This study investigates the effectiveness of pedagogical practices used to teach business ethics. The business community has greatly increased its demands for better ethics education in business programs. Educators have generally agreed that the ethical principles of business people have declined. It is important, then, to examine how common methods of instruction used in business ethics could contribute to the development of higher levels of moral judgment competence for students. To determine the effectiveness of these methods, moral judgment competence levels (...) for undergraduate and graduate students from three institutions were measured and compared based upon the pedagogical method used in a business class. Significant differences were found for moral reasoning and moral competence scores depending on the method used for ethics instruction. Students in classes with more highly integrated ethics coverage scored higher in moral reasoning and moral competence. (shrink)

While most ethics studies use student samples, the participants in our research were 306 business professionals from Afghanistan, Germany, Philippines and the United States. Our sample included 168 male business professionals and 138 female business professionals. Our research examined whether factors such as taking a college ethics course, gender, or being from a specific country significantly associate to being sensitive to ethical dilemmas. Our data indicate that individuals who had taken an ethics course in college were more sensitive to two (...) of our four ethical dilemmas. Our analyses indicate that business professionals from Afghanistan and Germany were consistently less sensitive to unethical activities than were the business professionals the United States. Gender was significant in only two of the four scenarios we examined; male business professionals were more likely to agree with the unethical act for these scenarios. Individuals who were more prone to responding in a socially desirable manner reported a lower likelihood of supporting unethical actions. Our research raises questions about the difference between being required to take an ethics course versus taking an elective ethics course. Finally, our research indicates that female professionals are more sensitive to minor ethical deviations than male professionals; an alternate explanation is that male professionals were more willing to accept minor ethical deviations. (shrink)

This study uses theories of moral reasoning and moral competence to investigate how university codes of ethics, perceptions of ethical culture, academic pressure from significant others, and ethics pedagogy are related to the moral development of students. Results suggest that ethical codes and student perceptions of such codes affect their perceptions of the ethical nature of the cultures within these institutions. In addition, faculty and student discussion of ethics in business courses is significantly and positively related to moral competence among (...) students. Our results point to the need to further examine the connections among academic institutional structures, ethics pedagogy, and students’ moral development. (shrink)

This paper examines faculty perceptions regarding ethical behavior among colleagues and students, and faculty practices with regard to teaching ethics in three institutions over a 4-year period. Faculty reported an uneven pattern of unethical behavior among colleagues over the period. A majority of business courses included ethics, however as both a specific topic on the syllabus and within course discussions. The percentage of courses with ethics discussions increased in 2006, however, the time allocated to these discussions decreased. These results suggest (...) that faculty are approaching ethics instruction less formally, raising concerns over the success of curriculum integration. (shrink)

Health care is transitioning from genetics to genomics, in which single-gene testing for diagnosis is being replaced by multi-gene panels, genome-wide sequencing, and other multi-genic tests for disease diagnosis, prediction, prognosis, and treatment. This health care transition is spurring a new set of increased or novel liability risks for health care providers and test laboratories. This article describes this transition in both medical care and liability, and addresses 11 areas of potential increased or novel liability risk, offering recommendations to both (...) health care and legal actors to address and manage those liability risks. (shrink)

Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

Participant-driven research is a burgeoning domain of research innovation, often facilitated by mobile technologies. Return of results and data are common hallmarks, grounded in transparency and data democracy. PDR has much to teach traditional research about these practices and successful engagement. Recommendations calling for new state laws governing research with mHealth modalities common in PDR and federal creation of review mechanisms, threaten to stifle valuable participant-driven innovation, including in return of results.

Human genomics is a translational field spanning research, clinical care, public health, and direct-to-consumer testing. However, law differs across these domains on issues including liability, consent, promoting quality of analysis and interpretation, and safeguarding privacy. Genomic activities crossing domains can thus encounter confusion and conflicts among these approaches. This paper suggests how to resolve these conflicts while protecting the rights and interests of individuals sequenced. Translational genomics requires this more translational approach to law.

The Covid‐19 pandemic has exposed four myths in bioethics. First, the flood of bioethics publications on how to allocate scarce resources in crisis conditions has assumed authorities would declare the onset of crisis standards of care, yet few have done so. This leaves guidelines in limbo and patients unprotected. Second, the pandemic's realities have exploded traditional boundaries between clinical, research, and public health ethics, requiring bioethics to face the interdigitation of learning, doing, and allocating. Third, without empirical research, the success (...) or failure of ethics guidelines remains unknown, demonstrating that crafting ethics guidance is only the start. And fourth, the pandemic's glaring health inequities require new commitment to learn from communities facing extraordinary challenges. Without that new learning, bioethics methods cannot succeed. The pandemic is a wake‐up call, and bioethics must rise to the challenge. (shrink)

Both bioethics and law have governed human genomics by distinguishing research from clinical practice. Yet the rise of translational genomics now makes this traditional dichotomy inadequate. This paper pioneers a new approach to the ethics of translational genomics. It maps the full range of ethical approaches needed, proposes a “layered” approach to determining the ethics framework for projects combining research and clinical care, and clarifies the key role that return of results can play in advancing translation.

