Trust is both ethically important and essential for business but difficult to measure. This paper contributes toward clarifying the nature of trust in a way that is both conceptually helpful for ethical inquiries concerning business and pertinent to the measurement of trust as an element in organizations. Several papers hypothesize that increasing the role of trust in a corporation reduces the need for external monitoring and contracts. Assessing this important hypothesis requires a way to gauge whether a firm has a (...) trusting corporate culture. We develop an objective measure of trust in a firm’s corporate culture by counting the number of times 21 trust-related words appear in an important kind of document: the Management Discussion and Analysis section of the annual report. We report two significant findings: that, contrary to what one might think, firms with a trusting culture frequently use audit and control-type words and that trust is positively linked with subsequent share price volatility. We propose explanations of these findings with the hope of facilitating the objective measurement of trust and enhancement of a trusting atmosphere in corporate culture. (shrink)

"AGM members lunch." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 13.

Pain is not a single entity but is instead a collection of sensory experiences commonly associated with tissue damage. There is growing recognition that not all pains are equivalent, that pains and pathologies are not related in a simple manner, and that acute pains differ in many respects from persistent pains. Great strides have been made in improving our understanding of the neuronal mechanisms responsible for acute pain, but the studies leading to these advances have also led to the realization (...) that a bewildering array of processes are interposed between tissue damage and sensations of pain, especially in persistent pains. Persistent pains often seem unrelated or disproportionate to identifiable pathology, and they are modulated by a multitude of factors. This complexity in such a vital function serves as a challenge both to scientists seeking fundamental understanding and to clinicians faced with the immediate need to treat patients with painful disorders. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Corporate image is a function of organizational signals which determine the perceptions of various stakeholders regarding the actions of an organization. Because of its relationship to the actions of an organization, image has been studied as an indicator of the social performance of the organization. Recent research has determined that social performance has direct effects on the behaviors and attitudes of the organization's employees. To better understand these effects, this study develops and empirically tests a model which links corporate leaders' (...) actions, employees' perceptions of corporate image, and the employees' level of association with the organization. The effects of managing the social environment of an organization on its employees' perceptions of image, attitudes, and intended behaviors are discussed. (shrink)

Corporate image is a function of organizational signals which determine the perceptions of various stakeholders regarding the actions of an organization. Because of its relationship to the actions of an organization, image has been studied as an indicator of the social performance of the organization. Recent research has determined that social performance has direct effects on the behaviors and attitudes of the organization's employees. To better understand these effects, this study develops and empirically tests a model which links corporate leaders' (...) actions, employees' perceptions of corporate image, and the employees' level of association with the organization. The effects of managing the social environment of an organization on its employees' perceptions of image, attitudes, and intended behaviors are discussed. (shrink)

Surgical devices are often marketed before there is good evidence of their safety and effectiveness. Our paper discusses the ethical issues associated with the early marketing and use of new surgical devices from the perspectives of the six groups most concerned. Health Canada, which is responsible for licensing new surgical devices, should amend their requirements to include rigorous clinical trials that provide data on effectiveness and safety for each new product before it is marketed. Industry should comply with all Health (...) Canada requirements to obtain licenses for new products. Until Health Canada requires effectiveness and safety data, industry should cooperate with physicians in appropriate studies before releasing new products and should make balanced presentations of all the available evidence. Surgeons should, before using a new surgical device, assess the evidence on its effectiveness and safety and ensure they are properly trained and competent in using the device. Surgeons should provide their patients with an evaluation of the available evidence and inform them about possible complications and the surgeon's level of experience with the new device. Patients, who should be given an honest evaluation of the available evidence, possible complications, and the surgeon's experience, should be encouraged to evaluate the evidence and information to their own satisfaction to ensure that fully informed consent is given. Health institutions, responsible for regulating practice within their walls, should review new devices for safety, effectiveness, and economic impacts, before allowing their use. They should also limit the use of new surgical devices to surgeons trained and competent in the new technology. Professional societies should provide guidance on the early adoption of new surgical devices and technologies. We urge all those involved in the development, licensing, and use of new surgical devices to aim for higher ethical standards to protect the health and safety of patients requiring surgery. The lowest acceptable ethical standard would require device manufacturers to provide surgeons with accurate and timely information on the efficacy and safety of their products, allowing surgeons and patients to evaluate the evidence (and the significance of information not yet available) before surgery. (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

