While many models of ethical decision-making in marketing have been presented in the literature, no recent attempts have been made to explicitly account for ethical decision-making from a marketing research perspective. We present an ethical framework for marketing research, the various philosophies of ethics, and a few enduring marketing ethical decision-making models, thus laying the foundation for a descriptive model for ethics in marketing research. The authors then develop an integrated model of ethical decision-making that incorporates the perspectives of all (...) parties involved in the process of making ethical marketing research decisions, the various philosophies, and external variables. The proposed model is compared with some of the models considered in the literature and illustrated with a marketing research application. (shrink)

There is limited guidance on how to assess the ethical acceptability of research risks that extend beyond research participants to third parties (or “research bystanders”). Community or stakeholder engagement has been proposed as one way to address potential harms to community members, including bystanders. Despite widespread agreement on the importance of community engagement in biomedical research, this umbrella term includes many different goals and approaches, agreement on which is ethically required or recommended for a particular context. We analyse the case (...) of a potential Zika virus human challenge trial to assess whether and how community engagement can help promote the ethical acceptability of research posing risks to bystanders. We conclude that, in addition to having intrinsic value, community engagement can improve the identification of bystander risks, effective approaches to minimizing them, and transparency about bystander risks for host communities. (shrink)

This work presents an annotated text of the most comprehensive and detailed arguments in Erasmus's conflict with the Catholic, conservative, scholastic theologians, the _Declarationes_. It also shows the contrast between the scholastic/logical and the humanist/rhetorical approach to Scripture and to theological questions.

This work presents an annotated text of the most comprehensive and detailed arguments in Erasmus's conflict with the Catholic, conservative, scholastic theologians, the _Declarationes_. It also shows the contrast between the scholastic/logical and the humanist/rhetorical approach to Scripture and to theological questions.

This work presents an annotated text of the most comprehensive and detailed arguments in Erasmus's conflict with the Catholic, conservative, scholastic theologians, the Declarationes. It also shows the contrast between the scholastic/ /logical and the humanist/rheorical approach to Scripture and to theological questions.

This book shares innovative approaches to effectively engage students and faculty working in research labs, lab-based classrooms and courses to build inclusive ethical cultures. The frameworks and approaches presented move beyond traditional research ethics training to strengthen the ethical culture in research labs. The chapters in the book showcase best practices and approaches to embedding educational interventions in courses, research labs and departments. The book is based on the two-day workshop “Building Inclusive Ethical Cultures in STEM” (April 23-24, 2021). Moving (...) beyond the two-day conference that inspired this collected volume, the various chapters address questions like: What are approaches and tools to integrate ethics education in STEM effectively? How can STEM ethics education be improved? What can researchers do to build more inclusive research environments? How can meaningful discussions about ethics be effectively integrated into STEM courses, research labs, and workplace environments? While each chapter takes a different perspective and is located in its respective context, the contributions are united by the goal of effectively including ethical reflection in STEM education. Instructors from both four-year and two-year colleges who teach STEM and lab-based STEM courses; young principal investigators/junior faculty who are in the process of building their research groups; departmental chairs interested in programmatic approaches for improving mentoring, research ethics education, and the research culture of their department, will find this work to be a very valuable resource in their daily practice. (shrink)

Science and technology are so intertwined that technoscience has been argued to more accurately reflect the progress of science and its impact on society, and most socioscientific issues require technoscientific reasoning. Education policy documents have long noted that the general public lacks sufficient understanding of science and technology necessary for informed decision-making regarding socioscientific/technological issues. The science–technology–society movement and scholarship addressing socioscientific issues in science education reflect efforts in the science education community to promote more informed decision-making regarding such issues. (...) Now Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics education has emerged as a major reform movement impacting science education. STEM education efforts emphasize literacy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but with rare exceptions, treat issues of technology superficially and uncritically. Informed decision-making regarding many personal and societal issues requires technological literacy beyond merely becoming an enthusiastic designer or skilled user of technology, but the science education community has given little attention to what such literacy entails. Here, we present results of an extensive review of the literature regarding the nature of technology in order to identify key issues among scholars who study technology. We then provide predominant perspectives among those scholars and suggest which identified NOT issues are most essential to address as part of STEM education efforts that seek to promote informed personal and societal decision-making. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on the discussion document by M. Joseph Sirgy which attempts to develop a marketing educator code of ethics. The authors center their discussion around the concepts of "Social responsibilities in relation to certain publics" and "Social responsibilities in relation to certain actions", as presented in the Sirgy paper, "Certain Publics" issues and "Certain Actions" issues are both examined in light of each of the stakeholder groups, as well as in terms of several ethical theories. Finally, (...) the proposed Academy of Marketing Science marketing educator code of ethics is compared to the ethics codes of other marketing organizations. (shrink)

