Online research in philosophy

Both of us have been involved with helping professions, especially new scientific or technological professions, develop ethics programs—for undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners. By “ethics program”, we mean any strategy for teaching ethics, including developing materials. Our purpose here is to generalize from that experience to identify the chief elements needed to get an ethics program started in a new profession. We are focusing on new professions for two reasons. First, all the older professions, both in the US and in most (...) other countries, now have ethics programs of some sort. They do not need our advice to get started. Second, new professions face special problems just because they are new—everything from deciding who belongs to the profession to formalizing ethical standards so that they can be taught. Our purpose in this paper is to generalize from our experience and to identify some of the fundamentals for getting an ethics program started in a new profession. We present our recommendations in the form of response to 6 questions anyone designing an ethics program for a new profession should ask. We realize that our brief discussion does not provide a complete treatment of the subject. Our purpose has been to point in the right direction those considering an ethics program for new profession. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of new research on moral thinking informed by evolutionary theory. The new findings have emanated from a wide variety of fields. While there is no shortage of theoretical models that attempt to account for specific research findings, Matthew Keefer's goals in this essay are more general. First, he examines the strength of the evolutionary approach to understanding morality and moral emotions as adaptations to cooperation. Second, he considers the importance of unconscious (...) processing for generating ethical (or unethical) behavior and the complex relation among moral emotions, intuitions, and conscious moral reasoning. Third, he underscores the importance of understanding self-deception and self-serving biases in moral thinking and behavior. Keefer ends the essay with a discussion of some implications of these considerations for professional ethics and moral education. (shrink)

This article provides a systematic analysis of the cognitive processes required for acquiring skill in practical ethical reasoning in a professional domain. We undertook this NSF-supported research project in part to study relationships between case-based instruction in professional ethics and cognitive analyses of ethical reasoning strategies. Using a web-based experimental design, we report striking differences in the students' and ethicists' use of knowledge and reasoning. Virtually all of the ethicists and some students' protocols made significant use of specialized professional knowledge (...) and also used role-specific content in the ethical principles applied in their responses. In contrast, other student protocols made significantly more use of common knowledge and applied more general ethical principles or appealed to consequences in the justification of their responses. Our analyses show how certain strategies were superior to others in regard to identifying alternative moral issues, assessing the moral implications of actions, and providing alternative practical resolutions to conflicts. The findings point to the importance of professional knowledge and role-specific professional obligations in resolving professional ethical conflicts: the same knowledge and "middle-level" principles necessary to comprehend and apply professional codes of ethics. (shrink)

Robert Solomon criticized the philosophy of death for abstracting from human reality to treat our mortality as a collection of metaphysical puzzles. Nowhere is death less abstract than in our response to the death of our loved ones. The public face of our response is the memorial service and the eulogies that move us. Our experience of a eulogy can be as cathartic as Aristotle theorized as part of great tragedy. However, treating the oration as a work of art seems (...) inappropriate; seeking to understand our engagement in aesthetic terms disrespectful to the grieving. This paper attempts to resolve this paradox by exploring analogies between the structures of eulogies and those of tragedy, and showing that, rather than traditional aesthetics' "promise of happiness," our engagement is concerned with the "promise of meaning." Psychological research on the nature of empathy theorizes that humans are hard-wired to feel the experiences of others and this is undoubtedly at work in our emotional responses to literature and eulogies. Drawing on the work of Dacher Keltner, the paper argues that the key to the aesthetics of eulogies and literature lies in their power to invoke our "awe" in response to their words. (shrink)

Abstract One characterisation of the duty/virtue debate contrasts an ethics of duty that provides us with the moral knowledge to know what is right because it is right, to an ethics of virtue that enables us to choose what is right only because we want to, and not because we know that we must (Baron, 1985). This paper provides an account of the practical reasoning that moral agents employ in the pursuit of valuable goals based on Raz (1986) that undermines (...) the basis for this contrast. The account shows how acquiring practical knowledge of our own valuable pursuits instructs us in the duties that we owe to others, just as being able to identify the duties we owe to others requires knowing what is necessary for living a meaningful and fulfilling life. It is argued that the interdependence of these two important aspects of moral development puts into question attempts by moral educators to distinguish sharply between them. (shrink)

How large the non-observed economy (NOE) is and what determines its size in different countries and regions of the world is a question that has been and continues to be much studied by many observers (Schneider and Enste, 2000, 2002).[1] The size of this sector in an economy has important ramifications. One is that it negatively affects the ability of a nation to collect taxes to support its public sector. The inability to provide public services can in turn lead more (...) economic agents to move into the non-observed sector (Johnson, Kaufmann, and Shleifer, 1997). When such a sector is associated with criminal or corrupt activities it may undermine social capital and broader social cohesion (Putnam, 1993), which in turn may damage economic growth (Knack and Keefer, 1997; Zak and Knack, 2001). Furthermore, as international aid programs are tied to official measures of the size of economies, these can be distorted by wide variations in the relative sizes of the NOE across different countries, especially among the developing economies. (shrink)