This response to Robert Knox’s very kind and constructive review1 of my 2008 book The Degradation of the International Legal Order: The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics gives me the opportunity not only to answer some of his criticisms, but also, on the basis of my own reflections since 2008, to fill in some gaps. Indeed, to revise a number of my arguments. First, I restate my attempt at a materialist account of human rights. Next I explain (...) why, for me, the right of peoples to self-determination is absolutely central to a materialist understanding of human rights; and also fill a serious gap in my own account in the book. This leads me not only to a reply to Robert Knox on the question of ‘indeterminacy’ in international law, but also to a disagreement with him on the use or misuse of the language of self-determination. My fourth section returns to our very different evaluations of the significance and meaning of the work of Yevgeny Pashukanis, and what, for me, is Pashukanis’s misunderstanding, for reasons consistent with his general theoretical trajectory, of Marx and Lenin on the Irish question. Finally, I present an outline of a re-evaluation of Marx’s principled position on self-determination. (shrink)

This paper sheds new light on the prevalence of evolutionary ideas in Scotland in the early nineteenth century and establish what connections existed between the espousal of evolutionary theories and adherence to the directional history of the earth proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner and his Scottish disciples. A possible connection between Wernerian geology and theories of the transmutation of species in Edinburgh in the period when Charles Darwin was a medical student in the city was suggested in an important 1991 (...) paper by James Secord. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of this important episode in the history of evolutionary ideas and explore the relationship between these geological and evolutionary discourses. To do this it focuses on the circle of natural historians around Robert Jameson, Wernerian geologist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh from 1804 to 1854. From the evidence gathered here there emerges a clear confirmation that the Wernerian model of geohistory facilitated the acceptance of evolutionary explanations of the history of life in early nineteenth-century Scotland. As Edinburgh was at this time the most important center of medical education in the English-speaking world, this almost certainly influenced the reception and development of evolutionary ideas in the decades that followed. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe duck-billed platypus, or Ornithorhynchus, was the subject of an intense debate among natural historians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its paradoxical mixture of mammalian, avian and reptilian characteristics made it something of a taxonomic conundrum. In the early 1820s Robert Jameson, the professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh and the curator of the University's natural history museum, was able to acquire three valuable specimens of this species. He passed one of these on to (...) the anatomist Robert Knox, who dissected the animal and presented his results in a series of papers to the Wernerian Natural History Society, which later published them in its Memoirs. This paper takes Jameson's platypus as a case study on how natural history specimens were used to create and contest knowledge of the natural world in the early nineteenth century, at a time when interpretations of the relationships between animal taxa were in a state of flux. It shows how Jameson used his possession of this interesting specimen to provide a valuable opportunity for his protégé Knox while also helping to consolidate his own position as a key figure in early nineteenth-century natural history. (shrink)

Professor Ian Maitland advances a version of utilitarianism, constrained by Robert Nozick’s minimal state, that finds no connectionbetween the pervasiveness of “market values,” which he gamely pursues, and the kind of problems that dominate our social scene. Inhis judgment, the prevailing tendency towards community or communitarian ends needlessly obstructs freedom, the overriding value of the libertarian-minimal state. When coupled with wrongheaded and perverse policies, communitarianism shackles the free market with crippling inefficiencies. This paper will interrogate Maitland’s characterization of communitarianism, challenge (...) his view that traditional values can be instrumentalized without harming community, and paint a more plausible and complex picture of thecommunitarian tendency. (shrink)