In this book, Daniel K. Miller articulates a new vision of human and animal relationships based on the foundational love ethic within Christianity. Framed around Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, Animal Ethics and Theologythoughtfully examines the shortcomings of utilitarian and rights-based approaches to animal ethics. By considering the question of animals within the Christian concept of neighbourly love, Miller provides an alternative narrative for understanding the complex relationships that humans have with other animals. This book addresses significant (...) theological questions such as: Does being created in the image of God present a meaningful distinction between humans and other animals? What does it mean for humans to have dominion over animals? Is meat eating a moral problem for Christians? In addition to drawing out the significance of Christian theology for field of animal ethics this book also engages environmental and feminist ethics. Miller brings a theological perspective to such questions as: Should care for animals be distinguished from care for the environment, and what role should human emotions play in our ethical dealings with other animals? As the title suggests, this book provides fresh insight into the theological significance of human relationships with other animals. mental and feminist ethics. Miller brings a theological perspective to such questions as: Should care for animals be distinguished from care for the environment, and what role should human emotions play in our ethical dealings with other animals? As the title suggests, this book provides fresh insight into the theological significance of human relationships with other animals. (shrink)

University human research ethics application procedures can be complicated and daunting, especially for international students unfamiliar with the process and the language. We conducted focus groups and interviews with four research higher degree and 21 Master’s coursework international students at an Australian university to gain their views on the human ethics application process. We found the most important influences on their experience were: the time it took to do an application; support from supervisors, peers and others; their own language skills; (...) and their lack of familiarity with research ethics procedures. To improve the experience of international students undertaking research involving human research ethics applications, we recommend universities provide guidance on institutional ethics review processes, concepts and terminology, with translations in a range of languages, together with guidance on how to conduct research ethically within and outside the students’ own countries. We also recommend curricula be developed to further students’ understanding of the importance of ethical research practice, and that these curricula be embedded in undergraduate and postgraduate degree programs and reflected in course learning outcomes. (shrink)

The idea that there could be spatially extended mereological simples has recently been defended by a number of metaphysicians (Markosian 1998, 2004; Simons 2004; Parsons (2000) also takes the idea seriously). Peter Simons (2004) goes further, arguing not only that spatially extended mereological simples (henceforth just extended simples) are possible, but that it is more plausible that our world is composed of such simples, than that it is composed of either point-sized simples, or of atomless gunk. The difficulty for these (...) views lies in explaining why it is that the various sub-volumes of space occupied by such simples, are not occupied by proper parts of those simples. Intuitively at least, many of us find compelling the idea that spatially extended objects have proper parts at every sub-volume of the region they occupy. It seems that the defender of extended simples must reject a seemingly plausible claim, what Simons calls the geometric correspondence principle (GCP): that any (spatially) extended object has parts that correspond to the parts of the region that it occupies (Simons 2004: 371). We disagree. We think that GCP is a plausible principle. We also think it is plausible that our world is composed of extended simples. We reconcile these two notions by two means. On the one hand we pay closer attention to the physics of our world. On the other hand, we consider what happens when our concept of something—in this case space—contains elements not all of which are realized in anything, but instead key components are realized in different features of the world. (shrink)

The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of (...) activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task. We review neurophysiological, neurobiological, neuroimaging, and computational studies that support this theory and discuss its implications as well as further issues to be addressed. (shrink)

Polymorphisms, deletions and translocations have been identified in some of the Chinese Spring nullisomic-tetrasomic and ditelosomic lines. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the status of these materials.

