Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, hypocrisy, (...) and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions of ethics program (...) effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs. (shrink)

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian (...) sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

The purpose of this research was to discover and describe the economic contribution one group of women entrepreneurs. The research participants were lowresource and laid-off women who had graduated from a Microenterprise Assistance Program . There was no differentiation among women by age, race, or ethnicity. The theoretical landscape that underpins this research includes economic geography and women entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship and economic development. This research provided a geographic representation of the dispersion and volume of the self-reported business expenses of (...) women entrepreneurs located in one geographic area. In addition, this research developed and examined the viability of an assessment tool that maps the business payments made by entrepreneurs. (shrink)

The food supply of the temperate lands of early-medieval western Europe, and the ways in which its peoples dealt with the central problem of feeding themselves, has been subjected to a variety of interpretations in recent years. Vern Bullough and Cameron Campbell's study of the medieval diet and female longevity concluded that early-medieval women suffered from iron deficiencies triggered jointly by poor nutrition and frequent childbearing and that these deficiencies contributed substantially to their average early age of death. Ann Hagen's (...) overview of Anglo-Saxon patterns of food production and consumption suggested that most of the early English population routinely lived at marginally adequate or outright substandard levels of nutrition. Similar conclusions were reached by Renée Doehaerd in her study of the early-medieval economy. Michel Rouche, on the other hand, asserted that the typical Carolingian—including the peasants—had access to a monotonous, but abundant, supply of foodstuffs and may have consumed an average of 6,000–9,000 calories per day. Richard Hodges likewise decided that Anglo-Saxon peasants were reasonably well fed, based on the heavy food rents per hide demanded during the reign of the West Saxon king Ina. (shrink)

One of the more interesting counter-intuitive findings in organizational research is that success breeds failure. This counter-intuitive has been described in termsof core rigidities, core incompetencies, and even the Icarus Paradox. The literature on these topics has concluded that success yields overconfidence and myopia in firms and their managers, and this eventually causes failure. We augment this literature by suggesting that success breeds not only internal pathologies that cause firms to misuse their established resources over time, but also external pathologies (...) that cause firms to lose access to new resources. In particular, success influences stakeholders’ perceptions of firms, causing firms to lose the benefits of underdog status and gain the problems of overlord status. We term this notion that success warps images of the successful, leading to their decline over time, the Helios Paradox, and suggest that dominant firms must counter natural tendencies to succumb to both the Icarus and Helios Paradoxes if they are to remain successful over time. (shrink)

We report the results of two studies that evaluated the perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. In our first study, we re-analyzed data from Pelletier and Bligh (J Bus Ethics 67:359–374, 2006) and found that the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale from that study could be used to differentiate perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. In a second study with a different sample, we examined the relationships between (1) individual employees’ perceptions of top managers’ and immediate supervisors’ ethical (...) tendencies, and (2) organizational climate, confidence in top leadership direction, commitment, and citizenship behavior. Results indicated that employee perceptions of top managers’ and supervisors’ ethics were significantly related to climate, top leadership direction, organizational commitment and the OCB dimension, civic virtue. (shrink)

It has been well documented how language-specific cues may be used for word segmentation. Here, we investigate what role a language-independent phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented speech stream with non-English word onsets that juxtaposed adherence to the SSP with transitional probabilities. Participants favored using the SSP in assessing word-hood, suggesting that the SSP represents a potentially powerful cue for word segmentation. To ensure the SSP influenced the segmentation process (i.e., (...) during learning), we presented two additional groups of participants with either (a) no exposure to the stimuli prior to testing or (b) the same stimuli with pauses marking word breaks. The SSP did not influence test performance in either case, suggesting that the SSP is important for word segmentation during the learning process itself. Moreover, the fact that SSP-independent segmentation of the stimulus occurred (in the latter control condition) suggests that universals are best understood as biases rather than immutable constraints on learning. (shrink)

The minimally conscious state presents unique ethical, legal, and decision-making challenges because of the combination of diminished awareness, phenomenal experience, and diminished or absent comm...

In its most recent report, the President's Commission on Bioethics discusses the U.S. regulatory framework for reproductive technologies. We offer three perspectives, from the U.S. and from abroad.

The National Institutes of Health and other federal health agencies are considering establishing a national biobank to study the roles of genes and environment in human health. A preliminary public engagement study was conducted to assess public attitudes and concerns about the proposed biobank, including the expectations for return of individual research results. A total of 141 adults of different ages, incomes, genders, ethnicities, and races participated in 16 focus groups in six locations across the country. Focus group participants voiced (...) a strong desire to be able to access individual research results. Recognizing the wide range of possible research results from a large cohort study, they repeatedly and spontaneously suggested that cohort study participants be given ongoing choices as to which results they received. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka has recently proposed a utilitarian theory which would effect a compromise between Average and Total utilitarianism, the better to deal with issues in population ethics. This Compromise theory would incorporate the principle that the value which an extra happy person contributes to a possible world is a decreasing function of the total population of that world: that happy people are of diminishing marginal value. In spite of its initial plausibility I argue against this principle. I show that the (...) Compromise theory is actually no improvement over the two original versions of utilitarianism; in particular, it is subject to almost all the objections which are fatal to Average utilitarianism, and more besides. And I attempt to dispell the appearance that intuition supports the Compromise theory as against Total utilitarianism, by arguing that the latter's Repugnant Conclusion, when properly understood, is not intuitively unacceptable. Total utilitarianism remains a plausible ethical theory, while both the Average and the Compromise theories should be definitely rejected. (shrink)

Using birth stories as our object of inquiry, this article examines the ways in which normative discourses about gender, disability and Down syndrome construct the birth stories of three mothers of children with Down syndrome. Their stories are composed of the mothers’ recollections of the first hours after birth as a time when their infants are separated from them and their postpartum needs are ignored. Together, their stories illustrate socio-cultural tropes that position Down syndrome as a dangerous form of the (...) “other” and mothers who give birth to children with Down syndrome as implicated in transgressing cultural norms. (shrink)

McKay & Dennett (M&D) have done an admirable job of distinguishing among various forms of misbelief and evaluating the idea that they stem from evolved mental mechanisms. We argue that a complete account of misbeliefs must attend to the role that others play in creating and maintaining positive illusions.