Bill Poteat was a member of Duke University’s Department of Religion and served a term as Chairman, during which I served with him as Director of Undergraduate Studies. I knew him as a brilliant scholar who devoted his exceptional gifts primarily to his teaching and his students. He was charming, gracious, yet we his Duke professorial colleagues never really knew him. One of our ranks suggested that the idea of Bill as a colleague was an oxymoron. Bill (...) did not attend professional meetings and only rarely had conversation of any sort with colleagues. He lived in Chapel Hill and not Durham. However, he seemed not to be at home in any of his academies-UNC Philosophy Department, Duke Divinity School, or finally the Duke Department of Religion. It was not clear what his commitments were. I knew that he had a Christian heritage and perhaps a Christian “hangover,” and had a Divinity degree from Yale. Nevertheless, his personal faith was not publically expressed. Perhaps it found expression in his zealous efforts to overcome the Cartesianism of the modern mind which he contended was inimical to the Christian understanding of the human person and his/her relationship to God. Yet, he was restless, rarely present to us and perhaps also to himself. (shrink)

Bill Poteat was a member of Duke University’s Department of Religion and served a term as Chairman, during which I served with him as Director of Undergraduate Studies. I knew him as a brilliant scholar who devoted his exceptional gifts primarily to his teaching and his students. He was charming, gracious, yet we his Duke professorial colleagues never really knew him. One of our ranks suggested that the idea of Bill as a colleague was an oxymoron. Bill (...) did not attend professional meetings and only rarely had conversation of any sort with colleagues. He lived in Chapel Hill and not Durham. However, he seemed not to be at home in any of his academies-UNC Philosophy Department, Duke Divinity School, or finally the Duke Department of Religion. It was not clear what his commitments were. I knew that he had a Christian heritage and perhaps a Christian “hangover,” and had a Divinity degree from Yale. Nevertheless, his personal faith was not publically expressed. Perhaps it found expression in his zealous efforts to overcome the Cartesianism of the modern mind which he contended was inimical to the Christian understanding of the human person and his/her relationship to God. Yet, he was restless, rarely present to us and perhaps also to himself. (shrink)

Bill Poteat was a member of Duke University’s Department of Religion and served a term as Chairman, during which I served with him as Director of Undergraduate Studies. I knew him as a brilliant scholar who devoted his exceptional gifts primarily to his teaching and his students. He was charming, gracious, yet we his Duke professorial colleagues never really knew him. One of our ranks suggested that the idea of Bill as a colleague was an oxymoron. Bill (...) did not attend professional meetings and only rarely had conversation of any sort with colleagues. He lived in Chapel Hill and not Durham. However, he seemed not to be at home in any of his academies-UNC Philosophy Department, Duke Divinity School, or finally the Duke Department of Religion. It was not clear what his commitments were. I knew that he had a Christian heritage and perhaps a Christian “hangover,” and had a Divinity degree from Yale. Nevertheless, his personal faith was not publically expressed. Perhaps it found expression in his zealous efforts to overcome the Cartesianism of the modern mind which he contended was inimical to the Christian understanding of the human person and his/her relationship to God. Yet, he was restless, rarely present to us and perhaps also to himself. (shrink)

It is almost 30 years since the sociobiology controversy burst into full bloom. The modern theory of the evolution of animal behavior was born in the mid 1960’s with Bill Hamilton’s seminal papers on inclusive fitness and George William’s book Adaptation and Natural Selection. The following decade saw an avalanche of important ideas on the evolution of sex ratio, animal conflicts, parental investment, and reciprocity, setting off a revolution our understanding of animal societies, a revolution that is still going (...) on today. By the mid-1970’s, Richard Alexander, E. O. Wilson, Napoleon Chagnon, Bill Irons, and Don Symons among others began applying these ideas to understand human behavior. Humans are evolved creatures, and quite plausibly the same evolutionary forces that shaped the behavior of other animals also molded our behavior. Moreover, the new theory of animal behavior—especially, kin selection, parental investment, and optimal foraging theory—seemed fit the data on human societies fairly well. (shrink)

