discussed in the light of recently published guidelines. The paper concludes with the hope for a wider discussion of relational ethics and a glimpse of a future after the pandemic has subsided. (shrink)

The article begins with a view of recent developments in the discipline of business law. A model useful in the study of business ethics is presented. Business ethics is the philosophical examination of the body of values and conceptions that influence business decision making as well as being pervasive components of the social environment in which businesses operate. Our model is a four-part framework for approaching business ethics which is sensitive to its implications for business law. The model's four parts (...) are: (1) ethical theory, (2) institutional frameworks, (3) organizational cultures, and (4) individual moral choice and responsibility. Topics, issues, and kinds of material appropriate for approaching each of these four are presented, and a list of scholarly articles, books, and court cases, is included as a source of additional classroom material. (shrink)

This paper provides a framework for the examination of cultural and socioeconomic factors that could impede the acceptance and implementation of a profession's international code of conduct. We apply it to the Guidelines on Ethics for Professional Accountants issued by the International Federation of Accountants (1990). To examine the cultural effects, we use Hofstede's (1980a) four work-related values: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity. The socioeconomic factors are the level of development of the profession and the availability of economic (...) resources. We evaluate the applicability and relevance of the accounting guideline, and discuss the implications for accounting and other professions. (shrink)

Digital Health Technologies (DHTs) are currently the subject of much debate both in terms of their technological frontiers as well as their ethical, legal and societal implications (ELSI). Regulation of such technologies as medical devices currently lacks behind their level of adoption. Digital Twins are the next evolution step of such DHTs and provide an opportunity to anticipate and act on ELSI before adoption again leaps before the necessary review. This paper introduces the concept and use cases of digital twins (...) in medicine, then frames the debate through the lens of related technologies, machine learning and personalized medicine, and maps ethical challenges stemming from those. Finally, we lay out how digital twins may change and challenge the future practice of medicine. (shrink)

Knobe relies on unhelpful analogies in stating his main thesis about the mind. It isn't clear what saying the mind works, or doesn't work, or means. We suggest he should say that some think that human cognition respects a ban on fallacies of relevance, where considerations actually irrelevant to truth are taken as evidence. His research shows that no such ban is respected.

This article places the concept of "right to know," which is normally associated with law, in a moral framework. It outlines multiple meanings of the concept, emphasizing the institutional nature of "right to know." Then the article imbeds this understanding in moral thinking, including a discussion of the moral elements of rights, and applies that understanding in specific journalistic situations.

A many-worlds interpretation is of quantum mechanics tells us that the linear equations of motion are the true and complete laws for the time-evolution of every physical system and that the usual quantum-mechanical states provide complete descriptions of all possible physical situations. Such an interpretation, however, denies the standard way of understanding quantum-mechanical states. When the pointer on a measuring device is in a superposition of pointing many different directions, for example, we are to understand this as many pointers, each (...) in a differentworld, each pointing in a different determinate direction. We ask here whether such talk makes any genuinely intelligible sense of the term world. We conclude that it does not. (shrink)

Adversariality in argumentation is typically theorized as inhering in, and applying to, the interactional roles of proponent and opponent that arguers occupy. This paper considers the kinds of adversariality located in the conversational roles arguers perform while arguing—specifically listening. It begins by contending that the maximally adversarial arguer is an arguer who refuses to listen to reason by refusing to listen to another’s reasons. It proceeds to consider a list of lousy listeners in order to illustrate the variety of ways (...) that the conversational role of listener can be performed adversarially. Because conversational roles, while not adversarial by nature, can be enacted adversarially, arguers are properly subject to praise and blame for their performances of these roles. Thus, the paper concludes, argumentation theory stands in need of an articulated normative vocabulary and theory to codify, apply, explain, and justify the norms of listening governing, guiding, and appraising arguers’ performances of listening in argumentation. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 5, Page 20-22, May 2012.

Here we identify approximately 40,000 healthy human volunteers who were intentionally exposed to infectious pathogens in clinical research studies dating from late World War II to the early 2000s. Microbial challenge experiments continue today under contemporary human subject research requirements. In fact, we estimated 4,000 additional volunteers who were experimentally infected between 2010 and the present day. We examine the risks and benefits of these experiments and present areas for improvement in protections of participants with respect to safety. These are (...) the absence of maximum limits to risk and the potential for institutional review boards to include questionable benefits to subjects and society when weighing the risks and benefits of research protocols. The lack of a duty of medical care by physician–investigators to research subjects is likewise of concern. The transparency of microbial challenge experiments and the safety concerns raised in this work may stimulate further dialogue on the risks to participants of human experimentation. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a dramatically expanding area of activity for managers and academics. Consumer demand for responsibly produced and fair trade goods is swelling, resulting in increased demands for CSR activity and information. Assets under professional management and invested with a social responsibility focus have also grown dramatically over the last 10 years. Investors choosing social responsibility investment strategies require access to information not provided through traditional financial statements and analyses. At the same time, a group of mainstream (...) institutional investors has encouraged a movement to incorporate environmental, social, and governance information into equity analysis, and multi-stakeholder groups have supported enhanced business reporting on these issues. The majority of research in this area has been performed on European and Australian firms. We expand on this literature by exploring the CSR disclosure practices of a size- and industry-stratified sample of 50 publicly traded U.S. firms, performing a content analysis on the complete identifiable public information portfolio provided by these firms during 2004. CSR activity was disclosed by most firms in the sample, and was included in nearly half of public disclosures made during that year by the sample firms. Areas of particular emphasis are community matters, health and safety, diversity and human resources (HR) matters, and environmental programs. The primary venues of disclosure are mass media releases such as corporate websites and press releases, followed closely by disclosures contained in mandatory filings. Consistent with prior research, we identify industry effects in terms of content, emphasis, and reporting format choices. Unlike prior research, we can offer only mixed evidence on the existence of a size effect. The disclosure frequency and emphasis is significantly different for the largest one-fifth of the firms, but no identifiable trends are present within the rest of the sample. There are, however, identifiable size effects with respect to reporting format choice. Use of websites is positively related to firm size, while the use of mandatory filings is negatively related to firm size. Finally, and also consistent with prior literature, we document a generally self-laudatory tone in the content of CSR disclosures for the sample firms. (shrink)

The accounting profession is concerned with the ethical beliefs of its members. To this end, the authors surveyed public accountants, questioning them about the AICPA''s Code of Professional Conduct and their perceptions of how potentially unethical behaviors impact the firm. The paper focuses on respondents'' perceptions of the impact on the firm''s practice, image and degree of concern.Public accountants appear to agree with the AICPA''s Code of Professional Ethics. Their mean responses indicate they believe the Code components are important and (...) extremely important. Some Code components were significantly more important than others, especially demonstrating professionalism and maintaining independence while performing independent audits. Gender, role and organizational level all had significant effects on the importance of the Code. Males, non-auditors and upper management all expressed stronger beliefs in the importance of the overall Code and its components. (shrink)