Through a witty and engaging style, this book is for anyone who has a job (employees, managers, and leaders), and who wants to do the right thing, but aren't always sure what that means, how to go about it, or how to withstand the forces that push all of us away from being ethical. By poking fun at the ironies and hypocrisies of human behavior, Exercising Your Ethics prompts readers to leverage techniques that can help us become more deliberate about (...) choosing value-driven actions. In a world that seems to reward winning, regardless of how it is achieved, we need a clearer reason for wanting to be and become our best selves. This approach to business ethics is innovative, fresh, and evocative in that the serious subject is treated in an informal and adventurous manner, poking fun at the ironies and hypocrisies of human behavior. Readers will see how our race to achieve quarterly profits, combined with a self-indulgent consumption-based economy, has shaped our entire lives. Readers will delight in the book's humor, as the ironies of human interaction prompt introspection to consider how to better equip oneself with the knowledge, tools, and techniques to engage in and support others in the path to moral action at work. Bringing Ethics to Work explains business ethics in a way that is engaging, understandable and enables the reader to recognise behaviors in themselves and others. It is ideal for adult education (students in undergraduate, Masters, or professional degree programs) and training within organizational settings (employees, management, and future leaders). HR professionals, team leaders, professional coaches, and organizational ethics trainers will find the book particularly insightful and useful. (shrink)

A volume in Ethics in Practice Series Editors Robert A. Giacalone, Temple University and Carole L. Jurkiewicz, Louisiana State University Making sure that performance in business enterprise is achieved ethically is no small task. Leaders, managers, and employees at every level of the organization need to utilize systems and processes that support ethical strength, establishing a workplace where responsibility, accountability, and doing the right thing are genuinely valued and practiced. Management can help support ethical performance in workers' daily task actions (...) by underscoring the importance of rules and regulations, while also moving to ensure that employees understand and care about doing what's right. Given that most firms only emphasize compliance in ethics training, there is vast room for additional development. Training people to be less bad is not good enough. With the infusion of mandatory requirements for ethics training programs in some firms and self-imposed initiatives in others, we see a range of deliverables. To advance ethics in practice, a closer look at ethics training in the workplace is warranted. This volume attempts to better understand ethics in organizational settings by taking a focused look at the science of ethics training and best practices, areas for concern, specific techniques, application outcomes, how to cultivate an ethical work environment, and considering where opportunities for additional inquiry reside. Managers and practitioners reading this book will garner specific trends and useful techniques that can inform, guide, and improve their efforts to build ethical awareness and effective ethical decisionmaking within their organizations. Academic scholars will find this book useful, providing insight as to where additional research and empirical work is needed. (shrink)

Scholars have shown renewed interest in the construct of courage. Recent studies have explored its theoretical underpinnings and measurement. Yet courage is generally discussed in its broad form to include physical, psychological, and moral features. To understand a more practical form of moral courage, research is needed to uncover how ethical challenges are effectively managed in organizational settings. We argue that professional moral courage (PMC) is a managerial competency. To describe it and derive items for scale development, we studied managers (...) in the U.S. military and examined prior work on moral courage. Two methods were used to measure PMC producing a five dimensional scale that organized under a single second-order factor, which we termed overall PMC. The five dimensions are moral agency, multiple values, endurance of threats, going beyond compliance, and moral goals. Convergent and discriminant validity are analyzed by use of confirmatory factor analysis procedures. We conclude by presenting a framework for proactive organizational ethics, which reflects how to support PMC as a management practice. (shrink)

We present this special issue on positive organizational ethics (POE) to highlight those pursuing positive subjective experiences, positive attributes of individuals and groups, and positive practices that contribute to ethical and virtuous behavior in organizations. Although prior research has offered some insight in this area, there is still much to be learned about how to cultivate and sustain ethical strength in different types of organizations and how goodness can emerge from and in spite of human failings. After describing the positive (...) movement, we position POE as a discrete area of inquiry within the broader positive behavioral sciences, at the intersection of positive behavioral studies and business ethics. After defining our terms and purpose for creating the POE domain, we introduce the articles in this special issue. The introduction concludes with suggested topics for future research. (shrink)

