Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing (...) to explore the limits of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the moral status of agents who innocently benefit from the wrongdoing of others. We commonly think that perpetrators should not benefit from their wrongdoings. But sometimes wrongdoings benefit third parties. Clearest examples are historical wrongdoings, such as colonialism and slavery, which have long lasting effects to this very day, benefitting some while harming others. Recent attempts to identify those who should address such wrongdoings suggest that their beneficiaries, even though they have done not taken (...) part in the original wrongdoing, have duties to relinquish the wrongful benefit and/or to compensate the victim. If correct, this view has important practical implications for identifying who should address pressing moral challenges such as climate change, reparations for slavery and global poverty. The chapter explores the normative underpinnings of the ‘principle of wrongful benefits’, and some of the theoretical and practical challenges to it. (shrink)

The principle of wrongful benefits prescribes that beneficiaries from wrongdoing incur duties towards the victims of the wrongdoing. The principle focuses on involuntary beneficiaries, demanding that they disgorge their tainted benefit. However, it overlooks the duties of beneficiaries who are not straightforwardly involuntary. The article addresses this gap in the literature. It explores the duties of ‘voluntary beneficiaries’, who could avoid receiving the tainted benefit; and the duties of ‘welcoming beneficiaries’, who cannot avoid receiving the tainted benefit (...) but welcome it. The article demonstrates that in both cases, the duties of the beneficiary towards the victim of the original wrongdoing are not limited to the disgorgement of the benefit. Rather, voluntary and welcoming beneficiaries are themselves involved in the commission of wrongdoing against the victim of the original wrongdoing, and hence may owe the victim compensation that exceeds the level of their own benefit. This argument has various practical implications, e.g. in specifying the duties of companies who benefit from human rights violations down their supply chain. (shrink)

Some normative theorists believe that there is a principled moral reason not to retain benefits realized by injustice or wrongdoing. However, critics have argued that this idea is implausible. One purported problem is that the idea lacks an obvious rationale and that attempts to provide one have been unconvincing. This paper articulates and defends the idea that the principled reason in question has an expressive quality: it gets its reason-giving force from the symbolic aptness of such an act (...) as an expressive response to wrongdoing. The paper thus argues that at least in a certain subset of cases, renouncing benefits realized by injustice amounts to a powerful and uniquely apt expression of protest against the disrespect for the victim that is implied by the wrongdoer’s actions. The paper shows how this idea can inform the question of reparations for slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Lastly it develops an important objection to the argument presented and gives an account of how this objection can be met. (shrink)

Some believe that the mere beneficiaries of wrongdoing of others ought to disgorge their tainted benefits. Others deny that claim. Both sides of this debate concentrate on unavoidable beneficiaries of the wrongdoing of others, who are presumed themselves to be innocent by virtue of the fact they have neither contributed to the wrong nor could they have avoided receiving the benefit. But as we show, this presumption is mistaken for unavoidable beneficiaries who intend in certain ways to benefit (...) from wrongdoing, and who have therefore done something wrong in forming and acting on such an intention. (shrink)

Bracket out the wrong of committing a wrong, or conspiring or colluding or conniving with others in their committing one. Suppose you have done none of those things, and you find yourself merely benefiting from a wrong committed wholly by someone else. What, if anything, is wrong with that? What, if any, duties follow from it? If straightforward restitution were possible — if you could just ‘give back’ what you received as a result of the wrongdoing (...) to its rightful owner — then matters are morally more straightforward. But in real-world cases that is often impossible, and questions of ‘how much, from whom and to whom?’ become far more vexing. The beneficiary disgorging all benefits of the wrong is part of the story, but where that is not possible or will not suffice to compensate the victim of wrongdoing we discuss various ways of allocating the cost of making the victim whole, including supplementation from public coffers. (shrink)

Many moral and political theorists have recently argued that the fact that an agent has innocently benefited from wrongdoing or injustice can ground special moral duties to help out the victims or simply give up the benefits. This idea is often referred to as the ‘Beneficiary Pays Principle’. This article critically assesses three recent attempts at providing a rationale for the BPP and argues that there are profound problems with each of them. It argues that even if we (...) accept plausible versions of the different normative ideas these accounts appeal to, we have no reason to accept the BPP. (shrink)

