One of the core problems with engineering ethics education is perceptual. Although ethics is meant to be a central component of today’s engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as a marginal requirement that must be fulfilled. In addition, there is a mismatch between faculty and student perceptions of ethics. While faculty aim to communicate the nuances and complexity of engineering ethics, students perceive ethics as laws, rules, and codes that must be memorized. This paper provides some historical context to better (...) understand these perceptual differences, and suggests that curriculum constraints are important contributing factors. Drawing on the growing scholarship of student engagement approaches to pedagogy, the paper explores how students can be empowered to effect change in the broader engineering curriculum through engineering ethics. The paper describes a student engagement approach to pedagogy that includes students as active participants in curriculum design—a role that enables them to critically reflect about why ethics is a requirement. Including students in the process of curriculum design leads students to reframe ethics as an integrative tool with the capacity to bring together different engineering departments and build bridges to non-engineering fields. This paper argues that students can and should play an active and important role in relocating ethics from the periphery to the core of the engineering curriculum. (shrink)

Governance theories impact how corporations are run, which in turn impacts societal well-being. This dynamic is commonly accepted, as evidenced by the flood of articles exploring the links between corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (e.g., Hong et al. in J Bus Ethics 136:199–213, 2016). This article supplements current corporate governance theories with Catholic social thought (CST) to address burgeoning societal issues such as the increasing trust gap, income inequality (the compensation gap), and an overemphasis on financial compensation as the (...) primary way to motivate senior managers. The authors propose a shift away from agency theory and stakeholder theory, both of which, with their limited depictions of the motivations of managers, have contributed to excessive executive compensation. Instead, the authors develop an alternative—justice stewardship theory—which integrates organizational justice theory, the principles of stewardship theory, and the insights of 150 years of CST. (shrink)

Emotions are often portrayed as subjective judgments that pose a threat to rationality and morality, but there is a growing literature across many disciplines that emphasizes the centrality of emotion to moral reasoning. For engineers, however, being rational usually means sequestering emotions that might bias analyses—good reasoning is tied to quantitative data, math, and science. This paper brings a new pedagogical perspective that strengthens the case for incorporating emotions into engineering ethics. Building on the widely established success of active and (...) collaborative learning environments, in particular the problem-based learning philosophy and methodology, the paper articulates new strategies for incorporating emotion into engineering ethics education. An ethics education pilot study is analyzed to explore how PBL can engage students’ emotions. Evidence suggests that PBL empowers students to cultivate value for engineering ethics and social responsibility, and in doing so, redefine the societal role of the engineer. Taking students’ emotions seriously in engineering ethics offers an effective strategy to meaningfully engage students in ethical learning. (shrink)

This article provides a critical analysis of the evolution and impact of hospital-sponsored women's health centers. Using original data gathered from interviews, participant observation, and content analysis of documents and brochures, the authors describe the development of four models of hospital-sponsored women's health centers and illustrate three specific mechanisms of the co-optation process. They show how many elements of feminist health care were used for the purpose of marketing and revenue production rather than for empowering women and transforming the delivery (...) of care. Following Stratigaki's notion of negative countereffect, the authors show how the key feminist concepts of women-centered care and empowerment ended up contradicting their original meaning and purpose. Rather than being the subject of care, women became the object of treatment and revenue production. (shrink)

Background:Clinical investigation is a growing field employing increasing numbers of nurses. This has created a new specialty practice defined by aspects unique to nursing in a clinical research context: the objectives, setting, and nature of the nurse–participant relationship. The clinical research nurse role may give rise to feelings of ethical conflict between aspects of protocol implementation and the duty of patient advocacy, a primary nursing responsibility. Little is known about whether research nurses experience unique ethical challenges distinct from those experienced (...) by nurses in traditional patient-care settings.Research objectives:The purpose of the study was to describe the nature of ethical challenges experienced by clinical research nurses within the context of their practice.Research design:The study utilized a qualitative descriptive design with individual interviews.Participants and research context:Participating nurses self-identified as having experienced ethical challenges during screening. The majority were Caucasian, female, and worked in outpatient settings. Approximately 50% had > 10 years of research experience.Ethical considerations:The human subjects review board approved the study. Written informed consent was obtained.Findings:Predominant themes were revealed: the inability to provide a probable good, or/do no harm, and dual obligations. The following patterns and subthemes emerged: conflicted allegiances between protocol implementation, needs of the participant, desire to advance science, and tension between the nurse–patient therapeutic relationship versus the research relationship.Discussion:Participants described ethical challenges specific to the research role. The issues are central to the nurse–participant relationship, patient advocacy, the nurse’s role in implementing protocols, and/or advancing science.Conclusion:Ethical challenges related to the specialized role of clinical research nurses were identified. More research is warranted to fully understand their nature and frequency and to identify support systems for resolution. (shrink)