Leader-managers face a myriad of competing values when they engage in ethical decision-making. Few studies help us understand why certain reasons for action are justified, taking precedence over others when people choose to respond to an ethical dilemma. To help address this matter we began with a qualitative approach to disclose leader-managers' moral motives when they decide to address a work-related ethical dilemma. One hundred and nine military officers were asked to provide their reasons for taking action, justifications of their (...) reasons, and to explain these justifications. We used network analysis techniques to identify a hierarchical motive structure. The motive structure is a cognitive map that identifies ethical motives and perceptions of how these ethical motives relate to each other. The motives identified represent classic conceptualizations of moral behavior; namely, virtue theories, consequentialism, and deontological theories, along with another category that expressed the emotional significance of the moral judgment, which we refer to as emotional empiricism. (shrink)

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have brought attention to the challenges of business ethics in intercultural settings. A lack of understanding regarding cultural pluralism in business ethics education has motivated some scholars to consider a broader lens, one that recognizes the influence of religion (Spalding and Franks 2012). Management awareness of the similarities and differences that stem from deeply held beliefs is essential, as unstated thoughts and feelings caninfluence starting assumptions, even before ethical decision-making processes begin. If deeply entrenched cultural traditions and (...) religious values remain implicit and/or misunderstood, collaborative efforts may be derailed due to an inadvertent lack of respect and understanding. Because many Westerners remain unfamiliar with Muslim-based beliefs, the authors advance business ethics education by offering an overview of business practices in the Middle East. A modeland exercise are presented as tools to promote awareness of cultural perspectives. This platform for understanding will help adult learners see how their personal origins can shape and influence management thought. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics and probability theory share one peculiarity. Both have well established mathematical formalisms, yet both are subject to controversy about the meaning and interpretation of their basic concepts. Since probability plays a fundamental role in QM, the conceptual problems of one theory can affect the other. We first classify the interpretations of probability into three major classes: inferential probability, ensemble probability, and propensity. Class is the basis of inductive logic; deals with the frequencies of events in repeatable experiments; describes (...) a form of causality that is weaker than determinism. An important, but neglected, paper by P. Humphreys demonstrated that propensity must differ mathematically, as well as conceptually, from probability, but he did not develop a theory of propensity. Such a theory is developed in this paper. Propensity theory shares many, but not all, of the axioms of probability theory. As a consequence, propensity supports the Law of Large Numbers from probability theory, but does not support Bayes theorem. Although there are particular problems within QM to which any of the classes of probability may be applied, it is argued that the intrinsic quantum probabilities are most naturally interpreted as quantum propensities. This does not alter the familiar statistical interpretation of QM. But the interpretation of quantum states as representing knowledge is untenable. Examples show that a density matrix fails to represent knowledge. (shrink)

In “Meeting the Moment: Bioethics in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” Camisha Russell calls for transforming “bioethics-as-usual” with help from “outsiders”. Prior scholars agree...

Answering important public health questions often requires collection of sensitive information about individuals. For example, our understanding of how HIV is transmitted and how to prevent it only came about with people's willingness to share information about their sexual and drug-using behaviors. Given the scientific need for sensitive, personal information, researchers have a corresponding ethical and legal obligation to maintain the confidentiality of data they collect and typically promise in consent forms to restrict access to it and not to publish (...) identifying data.The interests of others, however, can threaten researchers' promises of confidentiality when legal demands are made to access research data. In some cases, the subject of the litigation is tightly connected to the research questions, and litigants' interest in the data is not surprising. Researchers conducting studies on tobacco or occupational or other chemical exposures, for example, are relatively frequent targets of subpoenas. (shrink)

Researchers now commonly collect biospecimens for genomic analysis together with information from mobile devices and electronic health records. This rich combination of data creates new opportunities for understanding and addressing important health issues, but also intensifies challenges to privacy and confidentiality. Here, we elucidate the “web” of legal protections for precision medicine research by integrating findings from qualitative interviews with structured legal research and applying them to realistic research scenarios involving various privacy threats.

