Every field of practice has the responsibility to evaluate its outcomes and to test its theories. Evidence of the underdevelopment of measurement instruments in bioethics suggests that attending to strengthening existing instruments and developing new ones will facilitate the interpretation of accumulating bodies of research as well as the making of clinical judgements. A review of 65 instruments reported in the published literature showed 10 with even a minimal level of psychometric data. Two newly developed instruments provide examples of the (...) full use of psychometric and ethical theory. Bioethicists use a wide range of methods for knowledge development and verification; each method should meet stringent standards of quality. (shrink)

Written nearly fifty years ago, at a time when the world was still wrestling with the concepts of Marx and Lenin, 'The Illusion of the Epoch' is the perfect resource for understanding the roots of Marxism-Leninism and its implications for philosophy, modern political thought, economics, and history. As Professor Tim Fuller has written, this "is not an intemperate book, but rather an effort at a sustained, scholarly argument against Marxian views." Far from demonising his subject, Acton scrupulously notes where Marx's (...) account of historical and economic events and processes is essentially accurate. However, Acton also points out that Marx is generally right about things that were already widely known and accepted in his own time and indeed had been long understood in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Acton shows that in many cases Marx either is simply wrong or has stated his views so as to render his theories immune to disproof. Acton also explains why the embodiment of Marxist-Leninist theory in an actual social order would require coercive support if it were not, sooner or later, to collapse of its own contradictions. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how dignity is discursively constructed in the context of work dominated by physicality and dirt. Based on semi-structured interviews with garbage workers, our analysis considers how the deprivations they experience are cast through discourses intended to construct their individual and collective worth. We consider the manner in which dignity maybe denied to such workers through popular repudiations of individuality and status. We demonstrate how this positioning arises from contact with physical dirt, and associations with socially (...) dirty work based on ascriptions of servility, abuse and ambivalence. We go on to consider how garbage workers respond to this positioning through discourses of ‘everyday heroism’. Heroism is evoked through three inter-related narratives that speaks to a particular type of masculinity. The first takes the form of a classic process of reframing and recalibration through which workers not only renegotiate their public position and status, but also point to the inherent value to be had in working with dirt as part of that which we identify as a process of ‘affirmation’. The second narrative arises from the imposition of favourable social and occupational comparisons that effectively elevate garbage collectors’ social position. The third discourse—and previously unobserved in respect of garbage work—centres on paternalistic practices of care. Combined, these discourses disrupt the generally held view that dirty work is antithetical to heroism and wounds dignity. (shrink)

This article reflects on the relevance and applicability of the Belmont Report nearly four decades after its original publication. In an exploration of criticisms that have been raised in response to the report and of significant changes that have occurred within the context of biomedical research, five primary themes arise. These themes include the increasingly vague boundary between research and practice, unique harms to communities that are not addressed by the principle of respect for persons, and how growing complexity and (...) commodification in research have shed light on the importance of transparency. The repercussions of Belmont's emphasis on the protection of vulnerable populations is also explored, as is the relationship between the report's ethical principles and their applications. It is concluded that while the Belmont Report was an impressive response to the ethical issues of its day, the field of research ethics involving human subjects may have outgrown it. (shrink)

This fascinating study in the sociology of science explores the way scientists conduct, and draw conclusions from, their experiments. The book is organized around three case studies: replication of the TEA-laser, detecting gravitational rotation, and some experiments in the paranormal. "In his superb book, Collins shows why the quest for certainty is disappointed. He shows that standards of replication are, of course, social, and that there is consequently no outside standard, no Archimedean point beyond society from which we can lever (...) the intellects of our fellows. "- -Donald M. McCloskey, Journal of Economic Psychology "Collins is one of the genuine innovators of the sociology of scientific knowledge.... Changing Order is a rich and entertaining book. "- - Isis "The book gives a vivid sense of the contingent nature of research and is generally a good read. "- -Augustine Brannigan, Nature "This provocative book is a review of [Collins's] work, and an attempt to explain how scientists fit experimental results into pictures of the world.... A promising start for new explorations of our image of science, too often presented as infallibly authoritative. "- -Jon Turney, New Scientist. (shrink)

In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion but that this truth should not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom; indeed, this truth can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11360-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-11360-4 ... HM651.C64 2007 158.1—dc22 2007022671 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information ...

