What causes unethical behavior and what can we learn from those individuals who have had spectacular ethical lapses? The profiles of six prominent individuals, including Dennis Levine, Charles Keating, and Robert Citron are examined to try to provide some insight into what lead them down the slippery slope to criminal and unethical behavior. What we found is that all six certainly knew that they were breaking the law and most went to extra-ordinary lengths to cover up what they were doing. (...) Additionally, we found that each individual had attained a position of authority that enabled them to break the law without being seriously challenged by others who knew, or suspected, what was being done. Each person was highly compensated for their efforts, yet, they choose to engage in unethical and illegal activities in the pursuit of just a little more money or power. (shrink)

“Made for Learning” is the result of 60 years of research and theory building by Australian educator Brian Cambourne, articulated and described with abundant classroom examples by American educator Debra Crouch. This book describes a Discourse of Meaning-Making and explain and illustrate how to make that discourse the dominant language of the classroom. When the Conditions of Learning are coupled with four Processes That Empower Learning, an extension of the theory in the last three decades, teacher decision-making promotes the (...) active participation of learners in their own literate journey. How that active learning looks, sounds, and feels becomes tangible in the multitude of classroom examples found throughout the book. These classroom examples bring the Conditions of Learning to life and are unpacked to explore and analyze the specific teaching decisions leading to student learning. The authors offer educators concrete tools to use the Conditions of Learning as a framework to explore their own practices to strengthen learning experiences for every student. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My Gratifying Testimonial of My Extended Warranties of LifeDanette RaginMy name is Danette Ragin. I am a 2-time kidney recipient who has been diagnosed with ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease). Both transplants were performed in Baltimore, Maryland. I am also a 3-time Donor Family Member and the proud Mom of a living donor.I received the first kidney from a deceased donor on June 22, 2008. The donor was (...) traveling thru Maryland with her family on vacation and experienced heart complications. My second kidney was donated to me by my youngest daughter Angel on December 20. 2016. I am thankful to God for both of my extended warranties. I’d like to share a little about my journey with you.Around the year 2002, I started seeing my PCP (Primary Care Physician) for terrible migraine headaches, which on occasions lasted for weeks. After several tests, she expressed her concerns. I had been spilling protein in my urine and my kidney function was showing some abnormalities. My PCP sent me to see a neurologist after several failed attempts to gain some type of reprieve from the nerve-racking headaches. My nephrologist confirmed my PCP’s diagnosis, and I had visits with the nephrologist every 6 months until they noticed a substantial change.“Ah, Mrs. Ragin, you’re in the beginning stage of End Stage Renal Disease”. Boom! (That hit me like a ton of bricks.) “Umm, you mean I have kidney failure! No! Not me. I’ve worked in dialysis. That can’t happen to me!”Of course, I was in complete denial. Both my PCP and nephrologist were very supportive mentally, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually. This information was so devastatingly painful that I started working harder and longer. I turned into a Superwoman with my family, work, and church. I was trying to drown out the fact that my health was being compromised, refusing to believe this could happen to me. I started to slow down in my daily functions, my appetite decreased, and I lost weight as a result. I thought that my weight loss was bringing my “Sexy Back,” only to realize that I am not exempt from sickness. My nephrologist assured me of a possible solution. He advised me to have my name placed on the waitlist of one of the transplant centers in Maryland.In October 2006, I had surgery to have an A/V fistula placed in my left arm to prepare for possible dialysis treatments in the future. In January 2007, I went to be evaluated for a kidney transplant. I was given 6 weeks to complete all required tests to secure a place on the transplant waiting list. Determination allowed me to complete all tests within 2 weeks.In April 2007, I was approved to be placed on the transplant list. In October, I had a PDC (Peritoneal Dialysis Catheter) placed in my abdomen so that I could dialyze myself at home. I loved it but it didn’t love me. It was removed in January 2008. Right afterward, I received my first unsuccessful call to be transplanted. (The kidneys were cystic and could not be used.) “Bummer.” I also received another call in April 2008 (Easter Sunday). Those kidneys were [End Page 134] at another hospital in Maryland, so if the waiting patient at their facility refused the kidney, I would be next in line. The patient accepted the donation. It wasn’t my turn yet.In the meantime, I had already started hemo-dialysis in mid-March 2008. On Saturday, June 21, 2008, while enjoying the weekend with my family, I received a call around 2:30 p.m. My youngest daughter and I were out shopping. We were in a crowded store that was going out of business, and I felt my phone vibrate. I noticed a slightly familiar number. I stepped out of the store to retrieve the call.“Mrs Ragin...Me: Yes.“Danette Ragin...Me: Yes.“We are calling from the University with an organ offer for you!”I told them they had me at the sight of the first few digits of the phone number they were calling from!In June... (shrink)

In Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, philosopher Debra Satz takes a penetrating look at those commodity exchanges that strike most of us as problematic. What considerations, she asks, ought to guide the debates about such markets? What is it about a market involving prostitution or the sale of kidneys that makes it morally objectionable? How is a market in weapons or pollution different than a market in soybeans or automobiles? Are laws and social policies banning the (...) more noxious markets necessarily the best responses to them? Satz contends that categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited utility in addressing such questions because they have assumed markets to be homogenous. Accordingly, she offers a broader and more nuanced view of markets--one that goes beyond the usual discussions of efficiency and distributional equality--to show how markets shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power. (shrink)

We affirm the utility of integrative modeling, according to which it is advantageous to move beyond “one-at-a-time binary paradigms” through studies that position themselves within realistic multidimensional design spaces. We extend the integrative modeling approach to a target domain with which we are familiar, the consequences of bilingualism on mind and brain, often referred to as the “bilingual advantage.” In doing so, we highlight work from our group consistent with integrative modeling.

Congdon (2017), Giladi (2018), and McConkey (2004) challenge feminist epistemologists and recognition theorists to come together to analyze epistemic injustice. I take up this challenge by highlighting the failure of recognition in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. I offer the #MeToo movement as a case study to demonstrate how the process of mutual recognition makes visible and helps overcome the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. (...) I argue that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others. (shrink)

The People of Plato is the first study since 1823 devoted exclusively to the identification of, and relationships among, the individuals represented in the complete Platonic corpus. It provides details of their lives, and it enables one to consider the persons of Plato's works, and those of other Socratics, within a nexus of important political, social, and familial relationships. Debra Nails makes a broad spectrum of scholarship accessible to the non-specialist. She distinguishes what can be stated confidently from what (...) remains controversial and--with full references to ancient and contemporary sources--advances our knowledge of the men and women of the Socratic milieu. Bringing the results of modern epigraphical and papyrological research to bear on long-standing questions, The People of Plato is a fascinating resource and valuable research tool for the field of ancient Greek philosophy and for literary, political, and historical studies more generally. In discrete sections, Nails discusses systems of Athenian affiliation, significant historical episodes that link lives and careers of the late fifth century, and their implications for the dramatic dates of the dialogues. The volume includes a rich array of maps, stemmata, and diagrams, plus a glossary, chronology, plan of the agora in 399 B.C.E., bibliography, and indices. (shrink)

Dissecting Bioethics, edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Hayry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics. The department is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people’s actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings of a concept, describe the different readings of a moral doctrine, or provide an alternative angle to seemingly self-evident issues are particularly appreciated. To submit a paper or to discuss (...) a suitable topic, contact Tuija Takala [email protected].:This article examines some of the assumptions and implications associated with the Belmont era context in which the concept of therapeutic misconception was forged. We argue that the justification of therapeutic misconception should be reconsidered based on less paternalistic and more participatory models of research. Finally, we identify conceptual and practical approaches that might better reflect contemporary research practice. (shrink)

In The Enemies of Perfection, author Debra Candreva argues that Plato's philosophy is among the most important influences on Oakeshott's thought, with his debts to Plato far outweighing his criticisms. Further, Candreva's examination of Oakeshott's treatment of Plato forms the basis of an argument against the view that a radical gap between ancient and modern thought renders ancient philosophy either inaccessible or irrelevant to current thinking.