Advances in life-saving technologies in the past few decades have challenged our traditional understandings of death. Traditionally, death was understood to occur when a person stops breathing, their heart stops beating and they are cold to the touch. Today, physicians determine death by relying on a diagnosis of ‘total brain failure’ or by waiting a short while after circulation stops. Evidence has emerged, however, that the conceptual bases for these approaches to determining death are fundamentally flawed and depart substantially from (...) the established biological conception of death. We argue that the current approach to determining death consists of two different types of unacknowledged legal fictions. These legal fictions were developed for practices that are largely ethically legitimate but need to be reconciled with the law. The considerable debate over the determination of death in the medical and scientific literature has not informed the public that vital organs are being procured from still-living donors and it seems unlikely that this information can remain hidden for long. Given the instability of the status quo and the difficulty of making the substantial legal changes required by complete transparency, we argue for a second-best policy solution: acknowledging the legal fictions involved in determining death to move in the direction of greater transparency. This may someday result in more substantial legal change to directly confront the challenges raised by life-sustaining and life-preserving technologies without the need for fictions. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the case of Tay, the Microsoft AI chatbot that was launched in March, 2016. After less than 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment because the chatbot was generating tweets that were judged to be inappropriate since they included racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic language. We contend that the case of Tay illustrates a problem with the very nature of learning software that interacts directly with the public, and the developer's role and responsibility associated with it. (...) We make the case that when LS interacts directly with people or indirectly via social media, the developer has additional ethical responsibilities beyond those of standard software. There is an additional burden of care. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation theory, which concerns the translation of individual judgments on logical propositions into consistent group judgments, has shown that group consistency generally cannot be guaranteed if each proposition is treated independently from the others. Developing the right method of abandoning independence is thus a high-priority goal. However, little work has been done in this area outside of a few simple approaches. To fill the gap, we compare four methods based on distance metrics between judgment sets. The methods generalize the (...) premise-based and sequential priority approaches to judgment aggregation, as well as distance-based preference aggregation. They each guarantee group consistency and implement a range of distinct functions with different properties, broadening the available tools for social choice. A central result is that only one of these methods (not previously considered in the literature) satisfies three attractive properties for all reasonable metrics. (shrink)

The Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, intended as a standard for teaching and practicing software engineering, documents the ethical and professional obligations of software engineers. The code should instruct practitioners about the standards society expects them to meet, about what their peers strive for, and about what to expect of one another. In addition, the code should also inform the public about the responsibilities that are important to the profession. Adopted in 2000 by the IEEE Computer Society (...) and the ACM--two leading international computing societies--the code of ethics is intended as a guide for members of the evolving software engineering profession. The code was developed by a multinational task force with additional input from other professionals from industry, government posts, military installations, and educational professions. (shrink)

In this essay we argue that the current social and ethical structure in the Open Source Software Community stem from its roots in academia. The individual developers experience a level of autonomy similar to that of a faculty member. Furthermore, we assert that the Open Source Software Community’s social structure demands benevolent leadership. We argue that it is difficult to pass off low quality open source software as high quality software and that the Open Source development model offers strong accountability. (...) Finally, we argue that Open Source Software introduces ethical challenges for universities and the software development community. (shrink)

© 2015 American Neurological Association. Objective Mutations in the gene encoding the prion protein are responsible for approximately 10 to 15% of cases of prion disease in humans, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Here, we report on the discovery of a previously unreported C-terminal PrP mutation in a CJD patient exhibiting a disease similar to the rare VV1 subtype of sporadic CJD and investigate the role of this mutation in prion replication and transmission. Methods We generated transgenic mice expressing human PrP with (...) the V129 polymorphism and A224V mutation, denoted Tg mice, and inoculated them with different subtypes of sCJD prions. Results Transmission of sCJD VV2 or MV2 prions was accelerated in Tg mice, compared to Tg mice, with incubation periods of ∼110 and ∼210 days, respectively. In contrast, sCJD MM1 prions resulted in longer incubation periods in Tg mice, compared to Tg mice. Prion strain fidelity was maintained in Tg mice inoculated with sCJD VV2 or MM1 prions, despite the altered replication kinetics. Interpretation Our results suggest that A224V is a risk factor for prion disease and modulates the transmission behavior of CJD prions in a strain-specific manner, arguing that residues near the C-terminus of PrP are important for controlling the kinetics of prion replication. (shrink)

A volume of essays by leading photography writers and critics, published to benefit Amnesty International, cites such examples as the work of Susan Sontag to question whether photography of disturbing images stirs empathy or voyeurism in its viewers, outlining how to look at photographs to become contextually informed. Original.