Distinguishing “business” concerns from “ethical” values is not only an unfruitful and meaningless task, it is also an impossible endeavor. Nevertheless, fruitless attempts to separate facts from values produce detrimental second-order effects, both for theory and practice, and should therefore be abandoned. We highlight examples of exemplary research that integrate economic and moral considerations, and point the way to a business ethics discipline that breaks new ground by putting ideas and narratives about businesstogetherwith ideas and narratives about ethics.

Policy‐makers, bioethicists, and patient advocates have been engaged in a fierce battle about the merits and potential harms of a federal right‐to‐try law. This debate about access to investigational medical products has raised profound questions about the limits of patient autonomy, appropriate government regulation, medical paternalism, and political rhetoric. For example, do patients have a right to access investigational therapies, as the right‐to‐try movement asserts? What is government’s proper role in regulating and facilitating access to drugs that are still in (...) development? In this review, we analyze the history of the right‐to‐try movement, review the arguments put forth by supporters and opponents of the legislation, and consider the movement’s consequences. Two possible scenarios may emerge. One is that the right‐to‐try pathway may fail to meaningfully increase patient access to investigational products. Alternatively, certain companies may attempt to rely on the federal right‐to‐try legislation to sell investigational products, taking advantage of the provision that allows for direct costs, as there is currently no clear mechanism for enforcement or monitoring of cost calculations. (shrink)

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gansta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black (...) Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to report what can be learned about nurses’ ethical conflicts by the systematic analysis of methodologically similar studies. Five studies were identified and analysed for: (1) the character of ethical conflicts experienced; (2) similarities and differences in how the conflicts were experienced and how they were resolved; and (3) ethical conflict themes underlying four specialty areas of nursing practice (diabetes education, paediatric nurse practitioner, rehabilitation and nephrology). The predominant character of the ethical conflicts was (...) disagreement with the quality of medical care given to patients. A significant number of ethical conflicts were experienced as ‘moral distress’, the resolution of which was variable, depending on the specialty area of practice. Ethical conflict themes underlying the specialty areas included: differences in the definition of adequacy of care among professionals, the institution and society; differences in the philosophical orientations of nurses, physicians and other health professionals involved in patient care; a lack of respect for the knowledge and expertise of nurses in specialty practice; and difficulty in carrying out the nurse’s advocacy role for patients. (shrink)

It is perhaps most useful to approach the Doctor-Patient relationship (DPR) by admitting that it’s complicated. We review some of the strategies that have been employed to mitigate this complexity, zeroing in on one that promises to capture the main features of the DPR without eliminating some of its more important, existential components; pieces of the puzzle that must be retained if we are to avoid oversimplification and the errors that can arise by ignoring important foundational properties. We believe that (...) a useful way to look at the DPR and to capture essential features that must be balanced in the process is provided by Partnership Theory and its definition in terms of the so-called domination and partnership systems. We apply this theory to the DPR and investigate the implications of this application to health care. We see that in the absence of mitigating circumstances, adoption of the patient-as-partner model serves healthcare well and is flexible enough to accommodate circumstances that dictate modifications. (shrink)

Economists and other social scientists in this century have often supported economic arguments by referring to positions taken by philosophers of science. This important new book looks at the reliability of this practice and, in the process, provides economists, social scientists, and historians with the necessary background to discuss methodological matters with authority. Redman first presents an accurate, critical, yet neutral survey of the modern philosophy of science from the Vienna Circle to the present, focusing particularly on logical positivism, (...) sociological explanations of science (Polanyi, Fleck, Kuhn), the Popper family, and the history of science. She then deals with economic methodology in the twentieth century, looking at a wide range of methodological positions, especially those supported by positions from the philosophy of science. She considers the myth of the feasibility of falsification in economics and, within the context of its significance for economics, discusses the interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science as consensus and the danger such a view represents to science. Appendices review the history of the is-ought dispute and list economists whose first works deal with methodological topics. Comprehensive, readable, and accessible to those with little background knowledge, Redman's book will appeal to a wide range of social scientists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

The family is hotly contested ideological terrain. Some defend the traditional two-parent heterosexual family while others welcome its demise. Opinions vary about how much control parents should have over their children's upbringing. Family Values provides a major new theoretical account of the morality and politics of the family, telling us why the family is valuable, who has the right to parent, and what rights parents should—and should not—have over their children. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that parent-child relationships (...) produce the "familial relationship goods" that people need to flourish. Children's healthy development depends on intimate relationships with authoritative adults, while the distinctive joys and challenges of parenting are part of a fulfilling life for adults. Yet the relationships that make these goods possible have little to do with biology, and do not require the extensive rights that parents currently enjoy. Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child's interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children's values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children. Family Values reaffirms the vital importance of the family as a social institution while challenging its role in the reproduction of social inequality and carefully balancing the interests of parents and children. (shrink)