This paper examines the logic and morality of the German Stem Cell Act of 2002. After a brief description of the law’s scope and intent, its ethical dimensions are analysed in terms of symbolic threats, indirect consequences, and the encouragement of immorality. The conclusions are twofold. For those who want to accept the law, the arguments for its rationality and morality can be sound. For others, the emphasis on the uniqueness of the German experience, the combination of absolute and qualified (...) value judgments, and the lingering questions of indirect encouragement of immoral activities will probably be too much. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper examines the logic and morality of the German Stem Cell Act of 2002. After a brief description of the law's scope and intent, its ethical dimensions are analysed in terms of symbolic threats, indirect consequences, and the encouragement of immorality. The conclusions are twofold. For those who want to accept the law, the arguments for its rationality and morality can be sound. For others, the emphasis on the uniqueness of the German experience, the combination of absolute and (...) qualified value judgments, and the lingering questions of indirect encouragement of immoral activities will probably be too much. (shrink)

When does benefiting from others’ wrongdoing effectively make one a moral accomplice in their evil deeds? If stem cell research lives up to its therapeutic promise, this question (which has previously cropped up in debates over fetal tissue research or the use of Nazi research data) is likely to become a central one for opponents of embryo destruction. I argue that benefiting from wrongdoing is prima facie morally wrong under any of three conditions: (1) (...) when the wrongdoer is one’s agent; (2) when acceptance of benefit directly encourages the repetition of the wrongful deed (even though no agency relationship is involved); and (3) when acceptance of a benefit legitimates a wrongful practice. I conclude by showing that, because of the ways in which most embryonic stem cell lines come into being, people who oppose embryo destruction may use human embryonic stem cells without incurring moral blame. (shrink)

How do we acquire moral obligations to others? The most straightforward cases are those where we acquire obligations as the result of particular actions which we voluntarily perform. If I promise you that I will trim your hedge, I face a moral Obligation to uphold my promise, and in the absence of some morally significant countervailing reason, I should indeed cut your hedge. Moral obligations which arise as a result of wrongdoing, as a function of corrective justice, are typically (...) thought to be of a similar nature. (shrink)

How do we acquire moral obligations to others? The most straightforward cases are those where we acquire obligations as the result of particular actions which we voluntarily perform. If I promise you that I will trim your hedge, I face a moral Obligation to uphold my promise, and in the absence of some morally significant countervailing reason, I should indeed cut your hedge. Moral obligations which arise as a result of wrongdoing, as a function of corrective justice, are typically (...) thought to be of a similar nature. (shrink)

In this article we investigate whether non-culpably benefiting from wrongdoing or injustice generates a moral requirement to disgorge these benefits in order to compensate the victims. We argue that a strong requirement to disgorge such benefits is generated only if other conditions or factors are present. We identify three such factors and claim that their presence would explain why the normative features of certain types of cases of benefiting from wrongdoing differ from cases (...) of benefiting from simple misfortune or bad luck. (shrink)

Agents sometimes innocently benefit from the wrongdoing perpetrated by others. It has been asserted that when this happens the beneficiary acquires a defeasible duty to disgorge these benefits until the beneficiary’s gain is extinguished or the victim’s loss has been reversed. At the same time, critics have denied the existence of duties of disgorgement. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by proposing a novel account of the underlying justification, or rationale, for disgorgement duties grounded in the (...) value of corrective justice. An agent benefiting from injustice has a duty to disgorge, on this account, because fulfilling this duty helps correct injustice by making it as though the transaction that wrongfully enriched them had never happened. We go on to address five objections to this account of disgorgement duties and argue that the corrective justice account can withstand these objections. (shrink)