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 41-43.

"Reasonably priced and beautifully produced. A clear and helpful introduction by Susan Okin, one of the leading feminist scholars of our generation, as well as a useful bibliography and chronology of Mill's life.... Invaluable for teaching and scholarship alike." --Ian Shapiro, Yale University.

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium. The authors then (...) negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death. (shrink)

Hegel and Canada is a collection of essays that analyses the real, but under-recognized, role Hegel has played in the intellectual and political development of Canada. The volume focuses on the generation of Canadian scholars who emerged after World War Two: James Doull, Emil Fackenheim, George Grant, Henry S. Harris, and Charles Taylor.

Using the infamous research studies in Tuskegee and Guatemala, the article examines the difference between victims and bystanders. The victims can include families, sexual partners, and children not just the participants. There are also the bystanders in the populations who are affected, even vaguely, decades after the initial studies took place. Differing reparations for victims and bystanders through lawsuits and historical acknowledgments has to be part of broader discussions of historical justice, and the weighing of the impact of racism and (...) imperial research endeavors. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

Kant objects on principle to any duty of moral self-perfection that would aim at the moral self-perfection of another person. Yet, despite the apparent barrier posed by the introspective technique of self-perfecting effort, I argue that such a duty is both possible and desirable as a part of moral friendship. Through mutual sincere efforts at self-disclosure, we escape the prison of mutual distrust which otherwise characterizes social life and consolidate the very sincerity necessary for moral improvement.

Developing ethical standards for clinical use of large-scale genome and exome sequencing has proven challenging, in part due to the inevitability of incidental or secondary findings. Policy of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics has evolved but remains problematic. In 2013, ACMG issued policy recommending mandatory analysis of 56 extra genes whenever sequencing was ordered for any indication, in order to ascertain positive findings in pathogenic and actionable genes. Widespread objection yielded a 2014 amendment allowing patients to opt-out (...) from analysis of the extra genes. In 2015, ACMG published the amended policy, providing that patients could opt out of the full set of extra genes, but not a subset. In 2016, ACMG enlarged the set and indicated planned expansion of the roster of extra genes to include pharmacogenetic findings. ACMG policy does not protect the respect for patient choice that prevails in other domains of clinical medicine, where informed consent allows patients to opt in to desired testing. By creating an expanding domain of genomic testing that will be routinely conducted unless patients reject the entire set of extra tests, ACMG creates an exceptional domain clinical practice that is not supported by ethics or science. (shrink)

In museum settings, caregivers support children's learning as they explore and interact with exhibits. Museums have developed exhibit design and facilitation strategies for promoting families' exploration and inquiry, but these strategies have rarely been contrasted. The goal of the current study was to investigate how prompts offered through staff facilitation vs. labels printed on exhibit components affected how family groups explored a circuit blocks exhibit, particularly whether children set and worked toward their own goals, and how caregivers were involved in (...) children's play. We compared whether children, their caregivers, or both set goals as they played together, and the actions they each took to connect the circuits. We found little difference in how families set goals between the two conditions, but did find significant differences in caregivers' actions, with caregivers in the facilitation condition making fewer actions to connect circuits while using the exhibit, compared to caregivers in the exhibit labels condition. The findings suggest that facilitated and written prompts shape the quality of caregiver-child interactions in distinct ways. (shrink)