Little is known about how certain patient characteristics can affect the timing of an ethics consultation, which has been hypothesized to affect patient length of stay. This study assessed how specific patient characteristics affect the timing of an ethics consultation, namely, age (over 65 years), race, Medicaid status, the presence of a living will, the presence of a health care proxy, and the absence of decisional capacity. Moving beyond the typical case-series evaluation of an ethics consultation service, this study used (...) an innovative approach to model how predisposing, enabling, and need factors affect health behavior and subsequently affect health outcomes for patients who received an ethics consultation at a Catholic health care system in Oklahoma. (shrink)

Children show increasing control of emotions and behavior during their early years. Our studies suggest a shift in control from the brain’s orienting network in infancy to the executive network by the age of 3—4 years. Our longitudinal study indicates that orienting influences both positive and negative affect, as measured by parent report in infancy. At 3—4 years of age, the dominant control of affect rests in a frontal brain network that involves the anterior cingulate gyrus. Connectivity of brain structures (...) also changes from infancy to toddlerhood. Early connectivity of parietal and frontal areas is important in orienting; later connectivity involves midfrontal and anterior cingulate areas related to executive attention and self-regulation. (shrink)

In the _World Library of Educationalists_, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume, allowing readers to follow the themes of their work and see how it contributes to the development of the field. Mary James has researched and written on a range of educational subjects which (...) encompass curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in schools, and implications for teachers´ professional development, school leadership and policy frameworks. She has written many books and journals on assessment, particularly assessment for learning and is an expert on teacher learning, curriculum, leadership for learning and educational policy. Starting with a specially written introduction in which Mary gives an overview of her career and contextualises her selection, the chapters are divided into three parts: Educational Assessment and Learning Educational Evaluation and Curriculum Development Educational Research and the Improvement of Practice Through this book, readers can follow the different strands that Mary James has researched and written about over the last three decades, and clearly see her important contribution to the field of education. (shrink)

Use of humanities content in American medical education has been debated for well over 60 years. While many respected scholars and medical educators have purported the value of humanities content in medical training, its inclusion remains unstandardized, and the undergraduate medical curriculum continues to be focused on scientific and technical content. Cited barriers to the integration of humanities include time and space in an already overburdened curriculum, and a lack of consensus on the exact content, pedagogy and instruction. Edmund Pellegrino, (...) physician and scholar of the latter twentieth century, spent much of his professional life promoting the value and importance of the humanities in medical education, seeking the best way to incorporate and teach this content in clinically relevant ways. His efforts included the founding of multiple enterprises starting in the 1960s and 1970s to promote human values in medical education, including the Society for Health and Human Values and its Institute on Human Values in Medicine. Regardless of his efforts and those of many others into the current century, the medical humanities remains a curricular orphan, unable to find a lasting home in medical education and training. (shrink)

Mary Daly had a complicated relationship to the Catholic tradition. While it is commonly assumed that she rejected it thoroughly, this article offers a more nuanced look at the various ways in which it shaped her thinking. What is clear is that she had a decisive impact on the Catholic tradition, indeed on religion in general. Language about the divine, images of deities, human participation in things spiritual will never be the same after her thorough-going feminist critique. Her legacy (...) is multi-faceted like the woman herself. (shrink)

Social networks play a significant role in learning and thus in farmers’ adoption of new agricultural technologies. This study examined the effects of social network factors on information acquisition and adoption of new seed varieties among groundnut farmers in Uganda and Kenya. The data were generated through face-to-face interviews from a random sample of 461 farmers, 232 in Uganda and 229 in Kenya. To assess these effects two alternative econometric models were used: a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model and a (...) recursive bivariate probit model. The statistical evaluation of the SUBP shows that information acquisition and adoption decisions are interrelated while tests for the RBP do not support this latter model. Therefore, the analysis is based on the results obtained from the SUBP. These results reveal that social network factors, particularly weak ties with external support, partially influence information acquisition, but do not influence adoption. In Uganda, external support, gender, farm size, and geographic location have an impact on information acquisition. In Kenya, external support and geographic location also have an impact on information acquisition. With regard to adoption, gender, household size, and geographic location play the most important roles for Ugandan farmers, while in Kenya information from external sources, education, and farm size affect adoption choice. The study provides insight on the importance of external weak ties in groundnut farming, and a need to understand regional differences along gender lines while developing agricultural strategies. This study further illustrates the importance of farmer participation in applied technology research and the impact of social interactions among farmers and external agents. (shrink)

