This paper reviews studies of corporate ethical codes published since 2000 and concludes that codes be can effective instruments for shaping ethical behavior and guiding employee decision-making. Culture and effective communication are key components to a code’s success. If codes are embedded in the culture and embraced by the leaders, they are likely to be successful. Communicating the code’s precepts in an effective way is crucial to its success. Discussion between employees and management is a key component of successful ethical (...) codes. (shrink)

The dramatic increase in the number of corporate ethical codes over the past 20 years has been attributed to the Watergate scandal and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ethical codes differ somewhat from profesional codes and mission statements; yet the terms are frequently interchanged and often confused in the literature. Ethical code studies are reviewed in terms of how codes are communicated to employees and whether implications for violating codes are discussed. Most studies use content analysis to determine subjects in (...) codes. Little information is available about how codes are communicated, whether they are accepted and used by employees, and whether they affect employee/corporate behavior. More research on ethical codes is needed to answer some of these questions. (shrink)

Moral enhancement is an ostensibly laudable project. Who wouldn’t want people to become more moral? Still, the project’s approach is crucial. We can distinguish between two approaches for moral enhancement: direct and indirect. Direct moral enhancements aim at bringing about particular ideas, motives or behaviors. Indirect moral enhancements, by contrast, aim at making people more reliably produce the morally correct ideas, motives or behaviors without committing to the content of those ideas, motives and/or actions. I will argue, on Millian grounds, (...) that the value of disagreement puts serious pressure on proposals for relatively widespread direct moral enhancement. A more acceptable path would be to focus instead on indirect moral enhancements while staying neutral, for the most part, on a wide range of substantive moral claims. I will outline what such indirect moral enhancement might look like, and why we should expect it to lead to general moral improvement. (shrink)

While philosophers are often concerned with the conditions for moral knowledge or justification, in practice something arguably less demanding is just as, if not more, important – reliably making correct moral judgments. Judges and juries should hand down fair sentences, government officials should decide on just laws, members of ethics committees should make sound recommendations, and so on. We want such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. The purpose of this paper (...) is to propose a method of enhancing the moral reliability of such agents. In particular, we advocate for a procedural approach; certain internal processes generally contribute to people’s moral reliability. Building on the early work of Rawls, we identify several particular factors related to moral reasoning that are specific enough to be the target of practical intervention: logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence, openness, empathy and bias. Improving on these processes can in turn make people more morally reliable in a variety of contexts and has implications for recent debates over moral enhancement. (shrink)

Moral disengagement was initially conceptualized as a process through which people reconstrue unethical behaviors, with the effect of deactivating self-sanctions and thereby clearing the way for ethical transgressions. Our article challenges how researchers now conceptualize moral disengagement. The current literature is overly liberal, in that it mixes two related but distinct constructs—process moral disengagement and the propensity to morally disengage—creating ambiguity in the findings. It is overly conservative, as it adopts a challengeable classification scheme of “four points in moral self-regulation” (...) and perpetuates defining moral disengagement via a set of eight psychological mechanisms, narrowing our understanding of the phenomenon. To address these problems, we propose to define process moral disengagement intensionally (specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for correct application of the term) as intrapsychic cognitive reasoning processes through which people selectively reconstrue a moral judgment “behavior B by actor A is morally wrong” and shift it toward becoming “behavior B is not morally wrong” or “actor A is not responsible for behavior B.” This definition achieves disambiguation and increased concept clarity. We leverage the definition to motivate a classification scheme for psychological mechanisms of moral disengagement along two dimensions—reconstruing morality and reconstruing agency—and to initiate an open inventory of psychological mechanisms that specify how process moral disengagement operates. (shrink)

Futile treatment. Do not resuscitate. These terms and the thoughts they evoke may be unfamiliar to families with ill children. Similarly, laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, are probably unfamiliar. Yet these terms and laws, and, more important, their implications, are part of a new world of health care into which more families are thrust—the world of wrenching and complicated decisions.Although the number of these situations is increasing and even (...) predictable, the infrastructure of support services for families dealing with these medical decisions for seriously ill children has not been adequately addressed or developed. Parents know that some children are born with or develop serious illnesses and die. Amid absorbing large amounts of new information and interpreting the parameters and implications of what they are learning about their child's condition, families are forced by circumstances to assess—and to act on—their most critical, and perhaps previously unexamined, values. (shrink)

The “best-medical-interests” standard for reporting findings does not go far enough. Research subjects have a right to know about any comprehensible piece of information about them that is generated by research in which they are participating. An even broader standard may sometimes be appropriate: if subjects agree to accept information that they may not understand, then all information may be disclosed.