According to the beneficiary-pays principle, the involuntary beneficiaries of injustice ought to disgorge their unjustly obtained benefits in order to compensate the victims of injustice. The paper explores the effectiveness of the above principle in establishing a robust and unique normative connection between the rectificatory duties of the beneficiaries and the rectificatory rights of the victims of injustice. I discuss three accounts of the beneficiary-pays principle according to which the rectificatory duty of the beneficiaries towards the victims is grounded in (...) (a) their duty to oppose injustice and mitigate its effects, (b) their duty to give up benefits that are causally linked to an act of wrongdoing, or (c) their duty to not sustain wrongful harm against the victims. By criticizing these accounts, I intend to highlight the complexities of articulating a distinct rectificatory duty that applies uniquely to the beneficiaries of injustice qua beneficiaries. I conclude that, while it may seem complicated to defend the beneficiary-pays principle as an independent moral principle, it is more plausible to think of it as being derivative of more general principles such as the principle of fair play. (shrink)

How can criminal punishment be morally justified? Zisman addresses this classical question in legal philosophy. He provides two maybe surprising answers to the question. First, as for a methodological claim, it argues that this question cannot be answered by philosophers and legal scholars alone. Rather, we need to take into account research from social psychology, economy, anthropology, and so on in order to properly analyze the arguments in defense of criminal punishment. Second, the book argues that when such research (...) is properly accounted for, none of the current attempts to justify criminal punishment succeed. But that does not imply that the state should do nothing about criminal wrongdoing. Rather, the arguments that were supposed to justify criminal punishment actually speak in favor of an alternative approach to criminal law: restitution to the victim and restorative justice. That is to say, the state should coerce offenders to provide restitution for the harm inflicted on victims, and whenever possible restorative approaches should be taken to address criminal wrongdoing. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 20 According to the fair play defense of political obligations citizens have a reciprocity-based duty to share the costs involved in the production of public goods. But sometimes, states produce collective goods through wrongdoing. For example, sometimes states’ wrongful immigration policies can contribute to the welfare of their own populations. Do citizens have duties of reciprocity in light of such wrongful benefits? I argue that the answer to this question is negative. Drawing on the observation (...) that beneficiaries of wrongdoing incur compensatory duties to the victims of that wrongdoing, I argue that, rather than having a duty of reciprocity for wrongful benefits, citizens have a duty to disgorge the benefits in compensation. Furthermore, the fair play defense of political obligations entails that citizens can be justified in disobeying the law in order to comply with their compensatory duties to victims of their state’s wrongdoing. (shrink)

According to the fair play defense of political obligations citizens have a reciprocity-based duty to share the costs involved in the production of public goods. But sometimes, states produce collective goods through wrongdoing. For example, sometimes states’ wrongful immigration policies can contribute to the welfare of their own populations. Do citizens have duties of reciprocity in light of such wrongful benefits? I argue that the answer to this question is negative. Drawing on the observation that beneficiaries of wrongdoing (...) incur compensatory duties to the victims of that wrongdoing, I argue that, rather than having a duty of reciprocity for wrongful benefits, citizens have a duty to disgorge the benefits in compensation. Furthermore, the fair play defense of political obligations entails that citizens can be justified in disobeying the law in order to comply with their compensatory duties to victims of their state’s wrongdoing. (shrink)

Research in sociology and organization studies has consistently documented the tendency for organizations to develop wrongdoing practices that are at odds with the legal and moral frameworks of society. Often, this wrongdoing acquires a degree of normalization where it is endorsed, encouraged, and accepted throughout the organization. Such normalized wrongdoing can have severe negative effects on the whistleblowing opportunities of employees. While these effects are intuitively easy to understand, we still lack an understanding of the significant variation (...) that exists across situations of normalized wrongdoing and how that variation may affect potential whistleblowers. To advance such an agenda, the paper analyzes 14 whistleblower autobiographies. Building on work on normalized wrongdoing within corruption, fraud, and management studies and Niklas Luhmann’s theories on organization, the analysis finds that normalized wrongdoing in the autobiographies appears in different intensities that depend on the role of management, the benefits organizations obtain from wrongdoing, and the extent to which wrongdoing norms are internalized by employees. The paper builds on these distinctions to suggest a continuum of normalized wrongdoing from ‘weak’ to ‘strong.’ Understanding this variation offers a new set of tools to assess the organizational realities that concerned employees must navigate in when they attempt to resist and address situations of normalized wrongdoing. (shrink)