Bill Bowring’s book attempts to argue for a Marxist account of international law that embraces it as a tool for progressive politics and revolutionary change. He argues it is necessary to give a substantive account of both, locating them in the real struggles of the oppressed. Specifically, he locates human rights in the three great revolutions ‐ the French, the Russian and the anticolonial. However, this revolutionary heritage has been ‘degraded’ by recent events. As such, it is necessary to (...) adopt ‘revolutionary conservatism’, invoking international law’s origins against its current degradation. This review argues that, owing to international law’s indeterminacy, Bowring’s project is susceptible to imperial appropriation. This means, however, that Bowring cannot give an account of why we should use international law. It then argues that Bowring’s account of Pashukanis is wrong, and that Pashukanis’s work can better make sense of Bowring’s insights and international law more generally. (shrink)

This letter was submitted to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Government of Canada, on 29th January, 2021, as final debate over Bill C-7 was being undertaken in the Senate regarding MAiD and the strong opposition to the legislation expressed across the Canadian disability community. It draws on our individual and joint work on eugenics, well-being, and disability.

*I am very pleased to be able to contribute this paper to a festschrift for Andrea Bonomi. This is not however, the paper I really wanted to write; I would have much rather have contributed a paper comparing the pianistic styles of Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans, which I think Andrea would have found much more fascinating than an essay devoted to an understanding of Frege’s thinking. But I do not totally despair. Andrea’s first paper published in English was (...) entitled “On the Concept of Logical Form in Frege,” so perhaps I can maintain some hope that this paper will appeal to lingering interests that Andrea wrote of in the past. I would like to thank Johannes Brandl, Ben Caplan, Bill Demopoulos, Bob Fiengo, Mark Kalderon, Patricia Marino, Gila Sher, Michael Thau, Dan Vest and especially Aldo Antonelli for very helpful discussion. (shrink)

Bill Bowring’s book attempts to argue for a Marxist account of international law that embraces it as a tool for progressive politics and revolutionary change. He argues it is necessary to give a substantive account of both, locating them in the real struggles of the oppressed. Specifically, he locates human rights in the three great revolutions ‐ the French, the Russian and the anticolonial. However, this revolutionary heritage has been ‘degraded’ by recent events. As such, it is necessary to (...) adopt ‘revolutionary conservatism’, invoking international law’s origins against its current degradation. This review argues that, owing to international law’s indeterminacy, Bowring’s project is susceptible to imperial appropriation. This means, however, that Bowring cannot give an account of why we should use international law. It then argues that Bowring’s account of Pashukanis is wrong, and that Pashukanis’s work can better make sense of Bowring’s insights and international law more generally. (shrink)

: Health care reform is bottled up. Socially responsible physicians, forced to curtail care to uninsured patients, should respond with organized, open defiance, by billing the costs of the care to the accounts of patients covered under Medicaid or Medicare. Reverse cost-shifting: maybe it could work, certainly it would be justified.

Health care reform is bottled up. Socially responsible physicians, forced to curtail care to uninsured patients, should respond with organized, open defiance, by billing the costs of the care to the accounts of patients covered under Medicaid or Medicare. Reverse cost‐shifting: maybe it could work, certainly it would be justified.

This book traces the early history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, showing how brutal police treatment of civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, forced President Kennedy to send a strong civil rights bill to Congress in June of 1963. The various legislative strategies used to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress are detailed.

Gascoigne, Robert A quick rollcall of Australian political life demonstrates a remarkable presence of Catholics in leadership positions, including the Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove; the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott; the Leader of the Federal Opposition, Bill Shorten; the two immediate past premiers of New South Wales, Barry O'Farrell and Kristina Keneally; the previous Governor of New South Wales, Dame Marie Bashir; and the Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney, Clover Moore; among others. Indeed, in the immediate past Federal (...) Labor Cabinet, there were three members from just one Catholic school, St Patrick's Christian Brothers College, Strathfield, Sydney, just as there are four old boys of Jesuit colleges in the current Coalition Cabinet. It is noteworthy that there have been relatively few attempts in public commentary and debate to draw attention to this strong cross-party presence. I believe that this is essentially because it is clear that these Catholic political leaders do not represent any kind of ecclesial or communal political bloc, but are manifestly divergent in their political stances and allegiances. Previous linkages between Catholic religious identity and political allegiance have now become obsolete. Our current situation has positive aspects demonstrating a willingness by many Australian Catholics to take up political responsibilities within a context of political pluralism against a background of democratic consensus. Yet it also raises a number of questions about ecclesial identity and formation: What is the political - and ethical - presence and character of the Catholic ecclesial community in Australia, given the considerable divergence of political stances? To what extent does Catholic social teaching function as an agreed resource and inspiration? What is the character of shared membership of the church in the context of vigorously contested and divergent political allegiances? (shrink)