Development of the vertebrate pancreas is a complex stepwise process comprising regionalization, cell differentiation, and morphogenesis. Studies in zebrafish are contributing to an emerging picture of pancreas development in which extrinsic signaling molecules influence intrinsic transcriptional programs to allow ultimate differentiation of specific pancreatic cell types. Zebrafish experiments have revealed roles for several signaling molecules in aspects of this process; for example our own work has shown that retinoic acid signals specify the pre‐pancreatic endoderm. Time‐lapse imaging of live zebrafish embryos (...) has started to provide detailed information about early pancreas morphogenesis. In addition to modeling embryonic development, the zebrafish has recently been used as a model for pancreas regeneration studies. Here, we review the significant progress in these areas and consider the future potential of zebrafish as a diabetes research model. (shrink)

Human Nature offers a wide-ranging and holistic view of human nature from all perspectives: scientific, historical, and sociological. Mary Clark takes the most recent data from a dozen or more fields, and works it together with clarifying anecdotes and thought-provoking images to challenge conventional Western beliefs with hopeful new insights. Balancing the theories of cutting-edge neuroscience with the insights of primitive mythologies, Mary Clark provides down-to-earth suggestions for peacefully resolving global problems. Human Nature builds up a coherent, and (...) above all positive, picture of who we really are. (shrink)

Researchers have recently documented the unexpected opportunities war can present for women. While acknowledging the devastating effects of mass violence, this burgeoning field highlights war’s potential to catalyze grassroots mobilization and build more gender sensitive institutions and legal frameworks. Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina serve as important examples of this phenomenon, yet a closer examination of both cases reveals the limits on women’s capacity to take part in and benefit from these postwar shifts. This article makes two key contributions. First, it demonstrates (...) how the postwar political settlement created hierarchies of victimhood that facilitated new social divisions and fractured women’s collective organizing. Second, it argues that while war creates certain opportunities for women, a revitalization of patriarchy in the aftermath can undermine these gains. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with women in both countries, this article ultimately questions the extent to which postwar mobilization can be maintained or harnessed for genuine gender emancipation. (shrink)

In his recent article Philosophy Inside Out, Philip Kitcher presents a metaphilosophical outlook that aims at nothing less than a renewal of philosophy. His idea is to draw philosophers’ attention away from “timeless questions” in the so-called “core areas” of philosophy. Instead, philosophers should address questions that matter to human lives. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to reconstruct Kitcher’s view of how philosophy should be renewed; second, to point out some difficulties relating to his position. These difficulties (...) concern the integration of his naturalism into the pragmatic vision of philosophy, the role of putative philosophical experts, and the ideal status of the program of well-ordered inquiry. (shrink)

We specify two problems in syllogistic: the lack of functoriality of predicates and the change of grammatical role of the middle term, from subject to predicate, in some syllogisms. The standard semantics, the class interpretation, by-passes these difficulties but, we argue, in a manner that is at odds with logical intuition. We propose a semantics that is category theoretic to handle these difficulties. With this semantics we specify when syllogisms are valid and we set limits to the class interpretation. To (...) perform this task we show how to construct the categorical notion of an entity in a system of kinds. We devote two brief sections to an argument that our approach is very much in the spirit of Aristotle. (shrink)

One of the core problems with engineering ethics education is perceptual. Although ethics is meant to be a central component of today’s engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as a marginal requirement that must be fulfilled. In addition, there is a mismatch between faculty and student perceptions of ethics. While faculty aim to communicate the nuances and complexity of engineering ethics, students perceive ethics as laws, rules, and codes that must be memorized. This paper provides some historical context to better (...) understand these perceptual differences, and suggests that curriculum constraints are important contributing factors. Drawing on the growing scholarship of student engagement approaches to pedagogy, the paper explores how students can be empowered to effect change in the broader engineering curriculum through engineering ethics. The paper describes a student engagement approach to pedagogy that includes students as active participants in curriculum design—a role that enables them to critically reflect about why ethics is a requirement. Including students in the process of curriculum design leads students to reframe ethics as an integrative tool with the capacity to bring together different engineering departments and build bridges to non-engineering fields. This paper argues that students can and should play an active and important role in relocating ethics from the periphery to the core of the engineering curriculum. (shrink)

Arthur Anderson & Co. has made a significant contribution to assist and encourage the teaching of business ethics. They provided assistance initially through workshops and curriculum materials; currently they are using campus coordinators to disseminate information and materials. The curriculum materials can be used by the instructor to assist students in practicing their moral reasoning skills and cover four academic areas: Accounting, Finance, Marketing, and Management. These materials include business ethics video vignettes, suggestions on presentation methods, guidelines for implementing a (...) stakeholders' analysis approach to ethical reasoning, and possible discussion questions. The vignettes present ethical dilemmas that persons may encounter in entry level positions. We have used the vignettes, the accompanying discussion questions, and the suggested stakeholder analysis in class presentations. This paper presents a discussion of the basic concepts associated with cooperative learning, an example of the implementation of cooperative learning techniques using the Arthur Andersen Accounting Ethics Vignettes, and empirical results of the influence of these particular group discussions on the students' ethical responses. We did not attempt to measure whether the individuals' moral levels changed, but whether the group discussions stimulated any changes in the students attitudes toward the particular ethical dilemma they viewed. (shrink)