Through the personal stories of managers running global business, this book takes an inside look into the dilemmas of managers who are asked to make profits ethically according to the dictates of their company's ethics code. It examines what companies `think" they are doing to help managers in those situations and how those managers are actually affected. Thanks to the boost from the 1991 Sentencing Guidelines which minimizes penalties for companies with ethics codes caught in ethical wrongdoing, more (...) than 85% of US companies and two thirds of all Canadian companies and half of all European companies now have Codes of Ethics. Yet, over and over, we hear of stories of personal dilemmas and conflicts experienced by individual managers navigating those business waters in other cultures. "Eileen Morgan does an excellent job of mapping the course for navigating the previously uncharted global ethical waters. By identifying best practices, she leads the reader on a journey from Surviving, to Understanding to Knowing the ethical issues that frequently confront international business people. This is a must read for anyone who wants to successfully compete in world markets." -Michael J. Litwin, Executive Vice President, Chief Credit Officer, Heller Financial, Inc. "Eileen Morgan has combined the pragmatic concerns of the individual manager with the moral concerns that come from personal-life history, cultural roots, and corporate ethical culture …This book focuses on the constructive task of formulating and using an "ethical map," and is sure to be a tonic to conscientious managers who want to navigate cross-cultural commerce with integrity. It has done a superb job of creating order out of the complexity of cross-cultural moral experience by insisting that the complexity must be honored and appropriated rather than ignored or suppressed." -Dr. Richard Beauchamp, Professor of Ethics, Christopher Newport University "In this groundbreaking book, Eileen Morgan has provided scores of real-life examples and developed a framework for approaching ethical leadership in international business. This is mandatory reading for anyone involved in global management today...This is an important book on an important subject." -Stephen H. Rhinesmith, Ph.D. Author, A Manager's Guide to Globalization "Eileen Morgan provides us with a much needed roadmap for how to walk the path of ethical leadership with practical feet. She reminds us that ethical decision-making is a critical aspect of every day leadership, and that we can all choose to be 'ethical pioneers' in our companies and our communities. Every leader engaged in global business can benefit from the lessons and stories included in this book." -Christi A. Olson, Ph.D. Chair, Telecommunications Management Department, Golden Gate University "Eileen Morgan's thoughtful analysis of 'ethical capital' should be read by anyone who does business in a global environment…Morgan's book presents the issue clearly, comprehensively and compellingly, demonstrating that ethics is an indispensable aspect of individual leadership and organizational credibility. …It provides a clear roadmap for business leaders who need to communicate their commitment to integrity and accountability to their employees, their partners, and their customer, making their 'ethical capital' one of their most valuable assets." -Nell Minnow, Principal, Lens, The Corporate Governance Investors "Eileen Morgan gives excellent insight into ethical practices. She focuses on business but her insights have general application. This book also describes differences in ethical interpretation that can arise between diverse cultures. Ms. Morgan has made an excellent contribution to understanding the benefit of positive ethical practices." -David C. Lincoln, Sponsor, Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, College of Business, Arizona State University President, Arizona Oxides, LLC · First in-depth look at how managers in global companies actually bridge the gap between their organizations and their daily decisions · Explains the need for internal and external ethical operations¦and how organizations often create confusion rather than clarity with the label of "ethics". (shrink)

Sher's notion of deserved punishment has unacceptable implications. It does not justify punishing some serious wrongdoers, who are unwilling to commit lesser wrongs, more severely than minor offenders. It requires victim-inflicted punishments which repeat the wrongdoings, with the roles reversed. But if Sher moves away from such victim-inflicted punishments, then his theory should treat wrongdoers like tort-feasors who have to pay monetary compensations to their victims.