In confronting the insalubrious ramifications of globalization, human rights scholars and activists have argued for greater national and international responsibility pursuant to the human right to health. Codified seminally in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to health proclaims that states bear an obligation to realize the “highest attainable standard” of health for all. However, in pressing for the highest attainable standard for each individual, the right to health has been ineffective in (...) compelling states to address burgeoning inequalities in underlying determinants of health, focusing on individual medical treatments at the expense of public health systems. This article contends that the paradigm of individual health, focused on a right to individual medical care, is incapable of responding to health inequities in a globalized world and thereby hampers efforts to operationalize health rights through public health systems. While the right to health has evolved in international discourse over time, this evolution of the individual right to health cannot address the harmful societal ramifications of economic globalization. Rather than relying solely upon an individual right to medical care, envisioning a collective right to public health – a right applied at the societal level to address underlying determinants of health – would alleviate many of the injurious health inequities of globalization. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War. By Susan E. Lederer.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 2, November 1997, pp. 195-212 The Moral Self and the Indirect Passions SUSAN M. PURVIANCE David Hume1 and Immanuel Kant are celebrated for their clear-headed rejection of dogmatic metaphysics, Hume for rejecting traditional metaphysical positions on cause and effect, substance, and personal identity, Kant for rejecting all judgments of experience regarding the ultimate ground of objects and their relations, not just judgments of (...) cause and substantiality. Nevertheless, each argues that practical activity is not compromised by the rejection of metaphysical claims that others had taken to be crucial. Kant and Hume thought that political and moral life did not depend upon theoretical knowlege of the nature of the self, free will, or knowledge of the true motives of actions or the character of the agent. Because the grounds of morality and politics were too important to leave to the mercies of speculative metaphysics, each moved their foundations to higher ground, insulating the grounds of practical activity from the threat of metaphysical turmoil and skepticism. Contemporary philosophers have generally followed Hume and Kant in this regard, but often select very different strategies. Some think that the best way to avoid the problems associated with contemporary scientific ontologies is to separate ethics from the factual domain entirely. Some give moral and political language a noncognitivist interpretation, and others have interpreted values as a projection of the passions and affections of the subject or as the constructions of suitably situated practical reasoners.2 At the same time there has been a resurgence of interest in moral realism. Moral realists think that the objectivity of moral discourse, and hence the Susan M. Purviance is at the Department of Philosophy, The University of Toledo, Toledo OH 43606-3390 USA. 196 Susan M. Purviance possibility of moral truth, depend upon the existence of moral facts.3 Moral realists have tended to concentrate on the role of facts in establishing the truth of general moral principles, or the Tightness or moral value of particular individual actions. For moral realists, moral facts are the states of affairs that make general moral principles or particular moral judgments true. Whether these facts are of a naturalistic sort or not, whether they are literally on a par with natural facts, or whether they simply play the same role in practical knowledge that natural facts play in theoretical knowledge, is an open question. Moral realists often are naturalists, like David O. Brink and Jonathan Dancy, but they may be nonnaturalists, like G. E. Moore.4 Ethical naturalism accounts for moral motivation and the cultivation of good character in terms of moral qualities, and many hope to ground it in (or at least show that it is compatible with) the scientific understanding of objects and their relations and qualities. Naturalism is only one option, but realism has received support because it is not clear that antirealists have developed a convincing alternative to the grounding of concepts of moral agency and moral judgment in some sort of moral facts. Questions abound about what it means to ascribe responsibility to a moral self and how we can defend a notion of enduring character. Although moral realists have paid less attention to the ontological status of virtues and character traits than to moral principles, their status is equally important. Here the concern is with the sort of metaphysics of the self thought to be necessary to account for moral agency, responsibility, praise, and blame. I shall argue that there is a class of moral facts that justify or perhaps merely vindicate the ascription of moral powers to agents, and that these are the sorts of facts another sort of theorist is interested in, whereas the states of affairs that make moral judgments true are the sorts of facts that moral realists have been interested in. In order to distinguish this use of moral facts I shall call this sort of theory a Fact of Agency Theory, and it is a version of this theory that can be found in Hume's discussion of the problem of the self and the indirect passions. A realist metaphysics of morals needs to address two questions, the question of the reality of the... (shrink)

In confronting the insalubrious ramifications of globalization, human rights scholars and activists have argued for greater national and international responsibility pursuant to the human right to health. Codified seminally in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to health proclaims that states bear an obligation to realize the “highest attainable standard” of health for all. However, in pressing for the highest attainable standard for each individual, the right to health has been ineffective in (...) compelling states to address burgeoning inequalities in underlying determinants of health, focusing on individual medical treatments at the expense of public health systems. This article contends that the paradigm of individual health, focused on a right to individual medical care, is incapable of responding to health inequities in a globalized world and thereby hampers efforts to operationalize health rights through public health systems. While the right to health has evolved in international discourse over time, this evolution of the individual right to health cannot address the harmful societal ramifications of economic globalization. Rather than relying solely upon an individual right to medical care, envisioning a collective right to public health – a right applied at the societal level to address underlying determinants of health – would alleviate many of the injurious health inequities of globalization. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

An overview and critical discussion of Christine Overall’s Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships With Companion Animals. Argues that the book contains important contributions to many of the major ethical issues associated with the keeping of “pets” but is lacking in discussion of the most fundamental issue—namely, whether it is ethical to keep “pets” at all.