Administraation of antiretroviral therapy to women during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and to infants postnatally can dramatidy reduce mother-to- child HIV transmission. However, pregnant women need to know that they are HIV-infected to take advantage of antiretroviral therapy, and many women do not know their HIV status. One-half of HIV-infected infants in the United States were bornto women who had not been tested for HIV or for whom the time of testing was not known. Although fewer than 400infants are infected (...) perinatally in the United States each year, that number could be reduced even further through policies aimed at HIV testing during pregnancy.The reasons toadopt such a policy are strong: the pathophysiology of perinatal transmission is clear, prophylaxis is effective and safe, and the intended beneficiaries of the intervention - babies - cannot protect themselves. (shrink)

Administraation of antiretroviral therapy to women during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and to infants postnatally can dramatidy reduce mother-to- child HIV transmission. However, pregnant women need to know that they are HIV-infected to take advantage of antiretroviral therapy, and many women do not know their HIV status. One-half of HIV-infected infants in the United States were bornto women who had not been tested for HIV or for whom the time of testing was not known. Although fewer than 400infants are infected (...) perinatally in the United States each year, that number could be reduced even further through policies aimed at HIV testing during pregnancy.The reasons toadopt such a policy are strong: the pathophysiology of perinatal transmission is clear, prophylaxis is effective and safe, and the intended beneficiaries of the intervention - babies - cannot protect themselves. (shrink)

This study examined how research conducted at several federally funded institutions designated as Clinical Research Centers or Specialized Programs of Research Excellence addressed the issues of consent, control over biological materials, confidentiality, and disclosure of results in protocols and consent forms for genetic research with stored biological materials. Although a majority of the documents reviewed addressed most of the issues raised in the research ethics literature, topics identified in the literature that were missing include the return of research results, the (...) right to withdraw from research involving biological materials, and the consent of children when they become legal adults. If typical, these findings suggest greater educational efforts may be needed to prompt investigators and IRBs to consider these and other issues that were either not addressed in the protocols or consent forms or were addressed inadequately. (shrink)

The ideal goal of a screening program for breast cancer is to detect the disease at a stage when it is still curable by a simple lumpectomy. This goal would be possible if the tumor had an early latent period before it was vascularized. However, even if there existed a harmless screening examination that was sensitive enough to discover the cancer at this stage the benefit to be gained from a screening program would be highly dependent on the time the (...) tumor spends in the latent stage as well as on the chance of false negatives at the examination. Calculations derived from a mathematical model suggest a variety of theoretically possible situations including: (1) For certain cancers screening every three years would offer almost as much benefit as screening every year; (2) A large increase in the sensitivity of a screening examination does not necessarily lead to a large increase in the benefit of a screening program; (3) For certain cancers the benefit of screening might remain low no matter how sensitive the examination used. (shrink)

Can a country with a free press and a robust political debate provide its citizens with actionable information so that they can protect themselves from a threat to their health or safety? By actionable information, I mean accurate facts and reasonable interpretations of those facts upon which an individual should rely in making reason-based decisions. In the context of public health, this includes information that allows an individual to weigh the risk to one’s self, family, and community before deciding to (...) act in an uncertain environment under threatening conditions. The recent H1N1 pandemic, and in particular the government’s campaign for public acceptance of the vaccine, highlights the challenges in ensuring that individuals receive accurate information and perceive that such information should be the basis on which to make potential life-saving decisions. (shrink)

A reflection on the philosophical concept of morality, its values and human conduct and the obligations of medical personnel to conform to the recognised standard practices.