In trust relationships, one person has a ‘beneficial interest’ in another’s performance. The former not only would but should benefit from the latter’s action, and the latter has a ‘fiduciary duty’ toward the former to so act. But where that act would otherwise be wrong, the first person’s beneficial interest would be providing a pro tanto reason for the second person to do something that is pro tanto wrong. That reason can – and should – be removed by the (...) former renouncing their beneficial interest in the latter’s pro tanto wrongful action. Doing so would cancel the fiduciary’s excuse for wrongdoing on the beneficiary’s behalf. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that the history of behavior that has contributed to the threat of climate change bears in a significant way on the obligations of current people. In particular, a number of philosophers have defended the Beneficiary Pays Principle, according to which those who have benefited from unjust emitting activity have a special obligation to bear costs of mitigation and adaptation. I claim that versions of the BPP that have been defended by others share a common problematic (...) feature. Specifically, they seem to limit the benefits that ground obligations under the principle to those that derive from unjust acts, and thereby implicitly deny that other ways in which individuals might benefit from injustice can ground similar duties. I argue that there is no plausible theoretical basis for this distinction. I conclude that we should take seriously a different type of principle that can be plausibly called a Beneficiary Pays Principle, according to which those who benefit from injustice, all things considered, are obligated to give up the unjust benefits that they enjoy. (shrink)

The politics of climate change is marked by the fact that countries are dragging their heels in doing what they ought to do; namely, creating a binding global treaty, and fulfilling the duties assigned to each of them under it. Many different agents are culpable in this failure. But we can imagine a stylised version of the climate change case, in which no agents are culpable: if the bad effects of climate change were triggered only by crossing a particular threshold, (...) and it was reasonably, but mistakenly, believed by each country that insufficiently many other countries were willing to cooperate in order for that threshold to remain uncrossed, no country would be required to make a unilateral contribution. Yet even without culpability, we can diagnose a moral ill: the world has gone other than it should have. If not for the mistaken beliefs, there would have been a global climate treaty, and all the avoidance of future suffering that would come with it. In this article I argue that this moral ill has implications for the non-culpable agents, in that it generates duties to disgorge actual holdings over and above the counterpart holdings in the relevant counterfactual: those holdings the agents would have had, were the world to have gone as it should. (shrink)

Dominant theories of moral blame require an individual to have caused or intended harm. However, across four studies we demonstrate cases where no harm is caused or intended, yet individuals are nonetheless deemed worthy of blame. Specifically, individuals are judged to be blameworthy when they engage in actions that enable them to benefit from another’s misfortune (for example, betting that a company’s stock will decline or that a natural disaster will occur). We present evidence suggesting that perceptions of the (...) actor’s wicked desires are responsible for this phenomenon. We argue that these results are consistent with a growing literature demonstrating that moral judgments are often the product of evaluations of character in addition to evaluations of acts. (shrink)

Many political philosophers maintain that beneficiaries of injustice are under special obligations to assist victims of injustice. However, the examples favoured by those who endorse this view equally support an alternative luck egalitarian view, which holds that special obligations should be assigned to those with good brute luck. From this perspective the distinguishing features of the benefiting view are (1) its silence on the question of whether to allocate special obligations to assist the brute luck worse off to (...) those who are well off as a matter of brute luck but not as a result of injustice, and (2) its silence on the question of whether to allocate assistance to those who are badly off as a matter of brute luck but not as a result of injustice. In this new light, the benefiting view is harder to justify. (shrink)

Many have argued that that it is morally wrong to benefit from an agent's culpable wronging of a third party. This thought has formed the basis of some arguments that agents can have duties to make up for wrongful acts by others that they could not have stopped, or that occurred before they were born. For example, it has been argued that those who benefited from slavery, colonialism and other shameful events in their nation's history should surrender those (...) benefits, their equivalent value, or provide other forms of redress. Some have also argued that it is morally wrong to benefit from unjust situations caused by third parties even where there is no culpable element. These ideas have potential to be a principle of redress for harms that are caused by the working of very complex systems, such as the global climate system. Geoengineering, the intentional manipulation of the global climate, is a new development in climate science and policy — and one which raises many normative challenges. This article focuses on one specific challenge. The global climate is very complex and there is a real possibility that the best available science will not be able to account for all the consequences of deploying a geoengineering technique. Therefore, any governance regime that allows deployment will have to consider how to organise compensation or redress for any adverse impacts that could not have been predicted at the time of deployment. This article proposes that, with some modification, the principle that agents should surrender benefits that have accrued to them from using geoengineering techniques, can be a good basis for such a scheme. (shrink)

