While euthanasia and assisted suicide have been the subject of continuing public debate, few studies have examined the attitudes of relevant patient groups. This study systematically reviews the research literature on patients’ attitudes from 1989 to 2003, to i) identify the number of studies, ii) evaluate study methods and measures, and iii) examine prevalence of favourable attitudes. A systematic search was undertaken across five databases. Methods of the 21 studies identified varied considerably. General support for euthanasia and assisted suicide was (...) substantial across patient groups, with lower support for these as a personal option. The cancer / terminally ill / palliative care patient group had the lowest median general support for euthanasia (60% [IQ1=47, IQ3=65]) and assisted suicide (50% [IQ1=38, IQ3=71]), while the general/older/younger patient group had the lowest median personal preference for these (18% [IQ1=14, IQ3=27]). The effect of question context on level of support was unclear, due to the variety and number of contexts used across questions. There is still work that needs to be done in this controversial area before any robust conclusions can be made concerning the attitudes of patients to euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the adoption of a minimum set of standard questions would enhance this work. (shrink)

In The Veiled God, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft offers a detailed portrait of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s early life, ethics, and theology in its historical and social context, and critically reflects on the enduring relevance of his work for the study of religion.

Objective—To determine the objectivity, consistency and professional unanimity in the initiation, continuation and withdrawal of life-prolonging procedures in intensive care–to determine methods, time-scale for withdrawal and communication with both staff and relatives–to explore any professional unease about legality, morality or professional defensibility.Design—A structured questionnaire directed at clinical nurse managers for intensive care.Setting—All intensive care units in the Yorkshire region.Results—The survey reported a lack of consistency and objectivity in decision making in this area, with accompanying unease amongst staff.Conclusions—There is a need (...) to work towards more consistent care, both before and during admission, for the protection of the individual patient and to allow rational assessment of intensive care need. Comprehensive audit should lead to objective defensible decisions and facilitate informed choice. More open debate and better communication should minimise this issue as a source of stress amongst staff in intensive care. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a natural experiment involving academic cheating by university students. We explore the relationship of moral judgment to actual behavior, as well as the relationship between the honesty of students self-reports and the extent of cheating. We were able to determine the extent to which students actually cheated on the take-home portion of an accounting exam. The take-home problem was not assigned with the intent of inducing cheating among students. However, (...) the high rate of observed cheating prompted the instructor to return to class and ask the students to provide information on their motivation. The students' responses are the data analyzed in this natural experiment. We found that in a simple regression the relationship between moral judgment scores and cheating behavior was insignificant. However, when we tested whether including Utilizer scores affected the relationship of cheating and moral judgment we found that Utilizer affected the relationship significantly. Finally, we found that moral judgment and honesty were not related, but higher levels of cheating behavior related to less honesty. (shrink)

It is commonly understood that over-arching transcendental values (TVs) play a major role in directly influencing individual and group behaviours, including those relating to the environment. This paper challenges this approach, by arguing that there is good evidence to indicate that personal contexts – rather than TVs – inform many decisions that individuals need to make. As such, the paper argues that individuals use their TVs as a guide to forming contextual values, in a way that TVs only influence daily (...) behaviours indirectly. In order to review the potential utility of these arguments, we offer a secondary analysis of the International Social Survey Programme. The results indicate that contexts can influence behaviours independently of the set of (transcendental) values that people may hold. (shrink)

The current study is designed to propose and test a model about the ethical reputation of a target manager who must decide whether to engage in earnings management. We employ an experimental approach to examine the potential negative reputation effects within the internal labor market of a firm that occur as a consequence of earnings management. We examine participants’ responses to a hypothetical (target) manager when both the target’s behavior and the corporate incentives were manipulated. Participants assessed how ethical they (...) believed a target manager to be, based on the target’s decision regarding earnings management and the nature of the corporate incentives. Participants also assessed the target’s managerial ability. Participants’ judgments regarding the target’s morality were significantly affected by the target’s behavior, but were not affected by the incentive structure. Ability judgments were significantly and positively related with morality assessments. Further analysis indicates that morality assessments mediate the relationships between the target’s behavior and the participants’ willingness to extend work-related opportunities to the target. Implications of these results for management control systems design and for future research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents an oral history of farming in the Southern Yangtze Valley in China, covering the period from pre-liberation to recent market liberalization. Using the stories and observations of 31 elderly residents of a small water town, the paper describes the hard labor of traditional farming practices and the acquiescence of many when, post-liberation, they could leave farming for better-paid factory work. However, in a departure from conventional analyses, these oral histories suggest that the co-dependency culture of traditional farming (...) has broken down, and farmers are unwilling to return to the land and continue farming. The changes in knowledge cultures of local farmers in recent decades are not likely to lead to pathways to working with incoming modern “outsider farmers,” nor able to be blended with potential new “urbanite” knowledges of those who might wish to increase organic farming. The current knowledge cultures of these farmers has shifted as needed to the optimization of family unit needs, naturally leading them to urbanization and the relinquishing of their ties to the land. For cultural rather than economic reasons, these farmers see themselves as the last peasant farmers of Tianshanzhuang. (shrink)