Though he has worked almost exclusively in collaborative mediums like radio and film, Orson Welles has always tended to think of himself as an individual author. "Any production in any medium is a one-man production," he said to me. On the question of sharing creative responsibility for the works that bear his name, he is deeply ambivalent. His insistence on multiple billings for himself is legendary. As I can well testify, the very mention of the term collaboration at a wrong (...) moment can be enough to send him into a rage. The controversy over who scripted Citizen Kane initiated by Pauline Kael hurt him very deeply. That the wound still festers to this day is evident in the rancor with which he speaks of former associates like John Houseman. Yet in quieter moments he will fully concede how indispensable his principal collaborators have been to him and will openly discuss the nature and extent of their contributions. He is especially full of praise for cinematographers with whom he has worked over the years, such as Gregg Toland, Russell Metty, and, more recently, Gary Graver. On Citizen Kane, he singles out four individuals whom he thinks deserve special recognition: writer Herman Mankiewicz, art director Perry Ferguson, composer Bernard Herrmann, and Toland. Of these, he says, Toland's contribution to the film was the greatest, second in importance only to his own. In this essay I deal with the history and nature of Welles' collaboration with Toland on Citizen Kane—what brought them together, their working relationship, and the characteristics and rationale of the visual plan they created for the film. As we shall see, Toland brought a largely pre-conceived visual plan to Citizen Kanewhich he had been working out in his previous films. Welles accepted Toland's plan so readily because he recognized how dramatically appropriate it was to the story material. Toland's cinematography for Citizen Kane also left a major legacy to Hollywood films of the 1940s.Robert L. Carringer, is associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This essay is excerpted from his book in progress, The Road through Xanadu. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was "The Scripts of Citizen Kane". (shrink)

Ernst Haeckel’s popular book Nat¨urliche Sch¨opfungs- geschichte (Natural history of creation, 1868) represents human species in a hierarchy, from lowest (Papuan and Hottentot) to highest (Caucasian, including the Indo-German and Semitic races). His stem-tree (see Figure 1) of human descent and the racial theories that accompany it have been the focus of several recent books—histories arguing that Haeckel had a unique position in the rise of Nazi biology during the first part of the 20th century. In 1971, Daniel Gasman brought (...) the initial bill of particulars; he portrayed Haeckel as having specific responsibility for Nazi racial programs. He argued that Darwin’s champion had a distinctive authority at the end of the 19th century, throwing into the shadows the myriads of others with similar racial attitudes.1 But it was not simply a general racism that Haeckel expressed; he was, according to Gasman (1971: 157–159), a virulent anti-Semite. Since its original publication, Gasman’s thesis has caught on with a large number of historians, so that in the present period it is usually taken as a truism, an obvious fact of the sordid history of biological thought in the first half of the 20th century.2 Perhaps the most prominent scholar—at least among historians of biology—to adopt and advance Gasman’s contention was Stephen Jay Gould. In his first book, Ontogeny and Phy- logeny (1977), Gould took as his subject Haeckel’s principle of recapitulation, the proposal that during ontogeny the developing embryo went through the same morphological stages as the phylum passed through in its evolutionary descent. So according to this conception, the human embryo begins as a one-celled creature, then takes on the form of an ancient invertebrate (e.g., a gastraea), then of a primitive vertebrate, then of an early mammal, then of a primate, and finally of a distinct.. (shrink)