According to the Beneficiary Pays Principle, innocent beneficiaries of an injustice stand in a special moral relationship with the victims of the same injustice. Critics have argued that it is normatively irrelevant that a beneficiary and a victim are connected in virtue of the same unjust 'source'. The aim of this paper is to defend the Beneficiary Pays Principle against this criticism. Locating the principle against the backdrop of corrective justice, it argues that the principle is correct in saying that (...) innocent beneficiaries of an injustice may have an extra reason to assist the victims of that injustice. This is because it may be necessary to defeat the immoral plan of the perpetrator of the injustice and because it may satisfy weak restitution. The conclusion is that the principle is distinctive from related views, such as that property should be returned to its rightful owner or that tainted benefits should be given up for general use. (shrink)

It is common to focus on the duties of the wrongdoer in cases that involve injustice. Presumably, the wrongdoer owes her victim an apology for having wronged her and perhaps compensation for having harmed her. But, these are not the only duties that may arise. Are other beneficiaries of an injustice permitted to retain the fruits of the injustice? If not, who becomes entitled to those funds? In recent years, the Connection Account has emerged as an influential account that purports (...) to explain cases such as Embezzlement. This account holds that benefiting from injustice can give rise to a corrective duty - that is, a duty of compensation - owed specifically to the victim of the injustice from which the recipient benefits. This duty is grounded in the connection between the victim and the beneficiary of a given injustice. This paper has two aims. First, I show that we must reject the Connection Account on the grounds that it risks failing correctly to identify those who become entitled to the fruits of injustice. I achieve this by developing and defending the fairness objection. Second, I offer an alternative account: the Moral Taintedness Account. This account states that, when identifying who is entitled to the fruits of injustice, the cause and the degree of the harm suffered by a victim are both relevant considerations, though it does not matter whether the victim is the victim of the injustice that gave rise to the fruits in question. This account avoids the problem associated with the Connection Account, and yields intuitive conclusions in an important range of test cases. (shrink)

Much of the climate ethics discussion centers on considerations of compensatory justice and historical accountability. However, little attention is given to supporting and defending the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a guide for policymaking. This principle states that those who have benefitted from an instance of harm have an obligation to compensate those who have been harmed. Thus, this principle implies that those benefitted by industrialization and carbon emission owe compensation to those who have been harmed by climate change. Beneficiary (...) Pays is commonly juxtaposed with Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle in the relevant literature. Beneficiary Pays withstands objections that raise suspicion for the latter two. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has dramatically changed the way organizations communicate, understand, and interact with their potential consumers. In the context of this trend, the ethical considerations of advertising when applying AI should be the core question for marketers. This paper discusses six dominant algorithmic purchase decision pathways that align with ethical philosophies for online customers when buying a product/goods. The six ethical positions include: ethical egoism, deontology, relativist, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and ethics of care. Furthermore, this paper launches an “intelligent advertising” (...) AI theme by examining its present and future as well as identifying the key phases of intelligent advertising. Several research questions are offered to guide future research on intelligent advertising to benefit ethical AI decision-making. Finally, several areas that can be widely applied to ethical intelligent advertising are suggested for future research. (shrink)

After more than three decades of implementation, China’s one-child policy has generated a large number of only children. Although extensive research has documented the developmental outcomes of being an only child, research on the parent–child relational quality of the only child is somewhat limited. Using China Education Panel Survey (2014), this study examined whether the only child status was associated with parent–child relationships among Chinese junior high school students. It further explored whether children’s gender moderated the association between the only (...) child status and parent–child relationships. Two-level ordered logit models suggested that only children were more likely to report a close relationship with their mothers and fathers compared to children from multiple-child families (including two-child families). Taking birth order into consideration, we found that, only children were more likely to have close parent–child relationships than firstborns, whereas no significant differences were found between only children and lastborns. Interaction analyses further suggested that the only child advantages were gender-specific: the positive effects of the only child status were stronger for daughters than for sons, that is, daughters benefited more from being only children. Our findings highlight the importance of considering children’s gender and birth order in exploring the only child effects in the Chinese context. Additional analyses about sibling-gender composition indicated female children were more likely to be disadvantaged with the presence of younger brothers, whereas male children benefited more from having older sisters. This reveals that the son preference culture is still deep-rooted in the Chinese multiple-child families. (shrink)