While the bioethics literature demonstrates that the field has spent substantial time and thought over the last four decades on the goals, methods, and desired outcomes for service and training in bioethics, there has been less progress defining the nature and goals of bioethics research and scholarship. This gap makes it difficult both to describe the breadth and depth of these areas of bioethics and, importantly, to gauge their success. However, the gap also presents us with an opportunity to define (...) this scope of work for ourselves and to help shape the broader conversation about the impact of academic research. Because of growing constraints on academic funding, researchers and scholars in many fields are being asked to demonstrate and also forecast the value and impact of their work. To do that, and also to satisfy ourselves that our work has meaningful effect, we must understand how our work can motivate change and how that change can be meaningfully measured. In a field as diverse as bioethics, the pathways to and metrics of change will likewise be diverse. It is therefore critical that any assessment of the impact of bioethics research and scholarship be informed by an understanding of the nature of the work, its goals, and how those goals can and ought to be furthered. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model that connects individual bioethics projects to the broader goals of scholarship, describing the translation of research and scholarly output into changes in thinking, practice, and policy. One of the key implications of the model is that impact in bioethics is generally the result of a collection of projects rather than of any single piece of research or scholarship. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a thoroughgoing conversation about bioethics research and scholarship that will advance and shape the important conversation about their impact. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents (...) in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

Social epistemologists use the term hermeneutical injustice to refer to a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person’s inability to understand his/her/their own social experience. This essay argues that the phenomenon of unacknowledged date rapes, that is, when a person experiences sexual assault yet does not conceptualize him/her/their self as a rape victim, should be regarded as a form of hermeneutical injustice. The fact that the concept of (...) date rape has been widely used for at least three decades indicates the intractability of hermeneutical injustices of this sort and the challenges with its overcoming. (shrink)

The mystery of the rise of the affirmative, declarative (periphrastic) use of do in the thirteenth century and its decline by the start of the eighteenth century remains one of the principal unsolved problems for linguists working in historical research. Some of the main arguments on the origins of do discuss the needs of poetic rhyme (e.g., Engblom 1938), the positioning of the adverb (e.g., Ogura 1993), the elimination of awkward consonant clusters (e.g., Stein 1990), and the ambiguities of object (...) referents in questions (Hudson 1997), much of the earlier historical research relying on hypotheses relating to internal problems of the system. The present study examines the early causative origins of do, viewed from a diachronic, construction-based approach, and offers an explanation in which the reanalysis and subsequent loss of do as a declarative, affirmative auxiliary took place via a process known as hyperanalysis (Croft 2000), resulting in the gradual process of co-lexicalization of the causative verb meaning within the semantics of the main verb across an ever-increasing range of main verb environments. (shrink)

The RWJF public health law faculty fellowship provided an opportunity for legal and public health scholars to come together to develop innovative approaches for teaching public health law in schools of law, public health, medicine, and social work nationally. The fellowship program emphasized the importance of integrating individual change with organizational change as twin pillars of the core competencies necessary for advancing public health law education. This article describes the curriculum and learning formats used throughout the fellowship to guide the (...) fellows' development in the areas of leading change, managing conflict, building collaborative partnerships, and maintaining personal resilience. (shrink)

Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy offers extremely careful and detailed criticisms of some of the most important assumptions scholars have brought to bear in beginning the process of (Platonic) interpretation. It goes on to offer a new way to group the dialogues, based on important facts in the lives and philosophical practices of Socrates - the main speaker in most of Plato's dialogues - and of Plato himself. Both sides of Debra Nails's arguments deserve close attention: the (...) negative side, which exposes a great deal of diversity in a field that often claims to have achieved a consensus; and the positive side, which insists that we must attend to what we know of these philosophers' lives and practices, if we are to make a serious attempt to understand why Plato wrote the way he did, and why his writings seem to depict different philosophies and even different approaches to philosophizing. From the Preface by Nicholas D. Smith. (shrink)

We present an instrument developed to explain to students the concept of the personal ethical threshold (PET). The PET represents an individual’s susceptibility to situational pressure in his or her organization that makes moral behavior more personally difficult. Further, the PET varies according to the moral intensity of the issue at hand, such that individuals are less vulnerable to situational pressure for issues of high moral intensity, i.e., those with greater consequences for others. A higher PET reflects an individual’s greater (...) likelihood of adhering to the morally correct path, even in the face of high situational pressures (personal costs) and low moral intensity (collective importance). PET questionnaires were completed by 506 students representing eight business schools throughout the United States. Relationships between respondents’ PET and their gender, age, and major field of study, as well as the geographical location of their school, are explored. Results indicate that older students have higher PETs and that students attending schools in the northeastern part of the United States have lower PETs. These findings are discussed. It is argued that the PET instrument can be used to help students identify organizational pressures and intrapersonal processes that can impede their moral behavior in organizations. (shrink)

The upstream framework presented in public health and medicine considers health problems from a preventive perspective, seeking to understand and address the root causes of poor health. Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) have demonstrated the value of this upstream framework in the practice of law and engage in upstream lawyering by utilizing systemic advocacy to address root causes of injustices and health inequities. This article explores upstreaming and its use by MLPs in reframing legal practice.

