The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of (...) issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars. (shrink)

Child sexual exploitation and abuse has grave implications for the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. It has been linked to a wide range of difficulties which may extend into adulthood. School-based prevention programs that aim to raise awareness are popular, however, have historically lacked robust and consistent evaluation. The purpose of the present study was therefore to explore young people’s experiences of attending a school-based theater-in-education program, and the impact this had on their awareness and understanding (...) of CSEA. Four focus groups of between four to six participants each were conducted with young people from two co-educational State schools in the United Kingdom. The approach of Template Analysis was used to analyze the data, and revealed a number of themes related to the superordinate themes of “Information and Detail Delivered” and “Format and Timing.” The results suggest that participants gained new awareness and understanding of aspects related to CSEA, including other forms of exploitation, as well as how to avoid harm and what to do “if bad things happen.” Participants further reported that the theater performance/live element of the program was particularly impactful, feeling that this was delivered to them at the right time, but suggesting that younger people would also benefit from the important messages. In addition, areas for improvement were identified in terms of the delivery of the program, and the issue of victim blaming. Findings are discussed with a view to practical implications and directions for future research. (shrink)

A basic assumption in current western medicine is that good healthcare involves informed choices. Indeed, making informed choices is not only viewed as “good practice” but a right to which each individual is entitled, a perspective only recently developed in the medical field.Moreover, in the case of ethical decisions, much of the discussion on the role of the family is cast within the autonomy paradigm of contemporary bioethics; that is, family members provide emotional support but do not make decisions for (...) the competent adult patient. The family Is uniformly viewed as an Important proxy decision maker for incompetent patients; but most bioethicists would eschew any decision-making role for the family of mentally competent adult patients. Underlying the discussion of autonomy is the basic assumption in western medicine that good healthcare Involves choices by Informed individuals. (shrink)

Community supported agriculture programs are transforming the way people relate to food and agriculture. Many researchers have considered the transformative potential of CSAs on economic, social, and environmental relations. They illustrate how participants are embedded in broader political economic transformations. The same focus, however, has not been given to CSAs’ transformative impact on individual shareholders—especially in terms of their relationship to food and health. We draw together literatures from behavioral economics, econometrics, and political ecology to evaluate the potential impacts of (...) CSA participation on food lifestyle behaviors. Using primary data drawn from a survey of four groups with distinct food acquisition environments, we compare respondents’ self-assessed food-related behaviors along three different categories: produce versus processed food consumption, food away from home consumption, and food acquisition and interest in nutrition. By documenting between-group differences, we confirm that shareholders display significant absolute differences to other groups along numerous indicators related to the above-stated categories and in general assessments of health. These differences correspond directionally to behaviors public health officials identify as correlated to beneficial health outcomes. We conclude by theorizing how the food environments delineated by a CSA exchange relationship provide unique reflexive opportunities for participants to develop diverse food-related skills and behaviors. (shrink)

An incoherent visualization is when aspects of different senses of a word are present in the same visualization. We describe and implement a new model of creating contextual coherence in the visual imagination called Coherencer, based on the SOILIE model of imagination. We show that Coherencer is able to generate scene descriptions that are more coherent than SOILIE's original approach as well as a parallel connectionist algorithm that is considered competitive in the literature on general coherence. We also show that (...) co-occurrence probabilities are a better association representation than holographic vectors and that better models of coherence improve the resulting output independent of the association type that is used. Theoretically, we show that Coherencer is consistent with other models of cognitive generation. In particular, Coherencer is a similar, but more cognitively plausible model than the C3 model of concept combination created by Costello and Keane. We show that Coherencer is also consistent with both the modal schematic indices of perceptual symbol systems theory and the amodal contextual constraints of Thagard's theory of coherence. Finally, we describe how Coherencer is consistent with contemporary research on the hippocampus, and we show evidence that the process of making a visualization coherent is serial. (shrink)

Biomedical and behavioral research is a complex, multidisciplinary, and highly varied enterprise with but a single goal: to produce and disseminate knowledge about the causes, effects, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human illnesses and impairments. Success requires public trust in the process. When that trust has been shaken (or worse), the response has been to establish offices to exercise oversight of the various actors and to require them to adhere to regulations that specify, with various levels of detail, what they (...) may or may not do.The two regulatory frameworks examined in this report by Barbara Bierer and Mark Barnes began separately, provoked by different scandals and abuses of public trust. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is an increasingly high‐profile area of research that can be understood as encompassing three broad approaches towards the synthesis of living systems: DNA‐based device construction, genome‐driven cell engineering and protocell creation. Each approach is characterized by different aims, methods and constructs, in addition to a range of positions on intellectual property and regulatory regimes. We identify subtle but important differences between the schools in relation to their treatments of genetic determinism, cellular context and complexity. These distinctions tie into (...) two broader issues that define synthetic biology: the relationships between biology and engineering, and between synthesis and analysis. These themes also illuminate synthetic biology's connections to genetic and other forms of biological engineering, as well as to systems biology. We suggest that all these knowledge‐making distinctions in synthetic biology raise fundamental questions about the nature of biological investigation and its relationship to the construction of biological components and systems. BioEssays 30:57–65, 2008. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Ethical sourcing and socially responsible purchasing is increasingly on the business agenda, but developing and implementing policy and practice across a global network of suppliers is challenging. The purpose of this paper is to expand theory on the nature of linkages between firms in a social network, specifically postulating how ties between organizations can be configured to facilitate development, diffusion, and adoption of sustainability initiatives. The theory development provides a lens with which to view the influence of a firm’s structural (...) embeddedness in its organizational social network on developing, diffusing and adopting sustainability initiatives. The focus is on brokers who in various structural alignments help bridge the focal firm’s sustainability initiatives with distant or disconnected stakeholders the focal firm is trying to reach. The brokers help the focal firm engage these stakeholders by sharing knowledge and information regarding sustainability initiatives and by incorporating localized needs into the development of the initiatives to facilitate better diffusion and adoption. The theoretical contribution of this manuscript is a novel perspective on sustainability in organizational networks. This perspective allows for greater explanatory power regarding how organizations can achieve sustainable outcomes that meet a broad base of stakeholder needs and better facilitate sustainability initiatives across a diverse and expansive network. (shrink)