If SNOMED CT is to serve as a biomedical reference terminology, then steps must be taken to ensure comparability of information formulated using successive versions. New releases are therefore shipped with a history mechanism. We assessed the adequacy of this mechanism for its treatment of the distinction between changes occurring on the side of entities in reality and changes in our understanding thereof. We found that these two types are only partially distinguished and that a more detailed study is required (...) to propose clear recommendations for enhancement along at least the following lines: (1) explicit representation of the provenance of a class; (2) separation of the time-period during which a component is stated valid in SNOMED CT from the period it is (or has been) valid in reality, and (3) redesign of the historical relationships table to give users better assistance for recovery in case of introduced mistakes. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical architecture of the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle, which holds that agents can come to possess remedial obligations of corrective justice to others through the involuntary receipt of benefits stemming from injustice. Advocates of the principle face challenges of both persuasion and limitation in seeking to convince those unmoved of its normative force, and to explain in which cases of benefiting from injustice it does and does not give rise to rectificatory obligations. The article (...) considers ways in which advocates of the principle might seek to win over those sceptical of its merits by employing a modified principle which sidesteps the issue of enforceability, before considering the question of whether the argument can be expanded from cases of benefiting from wrongdoing specifically to other sorts of situation where one agent involuntarily benefits from another's loss. (shrink)

The intellectual property regimes we have currently in place are heavily under attack. One of the points of criticism is the interaction between two elements of article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the widely discussed issue of being able to benefit from scientific progress and the less argued for position of having a right to take part in scientific enterprises. To shine light on the question if we should balance the two elements or prioritize one of (...) them, an exploration will be offered on how benefiting from scientific progress and the ability to participate in the advancement of science relate to securing human capabilities. A different perspective to the question will be gained by identifying the problem as an issue of misrecognition, especially the failure to recognize many willing collaboration partners in scientific research as peers. Lastly, I will argue that cooperative justice requires that if we have an innovation incentive system that disproportionally benefits one particular group, a certain duty to counterbalance this advantage exists when we are relying on mutual cooperation for the recognition of intellectual property rights. (shrink)

Although theoretical results for several algorithms in many application domains were presented during the last decades, not all algorithms can be analyzed fully theoretically. Experimentation is necessary. The analysis of algorithms should follow the same principles and standards of other empirical sciences. This article focuses on stochastic search algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms or particle swarm optimization. Stochastic search algorithms tackle hard real-world optimization problems, e.g., problems from chemical engineering, airfoil optimization, or bioinformatics, where classical methods from mathematical (...) optimization fail. Nowadays statistical tools that are able to cope with problems like small sample sizes, non-normal distributions, noisy results, etc. are developed for the analysis of algorithms. Although there are adequate tools to discuss the statistical significance of experimental data, statistical significance is not scientifically meaningful per se. It is necessary to bridge the gap between the statistical significance of an experimental result and its scientific meaning. We will propose some ideas on how to accomplish this task based on Mayo's learning model. (shrink)

The digitization of society and academic research endeavours have led to an explosion of interest in the potential uses of population data in research. Alongside this, increasing attention is focussing on the conditions necessary for maintaining a social license for research practices. Previous research has pointed to the importance of demonstrating “public benefits” from research for maintaining public support, yet there has been very little consideration of what the term “public benefits” means or what public expectations of “public benefits” (...) are. In order to address this pressing issue a series of deliberative workshops with members of the public were held across Scotland in May and June 2017. The workshops aimed to engage a cross-section of the Scottish population in in-depth discussions of the ways that the public – or publics – might benefit from data-intensive health research. The findings reported here discuss workshop participants’ understandings and expectations of health research; who they considered to be “the public” that should benefit from health research and; in what ways they felt “the public” should benefit. Workshop participants’ preference was clearly for the widest possible public benefit to be felt by all, but they also acknowledged the value in research aiming to primarily benefit vulnerable groups within society. A key focus of discussions was the extent to which workshop participants were confident that potential public benefits would be realised. A crucial consideration then is the extent to which mechanisms and political support are in place to realise and maximise the public benefits of data-intensive health research. (shrink)