Alongside recent world-historical dates such as 11 September 2001, we would place 15 February 2003. On that day, around 10 million people—some estimates are much higher—demonstrated on the streets of the world's cities in opposition to the US war on Iraq, then being merely threatened. Sartre's study of the elements of history in Critique of Dialectical Reason and its unpublished ethical sequel, Morality and History, illuminate, and are illuminated by, the movements that contest today's global system. From the Critique, we'll (...) engage his notions of negative universality as threat of death and the "fusing" of "series" into "groups" as response. From Morality and History, we'll take "integral humanity" as a goal and standard; it seems to us built into the global act of February 15 and into the wider movement of which that day was a moment. After comparing a Sartrean take on February 15 with the famous Habermas-Derrida appeal inspired by that day, we'll close with some reciprocal illuminations between Sartre's theories and Zapatista practice. (shrink)

Not much has been written about how the ethics of U.S. business executives are perceived by the American public, yet the perception of integrity is important to both businesses and their investors. This study examines the U.S. public’s perceptions of the ethics of American business executives using Gallup Poll data for the past thirty years. Organizations with unethical executives have trouble attracting investors, customers, and new managerial talent. They suffer lawsuits, market share deterioration, and often prison time for the once-revered (...) leaders. This study also looked at the U.S.’s relative standing on the Corruption Perceptions Index and the Edelman Trust Barometer. Confidence in the ethics of the U.S. business executive remains fairly low on the Gallup Poll surveys and the U.S. has declined on the CPI and Edelman Trust Barometer. (shrink)

What are the implications of living in a gender system that recognizes “two and only two” genders? For those individuals whose “gender displays” are inappropriate, there can be a variety of consequences, many of them negative. In this article, the author provides an analysis of her experiences as a woman whose appearance often leads to gender misattribution. She discusses the consequences of the gender system for her identity and her interactions. The author also examines Lorber's assertion that “gender bending” actually (...) serves to perpetuate gender categories rather than to break them down, and she suggests how her experiences might contradict Lorber's argument. Using her biography to examine the social construction of gender, she both illustrates and extends theoretical work in this area. (shrink)

Communicating ethical values is a serious issue for a number of organizations. While ethical codes are useful, they cannot exist alone. Organizations must make certain codes reflect the ideals of individuals in the organization and the ethical expectations must be clearly communicated. This study examined the sources (people) and channels (ways messages were received) that affected how employees learned about ethics. Results showed that training and orientation programs were affirmed as sources of learning along with teaching others. Codes and handbooks (...) were also identified as ways employees learned about ethics in their organization. Ethical issues were discussed more frequently with fellow employees than with supervisors suggesting that managers could be more proactive about discussing ethics with employees. (shrink)

Participants watched themselves in a mirror while another person behind them, hidden from view, extended hands forward on each side where participants’ hands would normally appear. The hands performed a series of movements. When participants could hear instructions previewing each movement, they reported an enhanced feeling of controlling the hands. Hearing instructions for the movements also enhanced skin conductance responses when a rubber band was snapped on the other’s wrist after the movements. Such vicarious agency was not felt when the (...) instructions followed the movements, and participants’ own covert movement mimicry was not essential to the influence of previews on reported control. (shrink)