Using 452 letters sent in 1990 to Wellesley College over a student petition objecting to the choice of Barbara Bush as the graduation speaker, this article explores how an attempt to expand the boundaries of elite women's political behavior created a cultural and symbolic battle that centered upon the content of education, women's “manners” and civility, and their implications for elite women's participation in the broader Hobbesian social contract for citizenship. The article demonstrates that social class in its gendered form (...) is essential to understanding the construction of citizenship. (shrink)

Social entrepreneurship activity continues to surge tremendously in market and economic systems around the world. Yet, social entrepreneurship theory and understanding lag far behind its practice. For instance, the nature of the entrepreneurial discovery phenomenon, a critical area of inquiry in general entrepreneurship theory, receives no attention in the specific context of social entrepreneurship. To address the gap, we conceptualize social entrepreneurial discovery based on an extension of corporate social responsibility into social entrepreneurship contexts. We develop a model that emphasizes (...) mobilization and timing as underpinnings of social entrepreneurial discovery and offer distinct conceptual aspects and theoretic propositions instrumental to future social entrepreneurship research. (shrink)

Technology has outpaced the capacity of researchers performing research on human participants to interpret all data generated and handle those data responsibly. This poses a critical challenge to existing rules governing human subjects research. The technologies used in research to generate images, scans, and data can now produce so much information that there is significant potential for incidental findings, findings generated in the course of research but beyond the aims of the study. Neuroimaging scans may visualize the entire brain and (...) even the entire head; computed tomography colonography research may visualize the entire torso, from the base of the lungs to the pubis; genetics studies may reveal “extra” and sometimes unwanted information about the family, such as misattributed paternity and undisclosed adoption; and genomic microarray research increasingly involves whole-genome analysis revealing an individual’s complete genotype, with enormous potential for uncovering unexpected information about an individual’s genetics and risks of developing future conditions. (shrink)

Adrienne Asch pioneered a way of doing bioethics that few are brave enough to attempt. In addition to summoning logic, arguing values, and applying reasoning to cases, Adrienne lived bioethics. Without compromising the strength of her analysis, she grounded that analysis explicitly in her own lived experience of disability. Hers was the view from somewhere—a deep invitation to others to rethink everything from embryo selection to end‐of‐life decisions through the lens of lived disability.

Health care reform proposals threaten to exacerbate tensions physicians already face in trying to balance traditional duties to individual patients against increasing pressure to serve broader societal and institutional goals. To cope with reform, medical ethics must clarify physicians' moral obligations, change existing ethical codes, and develop an ethics of institutions.

The current explosion of genetic knowledge and the rapid proliferation of genetic tests has rightly provoked concern that we are approaching a future in which people will be labeled and disadvantaged based on genetic information. Indeed, some have already suffered harm, including denial of health insurance. This concern has prompted an outpouring of analysis. Yet almost all of it approaches the problem of genetic disadvantage under the rubric of “genetic discrimination.”This rubric is woefully inadequate to the task at hand. It (...) ignores years of commentary on race and gender demonstrating the limits of antidiscrimination analysis as an analytic framework and corrective tool. Too much discussion of genetic disadvantage proceeds as if scholars of race and gender had not spent decades critiquing and developing antidiscrimination theory.Indeed, there are multiple links among race, gender, and genetics. Dorothy Roberts has discussed the historical links between racism and genetics, while she and others have begun to map connections between gender and genetics. (shrink)

In 2004, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to allow firms that create “effective compliance and ethics programs” to receive better treatment if prosecuted for fraud. Effective compliance and ethics, however, appear to be limited to activities focused on complying with the firms’ internal legal and ethical standards. We explored a potential connection between the firms’ external corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors and internal compliance: Is there an organizationally valid relationship between these two firm activities? That (...) is, when organizations demonstrate CSR with behaviors external to the firm, such as employee volunteerism, are their employees more likely to demonstrate uncompromised legal and ethical compliance behavior internally? We collected data from 164 working professionals enrolled in a top-tier MBA program in the southeastern United States regarding their employer-sponsored volunteer activities and their intentions to comply in various organizational compliance vignettes. We found that employer-sponsored volunteerism is associated with uncompromised compliance choices in one of the three vignettes. This finding indicates preliminary support for further inquiry into the relationship within the firm between external CSR behaviors and policies regarding organizational compliance. Post hoc analyses suggest that employer-sponsored volunteerism is strongly associated with a positive organizational identity, but organizational identity is not associated with the significant compliance vignette. This evidence suggests that the underlying mechanism that connects external CSR behaviors and internal compliance intentions is complex and requires future study. (shrink)