In this paper, I employ the pioneering works of Nussbaum, Sen, Saito, and Walker, in conjunction with the U.S. tradition of academic freedom, to outline a capability-centered vision of undergraduate education. Pace Nussbaum and Walker, I propose a short list of learning capabilities to which every undergraduate student should be entitled. This working definition of undergraduate education offers a starting point for discussion and experimentation. I employ it here to engage the current controversy in U.S. colleges and universities over the (...) nature, value, and legitimacy of undergraduate students’ academic freedoms. In contrast to the anti-indoctrination emphasis of David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, I argue that students’ academic freedoms can be more effectively secured through the articulation of “essential freedoms for liberal learning” whose principal focus is not the behavior or political affiliations of teachers but the intellectual needs and circumstances of students. (shrink)

Over the past year, aggressive billing practices have been exposed at a number of hospitals in the United States. Despite the fact that a widower had paid $16,000 of his late wife's bill of $18,740, some 20 years after the incurrence of the bill a teaching hospital held a lien on his home for $40,000 in interest. Many years earlier the hospital had seized his bank account, and now the 77-year-old man was destitute. Only tremendous publicity caused the (...) hospital to back down. That same week, another nonprofit teaching hospital reportedly drove a 25-year-old uninsured woman from New York City while dunning her for a $19,000 bill for a two-day stay for an appendectomy. In California, a patient was forced into bankruptcy in 2000 by a for-profit hospital from a day-and-a-half stay in the hospital that did not include any surgery but totaled $48,000 in hospital bills. These have become common stories as hospitals aggressively market, bill, collect, and foreclose, just like any other corporation. The uninsured are facing the brunt of the hospital industry's billing practices. (shrink)

A good pragmatist's constitutional theory is inseparable from the legal disputes out of which it arises. John Paul Stevens's theory, that of deciding individual cases well instead of applying constitutional principles in the abstract to cases by category, thus lends itself to being studied in its natural, factual habitat—in his own words, case by case. That's what this book does. In Chapter 1 Sickels distills Stevens's thoughts about law and appellate judging from his early writings and his opinions on the (...) federal appeals court and, from 1975 to the present, on the U.S. Supreme Court. Stevens shows a concern for facts and consequences, for balancing, for deference to other decision makers unless they have been careless, for avoidance of undue complexity in judge-made law, and for drawing the line between clarity and oversimplification in legal rules. The next three chapters describe the application of Stevens's pragmatism to areas of constitutional law to which the Court and he especially have devoted most attention in recent years: First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression and religion, the procedural guarantees of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the equal protection of the laws. In each area, Stevens's special contributions are described. The concluding chapter places Stevens's judging in the contexts of the ongoing debate about the legitimacy of balancing, the ways of other moderates on the Court, and the voting records of the other members of the Court as a whole. Unique to this work is a meaningful introduction to the term moderate when applied to a Supreme Court justice, a definition based on careful analysis of the interplay of general rules and specific, case-by-case context. As such it is the very essence of Stevens's own way of judging and thus enables analysis of the work of a pragmatist on his own terms rather than through the distortions of a conflicting theory of law. John Paul Stevens is recognized as a jurist of unusual ability and one adheres to no ideological camp. While it is one thing to know he is neither rigid liberal nor a conservative, this book goes beyond the "neither nor" to accomplish the more difficult goal of defining what he is. This study is intended for scholars and students of the Supreme Court, the Constitution, the courts, and the American political process. Lawyers working before the Supreme Court, informed generalists, and courtwatchers generally, whether liberal, conservative, or neutral, will find much of interest here. (shrink)

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) brought an end to conflict in Northern Ireland (NI). However, the peace process has not brought about the reconciliation which many had hoped for. The purpose of this article is to consider the role of ‘peace education’ and ‘integrated education’ in fostering reconciliation in Northern Ireland. My research contains the views of primary school and secondary school principals and head teachers to ‘peace education’ and ‘integrated education’ in Northern Ireland. The research is positioned in (...) the tradition of previous research literature and contemporary concerns relating to integrated education and the Shared Education Bill that was passed by the Northern Ireland Assembly on the 8th March 2016. My research adds to the emerging knowledge in the area and offers an insight on the attitudes of educators in Northern Ireland to ‘peace education’ and ‘integrated education’. It also engages with ‘interventionist research’. This paper is written from the point of view that genuine and effective ‘peace education’ requires ‘integrated education’ where children from diverse backgrounds are educated together every day in the same classrooms. (shrink)