In this article, Satz critiques "both Pogge's use of the causal contribution principle as well as his attempt to derive all of our obligations to the global poor from the need to refrain from harming others.".

Having a self is associated with important advantages for an organism.These advantages have been suggested to include mechanisms supporting elaborate capacities for planning, decision-making, and behavioral control. Acknowledging such functionality offers possibilities for obtaining traction on investigation of neural correlates of selfhood. A method that has potential for investigating some of the brain-based properties of self arising in behavioral contexts varying in requirements for such behavioral guidance and control is functional brain imaging. Data obtained with this method are beginning to (...) converge on a set of brain areas that appear to play a significant role in permitting conscious access to representational content having reference to self as an embodied and independent experiencer and agent. These areas have been identified in a variety of imaging contexts ranging from passive state conditions in which they appear to manifest ongoing activity associated with spontaneous and typically ‘self-related’ cognition, to tasks targeting explicitly experienced properties of self, to demanding task conditions where activity within them is attenuated in apparent redirection of cognitive resources in the service of task guidance and control. In this paper, these data will be reviewed and a hypothesis presented regarding a significant role for these areas in enabling degrees of self-awareness and participating in the management of such behavioral control. (shrink)

The concept of ‘accounts’ (Scott and Lyman, 1968) – or linguistic strategies for neutralizing the negative social meanings of norm violation – has a long history in sociology. This work examines British and American women's accounts of cosmetic surgery. In the medical literature, feminist writings and the popular press, aesthetic plastic surgery has been associated with narcissism, psychological instability and self-hatred. Given these negative connotations, cosmetic surgery remains a practice requiring justification even as its popularity increases. Drawing on interview data, (...) I argue that respondents' efforts to account for cosmetic surgery vary according to the ‘repertoires of evaluation’ (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000) made available by their own nation and, particularly, by its healthcare culture. In the market-based US healthcare system, women justify cosmetic surgery by referring to their personal and financial ‘investments’ in physical attractiveness and well-being. Such explanations are less legitimate in Britain, where healthcare is considered a social right rather than a consumer good. In the latter context, women employ narratives that medicalize the pre-surgical body by stressing the physical pain and emotional distress that it caused. (shrink)

Sex differences in behavior are most interesting when they are the result of inherent differences in the operational rules motivating behavior and not merely a reflection of differing life history experiences. American men and women exhibit a few differences in testamentary patterns of property allocation that appear to be due to inherently different rules of allocation. Even when analyses control for resources and surviving kin configurations, women distribute their property among a greater number of individual beneficiaries than do men. The (...) most striking differences in property allocation between men and women occur within the nuclear family and reflect differences in reproductive life span and the resulting reproductive conflicts between spouses that can endure beyond death. (shrink)

This paper presents an experiential exercise introducing the concept of the personal ethical threshold (PET) to help explain why moral behavior does not always follow moral intention. An individual’s PET represents the individual’s vulnerability to situational factors, i.e., how little or much it takes for members of organizations to cross their proverbial line to act in a way they deem unethical. The PET reflects the interplay among the situation, the particular ethical issue, and the individual. Exploring the PET can help (...) account for why some people are sometimes able to withstand substantial organizational pressures to behave in congruence with their ethical intentions, whereas others crumble in the face of apparently minimal situational forces. We hope that students’ exposure to and subsequent reflection upon their PET, by means of the exercise we present, will foster the development of their moral courage. (shrink)

In 1993, my first full year as a master’s student studying rhetoric at the University of Tennessee, the venerable George Kennedy visited campus. He was part of a star-studded interdisciplinary symposium on rhetoric (Page duBois and Thomas Cole were the other two guests), and if memory serves, the large crowd awaiting Kennedy’s talk stirred with anticipation; this event was two years after the publication of a much-needed and now indispensible translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. After the talk, it stirred with something (...) more like befuddlement. Kennedy’s talk, “A Hoot in the Dark,” shared a title with an essay he had published in Philosophy and Rhetoric the year prior. The subject? Animal rhetoric. I .. (shrink)