The ethical treatment of cancer patientsparticipating in clinical trials requiresthat patients are well-informed about thepotential benefits and risks associated withparticipation. When patients enrolled in phaseI clinical trials report that their chance ofbenefit is very high, this is often taken as evidence of a failure of the informed consent process. We argue, however, that some simple themes from the philosophy of language may make such a conclusion less certain. First, the patient may receive conflicting statements from multiple speakers about (...) the expected outcome of the trial. Patients may be reporting the message they like best. Second, there is a potential problem of multivocality. Expressions of uncertainty of the frequency type can be confused with expressionsof uncertainty of the belief type. Patients may be informed using frequency-type statements and respond using belief-type statements. Third, each speech episode involving the investigator and the patient regarding outcomes may subservemultiple speech acts, some of which may beindirect. For example, a patient reporting ahigh expected benefit may be reporting a beliefabout the future, reassuring family members,and/or attempting to improve his or her outcome by apublic assertion of optimism. These sources oflinguistic confusion should be considered injudging whether the patient's reported expectation isgrounds for a bioethical concern that there hasbeen a failure in the informed consent process. (shrink)

The National Science Foundation (NSF) evaluates grant proposals based on two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. NSF gives applicants wide latitude to choose among a number of broader impacts, which include both benefits for the scientific community and benefits for society. This paper considers whether including potential societal benefits in the Broader Impacts Criterion leads to enhanced benefits for society. One prerequisite for realizing societal benefit is to transfer research results to potential users in a meaningful format. To determine (...) whether researchers who discuss broader impacts for society are more likely to engage in broad dissemination activities beyond the scientific publication, I analysed proposed broader impacts statements from recent award abstracts. Although 43% of researchers discussed potential benefits for society, those researchers were no more likely to propose dissemination of results to potential users than researchers who only discussed broader impacts for science. These findings suggest that considering potential societal benefit as a broader impact may not lead to more actual societal benefits and that many potentially useful results may not be disseminated beyond the scientific community. I conclude with policy recommendations that could increase the likelihood of realizing potential societal benefits from academic research. (shrink)

Although theoretical results for several algorithms in many application domains were presented during the last decades, not all algorithms can be analyzed fully theoretically. Experimentation is necessary. The analysis of algorithms should follow the same principles and standards of other empirical sciences. This article focuses on stochastic search algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms or particle swarm optimization. Stochastic search algorithms tackle hard real-world optimization problems, e.g., problems from chemical engineering, airfoil optimization, or bio-informatics, where classical methods from mathematical (...) optimization fail. Nowadays statistical tools that are able to cope with problems like small sample sizes, non-normal distributions, noisy results, etc. are developed for the analysis of algorithms. Although there are adequate tools to discuss the statistical significance of experimental data, statistical significance is not scientifically meaningful per se. It is necessary to bridge the gap between the statistical significance of an experimental result and its scientific meaning. We will propose some ideas on how to accomplish this task based on Mayo’s learning model (NPT*). (shrink)

The spread of Islam to a wide geography in a short time had an effect on the activities of notification and invitation rather than military success. While Muslims invite communities that have not yet converted to Islam, on the other hand, they have taken care to keep the Muslim community alive with sermons and guidance by not neglecting their own internal reforms. They encouraged people who are well-equipped in terms of religious knowledge and inclined to oratory to bring religious love (...) and enthusiasm to the new generations, especially to the new generations. This sermon expectation of society has encouraged the growth of powerful preachers throughout history in the Islamic community. One of the factors that make the sermon effective is the reinforcement of the speech content with the literary language. Human nature, which is inclined towards beauty by nature, values the word being spoken by considering aesthetic concerns. The way to make speeches that are concise in words, deep in meaning, declaratively clear and intelligible depends on the proper use of literary arts. Literary writers try to make the most of the possibilities of literature and make their works permanent. In this study, the work al-Mudhish of Ibn al-Jawzī, who is one of the preachers who made his sermons effective by taking advantage of the rich possibilities of Arabic literature, was examined within the framework of the relationship between literature and preaching. The prominent literary elements in the work were examined in titles, striking examples were selected and critiqued. As a result, it has been revealed what Ibn al-Jawzī’s bringing together his sermon language and his literary work has brought to the sermon text. (shrink)