This qualitative research study, a replication of a study published in 2002, investigated the qualities of a good nurse and the role ethics plays in decision making. After reviewing the limitations of the published work, the current study implemented modifications related to the research questions, sample selection, data collection, and use of software for data analysis. The original study identified seven categories that related to being a good nurse and doing the right thing. In the present study, the use of (...) relational analysis led to the recognition of four categories: (1) personal traits and attributes; (2) technical skills and management of care; (3) work environment and co-workers; and (4) caring and caring behaviors. To understand what it means to be a good nurse and do the right thing is a complex task; however, this research adds to the small amount of empirical data that exists to describe those characteristics. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine if reading achievement of students from high-poverty US schools differs as a function of participation in summer tutoring versus access to books. Data fro...

Recruiting adolescents into smoking cessation studies is challenging, particularly given institutional review board (IRB) requirements for research conducted with adolescents. This article provides a brief review of the federal regulations that apply to research conducted with adolescents, and describes researchers' experiences of seeking IRB approval for youth cessation research. Twenty-one researchers provided information. The most frequently reported difficulty involved obtaining parental consent. Solutions to commonly reported problems with obtaining IRB approval are also identified. Waivers of parental consent can facilitate recruitment (...) of youths into studies; however, researchers must ensure that their protocols comply with federal regulations when requesting a waiver. (shrink)

Given the complexity of teams involved in creating AI-based systems, how can we understand who should be held accountable when they fail? This paper reports findings about accountable AI from 26 interviews conducted with stakeholders in AI drawn from the fields of AI research, law, and policy. Participants described the challenges presented by the distributed nature of how AI systems are designed, developed, deployed, and regulated. This distribution of agency, alongside existing mechanisms of accountability, responsibility, and liability, creates barriers for (...) effective accountable design. As agency is distributed across the socio-technical landscape of an AI system, users without deep knowledge of the operation of these systems become disempowered, unable to challenge or contest when it impacts their lives. In this context, accountability becomes a matter of building systems that can be challenged, interrogated, and, most importantly, adjusted in use to accommodate counter-intuitive results and unpredictable impacts. Thus, accountable system design can work to reconfigure socio-technical landscapes to protect the users of AI and to prevent unjust apportionment of risk. (shrink)

I discuss John Henry Newman's correspondence with William Froude, F.R.S., (1810–79) and his family. Froude remained an unbeliever, and I argue that Newman's disputes with him about the ethics of belief and the relationship between religion and science not only reveal important aspects of his thought, but also anticipate modern discussions on foundationalism, the ethics of beliefs and scientism.

_Humanizing Education_ offers historic examples of humanizing educational spaces, practices, and movements that embody a spirit of hope and change. From Dayton, Ohio, to Barcelona, Spain, this collection of essays from the _Harvard Educational Review_ carries readers to places where people have first imagined—and then organized—their own educational responses to dehumanizing practices and conditions. Contributors include Montse Sánchez Aroca, William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Fernando Cardenal, Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade, Marco Garrido, Jay Gillen, Maxine Greene, Kathe Jervis, Nancy Uhlar Murray, Valerie (...) Miller, Wendy Ormiston, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Arthur E. Thomas, and Travis Wright. (shrink)