The Routledge Classic Edition of Daniels’ influential 2001 text _Vygotsky and Pedagogy_ explores the growing interest in Vygotsky and the pedagogic implications of the body of work that is developing under the influence of his theories. With a new preface from Harry Daniels this book explores the growing interest in Vygotsky and the pedagogic implications of the body of work that is developing under the influence of his theories. It provides an overview of the ways in which the original (...) writing has been extended and identifies areas for future development. The author considers how these developments are creating new and important possibilities for the practices of teaching and learning in school and beyond, and illustrates how Vygotskian theory can be applied in the classroom. The book is intended for students and academics in education and the social sciences and will be of interest to all those who wish to develop an analysis of pedagogic practice within and beyond the field of education. (shrink)

Research misconduct remains an important problem in health research despite decades of local, national, regional, and international efforts to eliminate it. The ultimate goal of every health research project, irrespective of setting, is to produce trustworthy findings to address local as well as global health issues. To be able to lead or participate meaningfully in international research collaborations, individual and institutional capacities for research integrity are paramount. Accordingly, this paper concerns itself not only with individuals’ research skills but also with (...) institutional and national policies and governance. Such policies and governance provide an ethical scaffold for the production of knowledge and structure incentives. This paper’s operational definition of research therefore draws from Institute of Medicine’s articulation of health research as an inquiry that aims to produce knowledge about the structure, processes, or effects of personal health services; and from an existing health systems framework. The paper reviews the research regulatory environment and the ethics apparatus in Ghana, and describes a project jointly undertaken by Ghanaian researchers in collaboration with New York University to assess the perceived adequacy of current institutional practices, opportunities, and incentives for promoting RI. (shrink)

This study provides current data on key questions about retraction of scientific articles. Findings confirm that the rate of retractions remains low but is increasing. The most commonly cited reason for retraction was research error or inability to reproduce results; the rate from research misconduct is an underestimate, since some retractions necessitated by research misconduct were reported as being due to inability to reproduce. Retraction by parties other than authors is increasing, especially for research misconduct. Although retractions are on average (...) occurring sooner after publication than in the past, citation analysis shows that they are not being recognised by subsequent users of the work. Findings suggest that editors and institutional officials are taking more responsibility for correcting the scientific record but that reasons published in the retraction notice are not always reliable. More aggressive means of notification to the scientific community appear to be necessary. (shrink)

Whistleblowers remain essential as complainants in allegations of research misconduct. Frequently internal to the research team, they are poorly protected from acts of retribution, which may deter the reporting of misconduct. In order to perform their important role, whistleblowers must be treated fairly. Draft regulations for whistleblower protection were published for public comment almost a decade ago but never issued. In the face of the growing challenge of research fraud, we suggest vigorous steps, to include: organizational responsibility to certify the (...) accuracy of research including audit, required whistleblower action in the face of imminent or grave harm to subjects, strengthened legal protections against retaliation including prompt enactment of Federal whistleblower protections and consideration of criminalizing the most egregious cases of research misconduct. (shrink)

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. (...) An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

Practicing scientists’ views of science recently have become a topic of interest to nature of science researchers. Using an interview protocol developed by Carey and Smith that assumes respondents’ views cohere into a single belief system, we asked 15 research chemists to discuss their views of theories and experimentation. Respondents expressed a range of ideas about science during interviews, but in ways that defied assignment to a unitary, coherent belief system. Instead, scientists expressed more or less constructivist ideas depending upon (...) the questions asked. We interpret our findings to suggest that efforts to categorize such conceptions at best oversimplify, and at worst misconstrue, people’s views about science and how such ideas might develop. (shrink)

We give a brief overview of several recent strands of speech-act theory, and then survey some issues in social and political philosophy can be profitably understood in speech-act-theoretic terms. Our topics include the social contract, the law, the creation and reinforcement of social norms and practices, silencing, and freedom of speech.