Some have objected to human enhancement on the grounds that it violates the autonomy of the enhanced. These objections, however, overlook the interesting possibility that autonomy itself could be enhanced. How, exactly, to enhance autonomy is a difficult problem due to the numerous and diverse accounts of autonomy in the literature. Existing accounts of autonomy enhancement rely on narrow and controversial conceptions of autonomy. However, we identify one feature of autonomy common to many mainstream accounts: reasoning ability. Autonomy can then (...) be enhanced by improving people’s reasoning ability, in particular through cognitive enhancement; given how valuable autonomy is usually taken to be, this gives us extra reason to pursue such cognitive enhancements. Moreover, autonomy-based objections will be especially weak against such enhancements. As we will argue, those who are worried that enhancements will inhibit people’s autonomy should actually embrace those enhancements that will improve autonomy. (shrink)

In recent decades, scholars have shown a distinct new willingness to concede the important place of religion in the life and thought of the philosopher Franz Brentano. However, these studies are still dominated by the presumption that Brentano's life and thought are best understood according to a model of secularisation as a progressive waning of religion. This essay asks whether such a presumption is the best way of understanding the complex interconnections between various elements of his philosophical and religious ideas. (...) It posits that a better appreciation of his position entails a confrontation with Brentano's historical imagination, and especially the structuring role of his approach to the history of philosophy as one manifesting regular cycles of decline and regeneration. Brentano's theory of the four phases of philosophy, though not the final word on how he viewed history, was nevertheless an exercise in thinking about the ways history accommodates various forms of progress and repetition. It was therefore a salutary means for thinking about the evolution of religion in ways that challenge any simple understanding of secularisation. (shrink)

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, it provides a (...) useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases. (shrink)

It is generally unquestioned that human subjects research review boards should assess the ethical acceptability of protocols. It says so right on the tin, after all: they are explicitly called research ethics committees in the UK. But it is precisely those sorts of unchallenged assumptions that should, from time to time, be assessed and critiqued, in case they are in fact unfounded. John Stuart Mill's objection to suppressers of dissent is instructive here: “If the opinion is right, they are deprived (...) of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error”.1 Andrew Moore and Andrew Donnelly's compelling article, “The job of ‘ethics committees’”, is just this sort of challenge to conventional wisdom, a rejection of the notion that review boards should be considering ethical matters at all.2 If true, we should be substantially reforming our research ethics policies. And if false, rebuttals would help strengthen and ground the otherwise unquestioned assumption of the role of ethics committees. As it happens, I will argue that their critiques fall into the second category. While mistaken, they present a valuable opportunity to clarify the role of ethics committees and their relationship to relevant codes. In particular, I will defend a hybrid account where codes have strict primacy, but leave significant room for review boards …. (shrink)

Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name “Garbo” and officially registered the change from Greta Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4 December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo, “wood nymph,” suggests the association with otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the Spanish meaning of the word, “animal grace sublimated,” combines the animal passion (...) and spiritual grace that were part of her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo’s life and work the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king. The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo’s initial act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes his own signature.What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks the evidence. In her article “Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars,” Louise Brooks suggests that the popular image of Garbo—the “dumb Swede” transformed by Stiller’s art—was perpetuated by Hollywood executives eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent . “The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director, watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul upon the screen.” Although recent accounts of Garbo’s life and work have advanced beyond the “dumb Swede” publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar, almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative power. “Her contribution,” states Kenneth Tynan, “is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs” . Comparing Garbo to a “watermark in a blank sheet of paper,” David Thomson says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: “She must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it out.” In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the impress of male voyeuristic fantasy. Betsy Erkkila, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet, and a collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing. (shrink)

Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, (...) 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website. (shrink)

This paper addresses the views of R.G. Collingwood and Theodor Adorno on the role of amusement and art in what each of them saw as the crisis of contemporary Western civilization. We will begin by showing how the aesthetic theories of Collingwood and Adorno develop out of their shared concerns about the harmful effects of amusement and bad art on the consciousness of human beings. We will argue that a productive dialogue between these two figures clarifies that the value of (...) art consists in its ability to remedy the corruption of the mental and emotional lives of human beings and in helping to fashion a different social and political order. As part of this, we will show how, despite appearances, Adorno’s aesthetic cognitivism and Collingwood’s expression theory of art agree with and complement one another in significant ways. In establishing this point, this work will leave us with an understanding of art that is more comprehensive and better equipped to address the crisis of contemporary Western society. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that reproductive genetic manipulation technologies like mitochondrial replacement and germline CRISPR modifications cannot be said to save anyone’s life because, counterfactually, no one would suffer more or die sooner absent the intervention. The present article argues that, on the contrary, reproductive genetic manipulations may be life-saving (and, from this, have therapeutic value) under an appropriate population health perspective. As such, popular reports of reproductive genetic manipulations potentially saving lives or preventing disease are not necessarily mistaken, (...) though such terminology still requires further empirical validation. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