The case and commentaries below were developed as part of a project, Graduate Research Ethics Education, undertaken by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. SBR 9421897 and NSF Grant No. 9817880). The project aims at training graduate students in research ethics and building a community of scientists and engineers who are interested in and capable of teaching research ethics. As part of the project, each graduate student participant develops a (...) case for use in teaching and writes a commentary to go with the case, and then a staff member is asked to write additional commentary on the case. The case below was written in the second year of the project and was published in Research Ethics: Cases and Commentaries edited by B. Schrag, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, Bloomington, Indiana, Vol. II (1998). Publication of these cases and commentaries will be a recurring feature of Science and Engineering Ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Replies to CriticismsJames R. HamiltonI am grateful to Noël Carroll, David Davies, Sherri Irvin, Aaron Meskin, and Paul Thom for stimulating discussions of The Art of Theater over the past year, culminating in these carefully crafted critical comments on various aspects of the book.1 I especially appreciate the efforts of Sherri Irvin, who edited this special issue and without whose encouragement, enthusiasm, and careful editing this would not have (...) happened.Whenever the central proposals made in The Art of Theater were made by theater people during the past hundred years, they were greeted with a kind of baffled outrage by many traditionalist literature scholars who had taken it as an obvious fact that theatrical performances are nothing more than illustrations or interpretations of works of dramatic literature, at best requiring artistry for performance but not issuing in independent works of art. Quite a few contemporary literature and theater scholars have seen errors in the traditionalist view and proposed that theatrical performances are capable of even great artistry and, perhaps, of being works of art in their own right. It must be said, however, that they will not find my defense of that position congenial. Indeed, it will seem worse still from their point of view because my defense of the position does not require semiotic analysis, let alone any sort of poststructuralist thinking about theatrical performances that depends on seeing performance as a novel kind of text—a “theater text.” This will disappoint because, unlike many contemporary literary theorists (and even some theater theorists), I do not think of theatrical performances as something to be read and, further, as something that falls within the purview of literary scholarship after all. Performances are actions and are to be understood in the ways we understand all other actions.I knew the central proposals in The Art of Theater would seem a little strange to philosophers. Some of the strangeness that they have felt about the view—if not the baffled outrage felt by literary theorists—can be mitigated, I believe, by considering three facts that served as motivations for making the proposal. I encountered these facts while teaching experimental theater techniques in a workshop format. Only gradually did I come to realize they are facts about any theatrical performance—its presentation, its [End Page 80] preparation, and its reception. It was only after I realized how general these facts are that I began to wonder why the view they seem to suggest is not more widely held, or even discussed, among philosophers working on the performing arts. My book was designed to get that discussion going. And, to judge by the quality of the discussion in this volume, it has succeeded admirably in meeting that goal. I think the book is also largely correct, however, so it is worth beginning at the beginning, with the basic facts I encountered in teaching experimental theater.First, it is undeniable that what typical spectators for any theatrical performance grasp is delivered to them entirely during the time of the performance itself. The typical spectator—which excludes academics and professional critics—is usually unfamiliar with what she is about to see and hear, in content if not in kind. Nevertheless, most spectators are successful in tracking most theatrical performances, even some in wildly unfamiliar styles and traditions. This is an important fact. Its importance lies in the implication that spectators do not need to recognize anything beyond what they see in the performance to regard the event as something they can assess aesthetically and artistically.Second, rehearsal processes for theatrical performances involve a lot of experimentation that focuses on how to make features of actors’ bodies and voices render clearly what the audience is supposed to see and hear and on how to make the sights and sounds generated by the ensemble, the set, the lighting, and so on focus audience attention in the places that will best enable them to understand what the company is presenting. This too is an important fact, for it highlights what any spectator has to know something about in order to make cogent artistic assessments of the event she has witnessed.Finally, consider the following case... (shrink)

According to a common sense theory, facial expressions signal specific emotions to people of all ages and therefore provide children easy access to the emotions of those around them. The evidence, however, does not support that account. Instead, children’s understanding of facial expressions is poor and changes qualitatively and slowly over the course of development. Initially, children divide facial expressions into two simple categories (feels good, feels bad). These broad categories are then gradually differentiated until an adult system of discrete (...) categories is achieved, likely in the teen years. Children’s understanding of most specific emotions begins not with facial expressions, but with their understanding of the emotion’s antecedents and behavioral consequences. (shrink)

The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they (...) no longer place value on living things and authentic emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic. (shrink)

The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they (...) no longer place value on living things and authentic emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic. (shrink)

Izard (2010) did not seek a descriptive definition of emotion—one that describes the concept as it is used by ordinary folk. Instead, he surveyed scientists’ prescriptive definitions—ones that prescribe how the concept should be used in theories of emotion. That survey showed a lack of agreement today and thus raised doubts about emotion as a useful scientific concept.

Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: breaking rules and standard operating procedures; challenging authority and avoiding tradition; creating conflict, competition and stress; and taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into ethical issues associated with (...) engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. (shrink)

Nancy is ultimately most concerned about how to determine the relevance of evidence to implementation of evidence-based policy guidelines, in other words, the transferability of study results to a population different from the one that was studied and in which procedures or conditions are not the same as those in the study. And she is concerned about the privileged position Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are given in the ranking schemes for evidence-based policy, because as she sees it RCTs do not (...) address this question while other methods do. RCTs are highly regarded because of their strength in ruling out confounding variables, but they can be weak on the transferability problem because the manipulations necessary for controlled experiment also guarantee that the setting and population are different from the situation and population targeted for application. However, both of these familiar points are simplifications that can be misleading. Some non-RCT type studies (e.g. soft interventions) can also be very good at ruling out confounding variables.1 And, as I will explain, the problems leading to the transferability problem – interacting variables and a difference between study and target populations – are present in any study, not unique to RCTs. In addition. (shrink)

Baruch Spinoza began his studies learning Hebrew and the Talmud, only to be excommunicated at the age of twenty-four for supposed heresy. Throughout his life, Spinoza was simultaneously accused of being an atheist and a God-intoxicated man. Bertrand Russell said that, compared to others, Spinoza is ethically supreme, 'the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers'. This book is an exploration of (a) what Spinoza understood God to be, (b) how, for him, the infinite and eternal power of God (...) is expressed, and (c) how finite human beings can have a true idea of this greatest of all entities. Sherry Deveaux begins with an analytic discussion of these three questions, and an explication of three different views held by contemporary commentators on Spinoza. She then shows that the commonly held views about Spinoza are inconsistent with Spinoza's texts, especially his magnum opus, the Ethics. Next comes an analysis of topics in Spinoza that must be understood in order correctly to answer the three questions. For example, the notions of 'power' and 'true idea' are discussed, along with Spinoza's definition of the 'essence' of a thing, which is shown to be central to the discussion of Spinoza's God. Deveaux then claims that Spinoza defines God's essence as 'absolutely infinite and eternal power' and that, contrary to the commonly held view that God's essence is identical with the attributes (e.g., thought and extension), God's essence or "power" is expressed through the attributes. (shrink)

This reference essay surveys recent work in the emerging sub-discipline of everyday aesthetics, which builds on the work of John Dewey to resist sharp distinctions between art and non-art domains and argue that aesthetic concepts are properly applied to ordinary domains of experience.

With increasing inoculations and emerging coronavirus variants, governments worldwide are challenged to adopt proper liberty-restricting measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and minimise grave consequences for liberty and well-being caused by over a year-long pandemic. Cameron et al ’s proposal of a selective strategy addresses this pressing issue.1 Following Savulescu and Cameron, they argue for limiting the liberty of the elderly. But, instead of claiming not doing so is an instance of wrongful levelling down equality, they argue this discriminative (...) strategy is morally acceptable.2 I argue against the selective liberty-restrictive measures after proposing a revision of the five-limb proportionality test that plays a pivotal role in supporting their argument. The following is a reconstruction of Cameron et al ’s central argument: It is ethically acceptable to promote the best outcome. One way to promote the best outcome is to maximise utility at the population level without imposing unreasonable costs on the most vulnerable individuals. All else being equal, adopting selective liberty-restricting measures in the COVID-19 pandemic is the best way to maximise utility at the population level without imposing unreasonable costs on the most vulnerable individuals. If it is ethically acceptable to …. (shrink)

Whereas professional persuasion is a means to an immediate and instrumental end, ethical persuasion must rest on or serve a deeper, morally based final end. Among the moral final ends of journalism, for example, are truth and freedom. There is a very real danger that advertisers and public relations practitioners will play an increasingly dysfunctional role in the communications process if means continue to be confused with ends in professional persuasive communications. Means and ends will continue to be confused unless (...) advertisers and public relations practitioners reach some level of agreement as to the moral end toward which their efforts should be directed. In this article we advance a five-part test that defines this moral end, establishes ethical boundaries that should guide persuasive practices, and serves as a set of action-guiding principles directed toward a moral consequence in professional persuasion. The TARES Test consists of five principles: Truthfulness, Authenticity, Respect, Equity and Social Responsibility. We provide checklists to guide the practitioner in moral reflection and application of TARES Test principles. (shrink)

This article examines baby farming as an urban neighborhood-based system of group child care in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century and considers the dangers and abuses the practice of baby farming posed for parents, children, and baby farmers. It explores reformers' early efforts to regulate the city's baby farms. Finally, the essay also investigates the ways in which the residents of Philadelphia's poor neighborhoods monitored the child-care establishments in their communities that catered to working mothers.