For the last two decades a doctrine called ‘‘eliminative materialism’’ (or sometimes just ‘‘eliminativism’’) has been a major focus of discussion in the philosophy of mind. It is easy to understand why eliminativism has attracted so much attention, for it is hard to imagine a more radical and provocative doctrine. What eliminativism claims is that the intentional states and processes that are alluded to in our everyday descriptions and explanations of people’s mental lives and their actions are _myths_. Like the (...) gods that Homer invoked to explain the outcome of battles, or the witches that Inquisitors invoked to explain local catastrophes, they _do not exist_. According to eliminativists, there are no such things as beliefs or desires or hopes or fears or thoughts. These putative states and processes are the badly misguided posits of a seriously mistaken theory, just like phlogiston and caloric fluid and the luminiferous ether.¹. (shrink)

The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this (...) article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ (Cooper, 2014). (shrink)

The current study is designed to propose and test a model about the ethical reputation of a target manager who must decide whether to engage in earnings management. We employ an experimental approach to examine the potential negative reputation effects within the internal labor market of a firm that occur as a consequence of earnings management. We examine participants’ responses to a hypothetical (target) manager when both the target’s behavior and the corporate incentives were manipulated. Participants assessed how ethical they (...) believed a target manager to be, based on the target’s decision regarding earnings management and the nature of the corporate incentives. Participants also assessed the target’s managerial ability. Participants’ judgments regarding the target’s morality were significantly affected by the target’s behavior, but were not affected by the incentive structure. Ability judgments were significantly and positively related with morality assessments. Further analysis indicates that morality assessments mediate the relationships between the target’s behavior and the participants’ willingness to extend work-related opportunities to the target. Implications of these results for management control systems design and for future research are discussed. (shrink)

jild-i 1. Chand maqālah darbārah-ʼi maqāmāt-i [i.e. maqālāt] ʻilmī, va mujāhadāt-i farhangī, va khadamāt-i Islāmī-i ū-- -- jild-i 2. Chand maqālah az Prūfisūr ʻAbd al-Javād Falāṭūrī Iṣfahānī.

In this paper we look at the manual analysis of arguments and how this compares to the current state of automatic argument analysis. These considerations are used to develop a new approach combining a machine learning algorithm to extract propositions from text, with a topic model to determine argument structure. The results of this method are compared to a manual analysis.

We show how faceted search using a combination of traditional classification systems and mixed-membership topic models can go beyond keyword search to inform resource discovery, hypothesis formulation, and argument extraction for interdisciplinary research. Our test domain is the history and philosophy of scientific work on animal mind and cognition. The methods can be generalized to other research areas and ultimately support a system for semi-automatic identification of argument structures. We provide a case study for the application of the methods to (...) the problem of identifying and extracting arguments about anthropomorphism during a critical period in the development of comparative psychology. We show how a combination of classification systems and mixed-membership models trained over large digital libraries can inform resource discovery in this domain. Through a novel approach of “drill-down” topic modeling—simultaneously reducing both the size of the corpus and the unit of analysis—we are able to reduce a large collection of fulltext volumes to a much smaller set of pages within six focal volumes containing arguments of interest to historians and philosophers of comparative psychology. The volumes identified in this way did not appear among the first ten results of the keyword search in the HathiTrust digital library and the pages bear the kind of “close reading” needed to generate original interpretations that is the heart of scholarly work in the humanities. Zooming back out, we provide a way to place the books onto a map of science originally constructed from very different data and for different purposes. The multilevel approach advances understanding of the intellectual and societal contexts in which writings are interpreted. (shrink)