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

To many who develop and use free software, the GNU General Public License represents an embodiment of the meaning of free software. In this paper we examine the definition and meaning of free software in the context of three events surrounding the GNU General Public License. We use a case involving the GPU software project to establish the importance of Freedom 0 in the meaning of free software. We analyze version 3 of the GNU General Public License and conclude that (...) although a credible case can be made that the added restrictions are consistent with the definition of free software, the case requires subtle arguments. Strong arguments against the added restrictions are less subtle, and may therefore be more convincing to many users and developers. We also analyze the Affero General Public License and conclude that it is inconsistent with the definition of free software. (shrink)

"The Rules" are found in a collaborative document that states principles for responsibility when a computer artifact is designed, developed and deployed into a sociotechnical system. At this writing, over 50 people from nine countries have signed onto The Rules. Unlike codes of ethics, The Rules are not tied to any organization, and computer users as well as computing professionals are invited to sign onto The Rules. The emphasis in The Rules is that both users and professionals have responsibilities in (...) the production and use of computing artifacts. In this paper, we use The Rules to examine issues of trust. (shrink)

We contend that software developers have an ethical responsibility to strive for reliable software. We base that obligation on long standing engineering traditions that place the public good as a central tenant and on the professional relationship between a software developer and the users of the software developed.

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.Crystallographic studies of ligands bound to biological macromolecules represent an important source of information concerning drug-target interactions, providing atomic level insights into the physical chemistry of complex formation between macromolecules and ligands. Of the more than 115,000 entries extant in the Protein Data Bank archive, ∼75% include at least one non-polymeric ligand. Ligand geometrical and stereochemical quality, the suitability of ligand models for in silico drug discovery and design, and the goodness-of-fit of ligand models (...) to electron-density maps vary widely across the archive. We describe the proceedings and conclusions from the first Worldwide PDB/Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center/Drug Design Data Resource Ligand Validation Workshop held at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics at Rutgers University on July 30-31, 2015. Experts in protein crystallography from academe and industry came together with non-profit and for-profit software providers for crystallography and with experts in computational chemistry and data archiving to discuss and make recommendations on best practices, as framed by a series of questions central to structural studies of macromolecule-ligand complexes. What data concerning bound ligands should be archived in the PDB? How should the ligands be best represented? How should structural models of macromolecule-ligand complexes be validated? What supplementary information should accompany publications of structural studies of biological macromolecules? Consensus recommendations on best practices developed in response to each of these questions are provided, together with some details regarding implementation. Important issues addressed but not resolved at the workshop are also enumerated. (shrink)

Proactive policing strategies produce a range of harms to African Americans in poor urban communities. We know little, however, about how aggressive policing is experienced across gender by adolescents in these neighborhoods. The authors argue that important insights can be gained by examining the perspectives of African American youths and draw from in-depth interviews with youths in St. Louis, Missouri, to investigate how gender shapes interactions with the police. The comparative analysis reveals important gendered facets of African American adolescents' experiences (...) with and expectations of law enforcement. Young men described being treated routinely as suspects regardless of their involvement in delinquency and also reported police violence. Young women typically described being stopped for curfew violations but also expressed concerns about police sexual misconduct. This study highlights the differential harms of urban policing for African American young women and men and highlights the need for systematic attention to the intersections of race and gender in research on criminal justice practices. (shrink)

There is a growing literature on the concept of e-trust and on the feasibility and advisability of “trusting” artificial agents. In this paper we present an object-oriented model for thinking about trust in both face-to-face and digitally mediated environments. We review important recent contributions to this literature regarding e-trust in conjunction with presenting our model. We identify three important types of trust interactions and examine trust from the perspective of a software developer. Too often, the primary focus of research in (...) this area has been on the artificial agents and the humans they may encounter after they are deployed. We contend that the humans who design, implement, and deploy the artificial agents are crucial to any discussion of e-trust and to understanding the distinctions among the concepts of trust, e-trust and face-to-face trust. (shrink)

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...) decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation. (shrink)

Left distributive algebras arise in the study of classical structures such as groups, knots, and braids, as well as more exotic objects like large cardinals. A long-standing open question is whether the set of left divisors of every term in the free left distributive algebra on any number of generators is well-ordered. A conjecture of J. Moody describes a halting condition for descending sequences of left divisors in the free left distributive algebra on an arbitrary number of generators. In this (...) paper we present progress toward an affirmative answer to the open question mentioned above, namely we prove that the many generator form of Moody’s conjecture holds if each member of the free left distributive algebra has a “division form” representation in an expanded algebra. (shrink)