In my dissertation I approach the subject of the attributes of God in Spinoza's metaphysics by considering three pivotal and closely linked problems. I discuss the problem of the relation of God to the attributes, the problem of the essence of God, and the problem of the true conception of God. ;I examine three interpretations of God and the attributes in Spinoza: that of Jonathan Bennett, according to which God is the thing that has the attributes and modes as properties, (...) that of Edwin Curley and Alan Donagan, according to which God is the collection of attributes, and that of H. F. Hallett and Steven Parchment, according to which God is the totality of attributes. I examine each stance relative to the three problems. I reveal the weaknesses of each interpretation by making explicit the problems that each interpretation is unable to deal with successfully and by exposing new problems that some of the interpretations create. I then discuss topics in Spinoza that need to be understood in order to arrive at the correct answers to the three problems. For example, I carefully examine 2D2---a definition that commentators on Spinoza generally consider imperative in the discussion of the essence of God. ;I then suggest an interpretation of God and the attributes that is motivated by Spinoza's claim in 1P34 that God's power is God's essence. I claim that an adequate idea of the essence of God is a de re conception of God; and I invoke Michael Della Rocca's account of the opacity of attribute-contexts in order to support my view of de re conceptions of God. I show that, for Spinoza, the essence of a thing is given by the definition of the thing; and I show that 1D6 correlates with his claim in 1P34 that God's power is God's essence. I argue that God's essence is absolutely infinite and eternal power, and that power is what is constituted and expressed by each of the infinite attributes. (shrink)

Developing Instinctive Analytical Skills in Students Becoming a Critical Thinker: A User Friendly Manual trains students to distinguish high-quality, well-supported arguments from those with little or no evidence to support them. It develops the skills required to effectively evaluate the many claims facing them as citizens, learners, consumers, and human beings, and also to be effective advocates for their beliefs. Teaching and Learning Experience Personalize Learning - MyThinkingLabdelivers proven results in helping students succeed, provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, and (...) comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students and instructors achieve their goals. Improve Critical Thinking - Coverage of persuasive speaking, decision-making, the Toulmin model of argumentation, and chapter-end writing and speaking exercisesall teach students to construct and present arguments so that they can gain skill and confidence. Engage Students - Becoming a Critical Thinker: A User Friendly Manual exposes students to a variety of contemporary and multicultural issues, engaging their understanding of analytical skills through the use of articles and varied examples. Support Instructors - Teaching your course just got easier! You can create a Customized Text or use our Instructor's Manual, Electronic “MyTest” Test Bank or PowerPoint Presentation Slides. PLUS, our new Instructor's Manual has been updated and expanded with revised tests and answer keys, a discussion of chapter exercises, and suggestions for teaching critical thinking concepts. Note: MyThinkingLab does no come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MyThinkingLab, please visit www.MyThinkingLab.com or you can purchase a valuepack of the text + MyThinkingLab (VP ISBN-10: 0205176038, VO ISBN-13: 9780205176038). (shrink)

Embrace your authentic self and let your soul's light shine forth with guidance from 150 lessons meant to inspire, motivate, and teach. This empowering book helps you shed what is false and come to know, accept, and express your true self. With essays to uplift and engage you through personal stories, meditations, exercises, affirmations, and question prompts, Discover Your Authentic Self shows you how to live according to your passions and purpose. Explore a range of topics for self-discovery, including intuition, (...) spirit animals, recognizing personal abilities as related to archetypes, living your purpose, spirit essence and energy (chakras and auras), and more. With this remarkable book, you'll unlock your truth and set yourself free. (shrink)