Social reformers necessarily proceed, after the fashion of Rousseau, ‘taking men as they are and laws as they can be’. Thus it has been since the founding of political science in the nineteenth century. But the lessons of the behavioural revolution in political science are that taking people ‘as they are’ might be more constraining that we ever imagined; and the lessons of the policy sciences are that there are far fewer ways that institutions ‘can be’ than we ever supposed. (...) All told, it might make more sense to start with the limited number of institutional options, rather than starting with a value‐driven wish list and searching for institutions that might more or less fill that bill. (shrink)

William (Bill) Newton-Smith was a renowned Canadian philosopher of science who spent his career largely in Oxford and then at the Central European University in Hungary.Newton-Smith was born in Ori...

Community food security and environmental justice are parallel social movements interested in equity and justice and system-wide factors. They share a concern for issues of daily life and the need to establish community empowerment strategies. Both movements have also begun to reshape the discourse of sustainable agriculture, environmentalism and social welfare advocacy. However, community food security and environmental justice remain separate movements, indicating an incomplete process in reshaping agendas and discourse. Joining these movements through a common language of empowerment and (...) systems analysis would strongly enhance the development of a more powerful, integrated approach. That opportunity can be located in the efforts to incorporate community food security and environmental justice approaches in current Farm Bill legislation; in particular, provisions addressing community food production, direct marketing, community development, and community food planning. (shrink)

Bill New's (1999) thoughtful paper has performed the valuable service of clarifying the meaning and the policy implications of paternalism. His careful formulation delimits the domain of justified state paternalism. Having argued successfully, in our view, for a narrow ambit, New proceeds to identify situations that justify paternalism. This comment is written in the spirit of a friendly reformulation that refines and improves the specification of when paternalism is justified. Our argument is two-fold. First, we argue that New's formulation, (...) properly understood, will not readily permit the paternalistic interventions he argues are justified. Second, we identify a class of potentially justified interventions that have paternalistic aspects, but which are neither strictly paternalistic nor market-failure remedies. (shrink)

The AIDS crisis poses a special challenge for American health care, which depends heavily on private insurance to pay medical bills. Can we provide adequate health care to all who need it and still meet the financial requirements of the private health insurance industry? More insurance carriers are turning to antibody testing in order to eliminate poor risks from non‐group, direct‐pay pools. Some cost‐conscious employers have attempted to fire AIDS patients summarily or to exclude AIDS coverage from group insurance policies. (...) Various remedies are available for spreading the financial risks of the epidemic, such as covering persons with AIDS under Medicare or in state‐sponsored health insurance pools. Ethical questions about cost and access may also rekindle the debate about the need for national health insurance. (shrink)

While proponents of sustainability reporting believe in its potential to help corporations be accountable and transparent about their social and environmental impacts, there has been growing criticism asserting that such reporting schemes are utilized primarily as impression management tools. Drawing on Goffman’s self-presentation theory and its frontstage/backstage analogy, we contrast the frontstage sustainability discourse of a sample of large U.S. oil and gas firms to their backstage corporate political activities in the context of the passage of the American-Made Energy and (...) Good Jobs Act, also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Bill. The ANWR Bill was designed to allow oil exploration within the most sensitive environmental areas in the Refuge and this bill was vigorously debated in the United States Congress in 2005 and 2006. Our results suggest that the firms’ sustainability discourse on environmental stewardship and responsibility contrasts sharply with their less visible but proactive political strategies targeted to facilitate the passage of the ANWR Bill. This study thus contributes to the social and environmental accounting and accountability literature by highlighting the relevance of Goffman’s frontstage/backstage analogy in uncovering and documenting further the deceptive nature of the discourse contained in stand-alone sustainability reports. In addition, it seeks to contribute to the overall understanding of the multifaceted nature of sustainability reporting by placing it in relation to corporate political activities. (shrink)