This paper examines the morality of kidney markets through the lens of choice, inequality, and weak agency looking at the case for limiting such markets under both non-ideal and ideal circumstances. Regulating markets can go some way to addressing the problems of inequality and weak agency. The choice issue is different and this paper shows that the choice for some to sell their kidneys can have external effects on those who do not want to do so, constraining the options that (...) are now open to them. I believe that this is the strongest argument against such markets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.3 (2002) 185-207 [Access article in PDF] Agonism and Aretê Debra Hawhee Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. —Friedrich Nietzsche The profound superficiality about which Nietzsche (...) marvels describes ancient Greek culture as a culture of contact, a culture replete with spectacular gatherings, groping eyes, bending flesh, constantly redoubling so that the superficial became embedded, enfolded into bodies, tones, words. One condition of such enfolding was the agôn, the contest, the encounter that produces struggle and change. As scholars such as Walter Ong, John Poulakos, and Jeffrey Walker have pointed out, agonism provided an important context for the emergence of rhetoric in antiquity. 1 As I will suggest, athletics made available an agonistic model for early rhetors to follow as they developed their art. But the force or quality of this brand of agonism is nonetheless at times surprising, and this unusual character of the agôn was central to the particular development of rhetoric as an art of response.It must be noted from the outset that the agôn is more than the one-on-one sparring that is emphasized in most treatments of the topic. That is, agonism is not merely a synonym for competition, which usually has victory as its goal. For outcome-driven competition, the Greeks used the term athlios, from the verb athleuein, meaning to contend for a prize. The agôn, by contrast, is not necessarily as focused on the outcome as it is on athlios, the more explicit struggle for a prize. Rather, the root meaning of agôn is "gathering" or "assembly." The Olympic Games, for example, depended on the gathering of athletes, judges, and spectators alike. Put simply, whereas athlios emphasizes the prize and hence the victor, agôn emphasizes the [End Page 185] event of the gathering itself—the encounter rather than the division between the opposing sides. To be sure, the "gathering" force of agôn to some extent entails—and is enabled by—the victory. One aim of this exploration, though, is less to consider agonism's teleological, or victory-driven side, and more to foreground the agonistic encounter itself. I will suggest that this encounter constitutes the more pervasive agonal dynamic, a dynamic that also figures prominently in the development of rhetoric as an agonistic force.John Poulakos's important book on the sophists points out the agonistic connection between rhetoric and athletics (32-39), arguing that the sophists effectively "turned rhetoric into a competitive enterprise" (35) and that athletics provided a "rich vocabulary" for the rhetorical art. Poulakos's account, however, focuses on the athlios side of agonism, the "victory at all cost" mentality. Yet the "gathering" force of the agôn inheres as well, most notably in the very structure of rhetorical situations and their dependence on an assembly, but also in the training and production of a rhetorical subject. The realm of training, interestingly, shows most clearly the close relation between athlios and agôn, as a drive for the prize depends on the gathering force of agonistic logic from the very beginning. Agôn is also connected to the verb agein, which is generally translated "to lead," but in some instances is linked to training and can be translated "to bring up, train, educate" (e.g., Plato's Laws 782d). So the word agôn suggests movement through struggle, a productive training practice wherein subjective production takes place through the encounter itself. As Nietzsche suggests, the Greeks produced themselves through active struggle; their pedagogy depended on agonism (1974, 58; see also Poulakos, 33).Taking seriously rhetoric's emergence in the context of the agôn requires a reconfiguration of rhetoric as an agonistic encounter. That is, for the sophists at least, agonism produces rhetoric as a gathering of forces—cultural, bodily, and discursive, thus problematizing the easy portrayal of rhetoric as telos-driven persuasion or as a... (shrink)

Both consumers and producers of biotechnology products have insisted that communication between the two be improved. The former demand more democratic participation in the risk assessment process of biotechnology products. The latter seek to correct misinformation regarding alleged risks from these products. One way to resolve these concerns, I argue, is through the use of biotechnology labels. Such labeling fosters consumer autonomy and moves toward more participatory decisionmaking, in addition to ensuring that informed consent from consumers is maintained. Furthermore, although (...) voluntary biotech-free labeling in lieu of biotechlabels may uphold consumer sovereignty, the latter remains a more effective strategy for achieving ethical communication between consumers and producers of biotechnology products. (shrink)