While researchers have examined the types of ethical issues that arise in long-term care, few studies have explored long-term care nurses’ experiences of moral distress and fewer still have examined responses to initial moral distress. Using an interpretive description approach, 15 nurses working in long-term care settings within one city in Canada were interviewed about their responses to experiences of initial moral distress, resources or supports they identified as helpful or potentially helpful in dealing with these situations, and factors that (...) hindered nurses in their responses. Using a thematic analysis process, three major themes were identified from the nurses’ experiences: (i) the context of the situation matters; (ii) the value of coming together as a team; and (iii) looking for outside direction. The work of responding to initial moral distress was more fruitful if opportunities existed to discuss conflicts with other team members and if managers supported nurses in moving their concerns forward through meetings or conversations with the team, physician, or family. Access to objective others and opportunities for education about ethics were also identified as important for dealing with value conflicts. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that translational research practitioners need to acquire special skills and knowledge that will enable them to anticipate, analyze, and manage a range of ethical issues. While there is a small but growing literature that addresses the ethics of translational research, there is a dearth of scholarship regarding how this might apply to engineers. In this paper we examine engineers as key translators and argue that they are well positioned to ask transformative ethical questions. Asking engineers to (...) both broaden and deepen their consideration of ethics in their work, however, requires a shift in the way ethics is often portrayed and perceived in science and engineering communities. Rather than interpreting ethics as a roadblock to the success of translational research, we suggest that engineers should be encouraged to ask questions about the socio-ethical dimensions of their work. This requires expanding the conceptual framework of engineering beyond its traditional focus on “how” and “what” questions to also include “why” and “who” questions to facilitate the gathering of normative, socially-situated information. Empowering engineers to ask “why” and “who” questions should spur the development of technologies and practices that contribute to improving health outcomes. (shrink)

Mary E. Hunt agrees with Rosemary Radford Ruether’s conclusion that women-church and women priests ‘both have their place in a vision of renewed church and renewed priestly ministry.’ She observes that the ‘either/or’ frame plays into what many feminists have tried to avoid with integrity, namely, setting progressive Catholic women against one another in the public arena. The writer explores the evolving relationship between and among the various feminist individuals and groups that are engaged in this work. She describes (...) how they co-operate to transform kyriarchal Roman Catholicism and meet the needs of the world. (shrink)

HIV/AIDS has changed from a disease of white gay men in the United States to a pandemic that largely involves women and dependent children in developing countries. Many theologies of disease are necessary to cope with the variety of expressions of this pandemic. Christian theoethical reflection on HIV/AIDS has been largely focused on sexual ethics, with uneven and mainly unhelpful results. Among the ethical issues that shape future useful conversations are globalized economics and resource sharing, the morality and economics of (...) the pharmaceutical industry, and the need for sex education and access to reproductive choice. Considering such issues in international, interreligious, multiscientific contexts is a concrete next step for the religion‐and‐science dialogue. It will put the powerful tools of both fields to the service of the common good. (shrink)

Round to elongate microbodies associated with fossil vertebrate soft tissues were interpreted as microbial traces until 2008, when they were re‐described as remnant melanosomes – intracellular, pigment‐containing eukaryotic organelles. Since then, multiple claims for melanosome preservation and inferences of organismal color, behavior, and physiology have been advanced, based upon the shape and size of these microstructures. Here, we re‐examine evidence for ancient melanosomes in light of information reviewed in Vinther (2015), and literature regarding the preservation potential of microorganisms and their (...) exopolymeric secretions. We: (i) address statements in Vinther's recent (2015) review that are incorrect or which misrepresent published data; (ii) discuss the need for caution in interpreting “voids” and microbodies associated with degraded fossil soft tissues; (iii) present evidence that microorganisms are in many cases an equally parsimonious source for these “voids” as are remnant melanosomes; and (iv) suggest methods/criteria for differentiating melanosomes from microbial traces in the fossil record. (shrink)

This is a critical look at the question of design from a feminist theological perspective. The author analyzes James Moore's 1995 Zygon article, “Cosmology and Theology: The Reemergence of Patriarchy.” Then she looks at the relationship between science and religion from a feminist perspective, focusing on the kyriarchal nature of theology itself in light of the myriad power issues at hand. Finally, she suggests that, instead of pondering the notion of design, scientists and theologians might more fruitfully look for new (...) ground for dialogue since feminist scholars are asking very different questions, not just answering questions differently. (shrink)