The current prevailing view is that participation in biomedical research is above and beyond the call of duty. While some commentators have offered reasons against this, we propose a novel public goods argument for an obligation to participate in biomedical research. Biomedical knowledge is a public good, available to any individual even if that individual does not contribute to it. Participation in research is a critical way to support an important public good. Consequently, all have a duty to participate. The (...) current social norm is that individuals participate only if they have a good reason to do so. The public goods argument implies that individuals should participate unless they have a good reason not to. Such a shift would be of great aid to the progress of biomedical research, eventually making society significantly healthier and longer lived. (shrink)

This article proposes to identify risk factors for moral distress from the literature, validate them through expert analysis and provide the basis for a new tool to assess the risk of moral distress among nurses. Moral distress is related to the psychological, emotional and physiological aspects of nursing. It arises from constraints caused by various circumstances and can lead to significant negative consequences. A scoping review and validation through expert analysis were used. The research question guiding this study was as (...) follows: What is known about risk factors for moral distress in nursing? The research was conducted using multiple sources including electronic databases and lists of references from relevant literature. The final sample consisted of 38 studies. A validation analysis was conducted by experts during December 2014 and June 2015. To exclude a risk factor item, at least 80% of the experts had to agree with the exclusion. In total, 53 risk factors for moral distress were identified, reviewed by the experts and grouped to form a new instrument that may help to identify risk for moral distress and to address its consequences. (shrink)

The prospect of consumable meat produced in a laboratory setting without the need to raise and slaughter animals is both realistic and exciting. Not only could such in vitro meat become popular due to potential cost savings, but it also avoids many of the ethical and environmental problems with traditional meat productions. However, as with any new technology, in vitro meat is likely to face some detractors. We examine in detail three potential objections: 1) in vitro meat is disrespectful, either (...) to nature or to animals; 2) it will reduce the number of happy animals in the world; and 3) it will open the door to cannibalism. While each objection has some attraction, we ultimately find that all can be overcome. The upshot is that in vitro meat production is generally permissible and, especially for ethical vegetarians, worth promoting. (shrink)

Much existing economic theory overlooks ethics. Rather than situating the market and values at separate extremes of a continuum, Ethics and the Market contends that the two are necessarily and intimately related. This volume brings together some of the best work in the social economics tradition, with contributions on the social economy, social capital, identity, ethnicity and development, the household, externalities, international finance, capability, and pedagogy. Proceeding from an examination of the moral implications of markets, the book goes on to (...) explore such themes as the institutional arrangements of social economies, individual and household decision-making, and economic development in a global context. Ethics and the Market illuminates the diverse and dynamic theoretical approaches that are employed in social economics, reflecting on their continuously evolving relationship with neoclassical economics. This book will prove vital reading for students and academics in the fields of Economics, Sociology, Gender Studies, and Public Policy. (shrink)

Many of our children are poorly prepared to face the challenges of school and growing up in our complex society. The term readiness is misrepresented in the field of education; this book implies a different type of readiness involving a process that can be taught and nurtured within each child. Going beyond what our schools typically assess to determine readiness to attend school, which is often based upon age, this book addresses the synergistic aspects of readiness, learning, and adaptation that (...) allow children to be optimally ready to learning and capable of handing for challenges and transitions. This more holistic and interactive understanding of readiness involves not only the typical physical development, but also psychological aspects including the cognitive, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, and environmental pieces. The goal of this book is to provide the necessary lens through which we can see what is really hindering many children in schools today, along with possible approaches and interventions typically not seen as educational in nature, but what may be just the needed prescription for our ailing youth. (shrink)