On the verge of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors, we examine the organization’s focus on academic freedom, shared governance, and the challenges the AAUP faced during its early years. The history is a fairly uncontested one: higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States was the context for the struggle over academic freedom and shared governance. Dismissed professors, resignations by colleagues, and the struggle of professionalization (...) characterize the period.1 A century later, we wonder about the state of academic freedom and shared governance. We argue that higher education is currently so.. (shrink)

In the United Kingdom women have access to termination of pregnancy for maternal reasons until 24 weeks’ completed gestation, but it is accepted practice for children born at or beyond 25 weeks’ gestation to be treated according to the child’s perceived best interests even if this is not in accordance with parental wishes. The authors present a case drawn from clinical practice which highlights the discomfort that parents may feel about such an abrupt change in their rights over their child, (...) and argue that parents should have greater autonomy over treatment decisions regarding their prematurely born children. (shrink)

Four ethical values — maximizing benefits, treating equally, promoting and rewarding instrumental value, and giving priority to the worst off — yield six specific recommendations for allocating medical resources in the Covid-19 pandemic: maximize benefits; prioritize health workers; do not allocate on a first-come, first-served basis; be responsive to evidence; recognize research participation; and apply the same principles to all Covid-19 and non–Covid-19 patients.

Based on our experience in teaching ethics, we have developed, tested, and presented in this article a program of instruction that rests on four pillars: popular feature films, a six-stage ethical decision-making process, the principles necessary to address ethical situations, and the classroom instructor. Taken separately, there is nothing new or unique in these pillars. Taken together, however, and to our knowledge, these four pillars, including the requirement that each student is expected to prepare a written abstract of the film (...) prior to the classroom discussion of that film in which the student is expected to demonstrate a practical application of ethical principles to actual and concrete moral situations, constitute a new, unique, and tested way to teach ethics to undergraduate students of management and economics. (shrink)

Our comments focus on the ACMCode of Ethics and situate the Code within ageneral ethical decision-making process tospecify the five steps which logically precedehuman action in ethical matters and determinethat action, and the individual differencetraits in these five steps which bear upon theresolution of an ethical problem and lead tomorally responsible action. Our main purpose isto present a cognitive moral processing modelwhich computing professionals can use to betterunderstand their professional rights andduties. It is clear that the Code providessubstantial guidance in (...) the areas ofintellectual property rights, unauthorizedentry into computing systems, and privacy. Inother areas, such as obscenity onbulletin-board systems, the Code is silent. Aninteractive software program which allows theuser to see the ways in which the Code isintegrated and instructive in the six-stepmoral decision-making process is accessible viathe internet. Our secondary purpose is toreformulate the Code as a set of questionswhich allow the computing professional to seepractices which diminish the human person asunethical and those which enhance the humanperson as ethical. (shrink)

Max Anderson and Peter Escher’s The MBA Oath addresses the need for a set of ethical standards to provide guidance to MBA graduates as they go about their everyday professional business. Their oath is relevant to the concerns of others in business but clearly was inspired by the special problems they encountered in the classroom as members of the Harvard MBA class of 2009. The oath and the book itself evolved from the financial meltdown of 2008 for which MBAs often (...) felt that they were being held accountable. Our review begins with the oath itself. Then we turn to the rest of the book in which we have organized our comments around its strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

The authors demonstrate that ethical judgments can be biased when previous judgments serve as a point of reference against which a current situation is judged. Scenarios describing ethical or unethical sales practices were used in an experiment to prime subjects who subsequently rated the ethics of an ethically ambiguous target scenario. The target tended to be rated as more ethical by subjects primed with unethical scenarios, and less ethical by subjects primed with ethical scenarios. This "contrast effect," however, is contingent (...) upon individual differences. Specifically, subjects with high (versus low) needs for cognition are more likely to process and use the information presented in the priming scenarios as a point of reference against which to judge the target situation, and hence more prone to the contrastive bias. Implications for avoiding unintentional moral relativism in business decision-making are discussed. (shrink)

This article addresses the two main obstacles — ignorance and conflict — that block the pathway to ethically proper conduct, both generally in business and specifically in marketing. It begins with a brief examination of theories of the moral good which emphasizes the Greco-Roman humanistic tradition and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. A professional code of ethics, such as the code of the American Marketing Association, is meaningful only if human beings are regarded as making moral judgments that, objectively speaking, are (...) morally wrong, that is only when the code is considered a set of moral absolutes.Following that, the question of ignorance is dealt with utilizing the American Marketing Association code of ethics. The specific items in that code are related to the three central principles of economic justice: equivalence, contributive justice, and distributive justice. In the second section, the question of conflict is encountered in the context of four other ethical principles — double effect, culpability, good end and bad means, self-determination — that are likely to be helpful in dealing with two cases that are especially instructive because they are limiting cases: the dilemma and the hard case. The role of the hero or champion in conflicts is underscored. (shrink)

Is it justified to detect minor genetic aberrations before birth and terminate pregnancies based upon such information? We present the case of a woman who wanted Prenatal Diagnosis to detect whether her female fetus was a Haemophilia mutation carrier. Such carriers are usually healthy.She wished to eradicate the Haemophilia mutation from her family to avoid future generations being affected and to protect her children from having to go through PND themselves. We explore existing practice guidelines, public attitudes and possible objections (...) to providing PND for minor abnormalities. We argue that in a society where couples have considerable autonomy relating to decisions about the fetus at least until viability, the routine restriction of PND for minor genetic abnormalities would be an unjust infringement of individual liberty. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of Roman Catholic teachings on social justice and rights to health care. It argues that contemporary societies, such as those in North America and Western Europe, have an obligation to provide health care to their citizens as a matter of right. Moral considerations provide a basis for evaluating concerns about the role of equality when determining health care entitlements and giving some precision to the widespread belief that the right to health care requires equal entitlement (...) to health care benefits. (shrink)

In this short response to Peter Clarke's thorough and interesting tracing of the developments in Richard McCormick's approach to moral questions, I take a perspective external to the concerns of Clarke's paper. I propose to look at the developments in McCormick's approach not so much from the perspective of contemporary Catholic moral theology but from that of the impact on the practices and beliefs of the Catholic community. From that perspective, the really important events in McCormick's theological development are his (...) rejection of the received teaching on contraception and his closely connected embracing of a moral theory that implies that there are no moral absolutes, namely, proportionalism. (shrink)

Max Anderson and Peter Escher's The MBA Oath addresses the need for a set of ethical standards to provide guidance to MBA graduates as they go about their everyday professional business. Their oath is relevant to the concerns of others in business but clearly was inspired by the special problems they encountered in the classroom as members of the Harvard MBA class of 2009. The oath and the book itself evolved from the financial meltdown of 2008 for which MBAs often (...) felt that they were being held accountable. Our review begins with the oath itself. Then we turn to the rest of the book in which we have organized our comments around its strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates’ promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education—previously recognized as a universal guarantee—on the education consumer’s ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude (...) that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy. (shrink)