Structured interviews were held with 149 registered nurses in seven countries in America, Asia, Australia and Europe concerning the feeding of severely demented patients who do not accept food. The most common reasons for nurses being willing to change their decision to feed or not to feed were an order from the medical head, a request from the patient's husband and/or the staff meeting. There was a connection between the willingness to feed and the ranking of ethical principles. Nurses who (...) were most prone to feed the patient most often gave a high rank to the ethical principle of sanctity of life, while those who primarily chose not to feed the patient gave a high rank to the ethical principle of autonomy. All nurses stressed the ethical principle of beneficence. Des interviews structurés ont eu lieu avec 149 infirmiers/ères dans sept pays en Amérique, Asie, Australie et Europe concernant l'alimentation des malades gravement dément qui refusent de manger. La raison la plus générale pour des infirmiers/ères d'être prêt à changer leures décisions de donner à manger ou non sont: un ordre du médecin, la demande du mari de la malade ou de la réunion du personnel. Il y avait un lien entre la volonté de nourir et le rang des principes éthiques. Les infirmiers/ères les plus enclins de nourir la malade le plus souvent donnaient un rang supérieur au principe éthique de la sainteté de vie, pendant que ceux et celles qui choisissaient de ne pas nourrir la malade donnaient un rang supérieur au principe éthique de l'autonomie. Tous insistaient sur l'importance du principe éthique de la bienfaisance. Konstruktive Interviews wurden mit 149 ausgebildeten Krankenschwestern und Pfleger in sieben Ländern in Amerika, Asien, Australien und Europa gehalten über die Ernährung von schwer von Dementia praecox leidenden Patienten, die das Essen verweigern. Die gewöhnlichsten Gründe des Pflegepersonals für die Bereitwilligkeit, ihre Entscheidung, zu ernähren oder nicht, zu ändern, waren Anordnungen vom medizinischen Chef, Anfragen vom Ehemann der Patientin und/oder einer Personalsitzung. Es bestand ein Zusammenhang zwischen der Bereitwilligkeit zur Ernährung und dem Rang der ethischen Prinzipien. Die Pflegenden, die sich am meisten neigten, die Patientin zu ernähren, gaben dem ethischen Prinzip der Heiligkeit des Lebens einen hohen Rang, während die, die meistens vorzogen, die Patientin nicht zu ernähren, gaben dem ethischen Prinzip der Autonomie einen hohen Rang. Alle Pflegenden legten grossen Wert auf das ethische Prinzip der Wohltätigkeit. (shrink)

According to several recent polls, more than 80 percent of Americans believe in life after death. Of those, many adhere to their beliefs because of religious faith. Beyond religion, though, there is increasing scientific examination of life after death hypotheses. Both religious and secular believers are more frequently using empirical research to answer the key questions of how consciousness may transcend corporeal life and death. These essays from leading survival theoreticians scientifically assay the issues and evidence. Interdisciplinary in nature, it (...) covers diverse topics including the origins of life after death hypotheses; theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches to afterlife research; hallucination experiences; evidence for consciousness survival; birthmarks and previous-life memories; suicide; and spirit participation. Concluding chapters discuss the future of afterlife research and offer a new interpretation of consciousness survival. (shrink)

The authors discuss some of the conceptual issues that must be considered in using and understanding psychiatric classification. DSM-IV is a practical and common sense nosology of psychiatric disorders that is intended to improve communication in clinical practice and in research studies. DSM-IV has no philosophic pretensions but does raise many philosphical questions. This paper describes the development of DSM-IV and the way in which it addresses a number of philosophic issues: nominalism vs. realism, epistemology in science, the mind/body dichotomy, (...) the definition of mental disorders, and dimensional vs. categorical classification. (shrink)

This paper investigates the difficulties of creating economic, social, and environmental values when operating as a hybrid venture. Drawing on hybrid organizing and sustainable business model research, it explores the implications of alternative forms of business model experimented with by farmer owned, fairtrade social enterprise Cafédirect. Responding to changes and challenges in the market and societal environment, Cafédirect has tried multiple business model innovations to deliver on all three forms of value capture, with differing levels of success. This longitudinal case (...) study, therefore, provides a contribution to our understanding of how business models enact hybrid mission, providing a platform for triple-bottom-line value capture. In doing so, we are able to expand on the normative understandings of integrating hybrid objectives, and the complications of multiple types of value capture. (shrink)