An increasingly long line of high-profile scientific misconduct cases raises the question of whether regulatory policy ought to incorporate more rigorous sanctions for investigators and their institutions. Broad and Wade graphically describe these cases through the early 1980s. They continue to recent times with the cases of Evan Dreyer, Kimon Angelides and Robert Liburdy, Justin Radolf, and others. In addition, recent Congressional investigation into conflict of interest concerns surrounding consulting by National Institutes of Health scientists has raised further questions about (...) ethical standards. The record of continuing scandal suggests that current policy may not be optimal for controlling scientific misconduct. Would an alternative policy better minimize its incidence and associated costs?What should we expect of public policy governing misconduct by American scientists? Surely the public has a right to presume that its tax money is being spent wisely and that any economic rewards from taxpayer funded research are used prudently and in the public interest. (shrink)

An increasingly long line of high-profile scientific misconduct cases raises the question of whether regulatory policy ought to incorporate more rigorous sanctions for investigators and their institutions. Broad and Wade graphically describe these cases through the early 1980s. They continue to recent times with the cases of Evan Dreyer, Kimon Angelides and Robert Liburdy, Justin Radolf, and others. In addition, recent Congressional investigation into conflict of interest concerns surrounding consulting by National Institutes of Health scientists has raised further questions about (...) ethical standards. The record of continuing scandal suggests that current policy may not be optimal for controlling scientific misconduct. Would an alternative policy better minimize its incidence and associated costs?What should we expect of public policy governing misconduct by American scientists? Surely the public has a right to presume that its tax money is being spent wisely and that any economic rewards from taxpayer funded research are used prudently and in the public interest. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Patient self‐management (SM) of chronic disease is an evolving movement, with some forms documented as yielding important outcomes. Potential benefits from proper preparation and maintenance of patient SM skills include quality care tailored to the patient's preferences and life goals, and increase in skills in problem solving, confidence and success, generalizable to other parts of the patient's life. Four central ethical issues can be identified: 1) insufficient patient/family access to preparation that will optimize their competence to SM without harm (...) to themselves, 2) lack of acknowledgement that an ethos of patient empowerment can mask transfer of responsibility beyond patient/family competency to handle that responsibility, 3) prevailing assumptions that preparation for SM cannot result in harm and that its main purpose is to deliver physician instructions, and 4) lack of standards for patient selection, which has the potential to exclude individuals who could benefit from learning to SM. Technology assessment offers one framework through which to examine available data about efficacy of patient SM and to answer the central question of what conditions must be put in place to optimize the benefits of SM while assuring that potential harms are controlled. (shrink)

An analysis of current biomedical research misconduct policy that proposes a new approach emphasizing the context of misconduct and improved oversight. Federal regulations that govern research misconduct in biomedicine have not been able to prevent an ongoing series of high-profile cases of fabricating, falsifying, or plagiarizing scientific research. In this book, Barbara Redman looks critically at current research misconduct policy and proposes a new approach that emphasizes institutional context and improved oversight. Current policy attempts to control risk at the (...) individual level. But Redman argues that a fair and effective policy must reflect the context in which the behavior in question is embedded. As journalists who covered many research misconduct cases observed, the roots of fraud “lie in the barrel, not in the bad apples that occasionally roll into view.” Drawing on literature in related fields—including moral psychology, the policy sciences, the organizational sciences, and law—as well as analyses of misconduct cases, Redman considers research misconduct from various perspectives. She also examines in detail a series of clinical research cases in which repeated misconduct went undetected and finds laxity of oversight, little attention to harm done, and inadequate correction of the scientific record. Study questions enhance the book's value for graduate and professional courses in research ethics. Redman argues that the goals of any research misconduct policy should be to protect scientific capital (knowledge, scientists, institutions, norms of science), support fair competition, contain harms to end users and to the public trust, and enable science to meet its societal obligations. (shrink)

Ethics introduces the issues and controversies of contemporary moral philosophy, and relates them to specific issues, such as racism, education and abortion. The book allows for a fair treatment of different views, and suggests the practical method for forming moral beliefs.

Some of the barriers to the realisation of equality reflect the value of respecting prerogatives people have to favour themselves. Even G.A. Cohen, whose egalitarianism is especially pervasive and demanding, says that.

What is education for? Should it produce workers or educate future citizens? Is there a place for faith schools - and should patriotism be taught? In this compelling and controversial book, Harry Brighouse takes on all these urgent questions and more. He argues that children share four fundamental interests: the ability to make their own judgements about what values to adopt; acquiring the skills that will enable them to become economically self-sufficient as adults; being exposed to a range of (...) activities and experiences that will enable them to flourish in their personal lives; and developing a sense of justice. He criticises sharply those who place the interests of the economy before those of children, and assesses the arguments for and against the controversial issues of faith schools and the teaching of patriotism. Clearly argued but provocative, On Education draws on recent examples from Britain and North America as well as famous thinkers on education such as Aristotle and John Locke. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the present state of education and its future. (shrink)