The pioneering ideas of Glenn D. Paige for a paradigm shift from killing to nonkilling are highlighted. The relevance of anthropology for this paradigm is advanced. The accumulating scientific evidence proves that nonviolent and peaceful societies not only exist, but are actually the norm throughout human prehistory and history. This scientific fact is elucidated through a historical inventory of the most important documentation. Ethnographic cases are summarized of the Semai as a nonviolent society, the transition from killing to nonkilling of (...) the Waorani, and the critiques of the representation of the Yanomami as a killing society. Several of the most important cross-cultural studies are discussed. The assertions of some of the most vocal opponents to this paradigm are refuted. The systemic cultural and ideological bias privileging violence and war over nonviolence and peace is documented. (shrink)

The revised Common Rule includes a new option for the conduct of secondary research with identifiable data and biospecimens: regulatory broad consent. Motivated by concerns regarding autonomy and trust in the research enterprise, regulators had initially proposed broad consent in a manner that would have rendered it the exclusive approach to secondary research with all biospecimens, regardless of identifiability. Based on public comments from both researchers and patients concerned that this approach would hinder important medical advances, however, regulators decided to (...) largely preserve the status quo approach to secondary research with biospecimens and data. The Final Rule therefore allows such research to proceed without specific informed consent in a number of circumstances, but it also offers regulatory broad consent as a new, optional pathway for secondary research with identifiable data and biospecimens. In this article, we describe the parameters of regulatory broad consent under the new rule, explain why researchers and research institutions are unlikely to utilize it, outline recommendations for regulatory broad consent issued by the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, and sketch an empirical research agenda for the sorts of questions about regulatory broad consent that remain to be answered as the research community embarks on Final Rule implementation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Sexism? Background: Language, Experience, and Recognition Levels of Sexism Two Feminist Views of Sexism Objections.

Capitalizing on the hype surrounding stem cell research, numerous clinics around the world offer “stem cell therapies” for a variety of medical conditions. Despite questions about the safety and efficacy of these interventions, anecdotal evidence suggests a relatively large number of patients are traveling to receive these unproven treatments — a practice called “stem cell tourism.” Because these unproven treatments pose risks to individual patients and to legitimate translational stem cell research, stem cell tourism has generated substantial policy concern and (...) inspired attempts to reduce these risks through the development of guidelines for patients and medical practitioners. This paper examines the roles and responsibilities of physicians in patients' home countries with respect to patients' decisions to try unproven stem cell therapies abroad. Specifically, it examines professional guidance from two organizations — the American Medical Association and the International Society for Stem Cell Research — and assesses physicians' professional and legal obligations to patients considering unproven stem cell therapies. Then, drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with patients who traveled abroad for unproven stem cell treatments, it explores the roles that physicians actually play in patients' decisions and compares these actual roles with their professional and legal responsibilities. The paper concludes with a discussion of strategies to help improve the guidance physicians provide to patients considering unproven treatments. (shrink)

Stem cell science, using both embryonic and a variety of tissue-specific stem cells, is advancing rapidly and offers promise to improve medical care in the future. Yet, with the notable exception of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, a long-established approach to treating certain cancers of the blood system, this promise is long term and most stem cell research focuses on basic scientific questions or the collection of pre-clinical data. Although some clinical trials are underway, most are focused on safety, and novel (...) effective therapy is likely a long way off. Despite the preliminary nature of most stem cell research, however, numerous clinics around the world offer stem cell “therapies” to patients today outside the context of a clinical trial. Although the number of patients who have received these stem cell-based interventions is unknown, anecdotal reports suggest a substantial population of patients is willing to try them, despite unresolved questions about their safety and efficacy. (shrink)

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed substantial changes to the current regulatory system governing human subjects research in its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, entitled “Human Subjects Research Protections: Enhancing Protections for Research Subjects and Reducing Burden, Delay, and Ambiguity for Investigators.” Some of the most significant proposed changes concern the use of biospecimens in research. Because research involving biological materials begins with an initial interaction with an individual, such research falls squarely within the human subjects (...) research regulatory framework known as the “Common Rule,” which applies to research conducted or funded by the HHS and the other signatory agencies and departments. However, as described in detail below, much biospecimen research may fall within exemptions and exceptions under the Common Rule and, thus, may be conducted without consent. The ANPRM proposes requiring written consent for research use of biospecimens, even if the biospecimens were initially collected for a purpose other than research or have been stripped of identifiers. (shrink)