A study of American Indian youths illustrates competing pressures between research and ethics. A stakeholder-researcher team developed three plans to protect participants. The first allowed participants to skip potentially upsetting interview sections. The second called for participants flagged for abuse or suicidality to receive referrals, emergency 24-hr clinical backup, or both. The third, based on the community's desire to promote service access, included giving participants a list of service resources. Interviewers gave referrals to participants flagged as having mild problems, and (...) reported participants with serious problems to supervisors for clinical backup. Participants seldom chose to skip sections, so data integrity was not compromised. However, participants did have more problems than expected (e.g., 1 in 3 had thought about suicide, 1 in 5 had attempted suicide, and 1 in 4 reported abuse), so service agencies were not equipped to respond. Researchers must accept the competing pressures and find ethically appropriate compromises that will not undermine research integrity. (shrink)

This volume defends a particular set of progressive political interventions on the basis of their being legitimate exercises of coercive political power, specifically focusing on the gendered division of labour, which is widely regarded as the predominant form of gender injustice.

Workplace bullying has a well-established body of research internationally, but the United States has lagged behind the rest of the world in the identification and investigation of this phenomenon. This paper presents a managerial perspective on bullying in organizations. The lack of attention to the concept of workplace dignity in American organizational structures has supported and even encouraged both casual and more severe forms of harassment that our workplace laws do not currently cover. The demoralization victims suffer can create toxic (...) working environments and impair organizational productivity. Some methods of protecting your organization from this blight of bullying are proposed. Bullying has always been part of the human condition; history is rife with references to abuse of power and unnecessary or excessive force. The classic bully story is of Joseph and his brothers, a tale of envy and hostility. The refinement of bullying to include various forms of legally defined social harassment is a relatively late phenomenon, however, dating to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the United States, bullying is not illegal, whereas it is illegal in many other countries. Bullying is not about benign teasing, nor does it include the off-color jokes, racial slurs, or unwelcome advances that are the hallmarks of legally defined harassment. Workplace bullying is the pattern of destructive and generally deliberate demeaning of co-workers or subordinates that reminds us of the activities of the schoolyard bully. Unlike the schoolyard bully, however, the workplace bully is an adult, usually (but not always) aware of the impact of his or her behavior on others. Bullying in the workplace, often tacitly accepted by the organizational leadership, can create an environment of psychological threat that diminishes corporate productivity and inhibits individual and group commitment. The two examples that follow will help to clarify the difference between harassment and bullying. (shrink)

In this paper, I urge feminists to re-center fetal moral status in their theorizing about abortion. I argue that fundamental feminist normative commitments are at odds with efforts to de-emphasize fetal moral status: The feminist commitment to ensuring care for dependents supports surprising conclusions with regard to the ethics of abortion, and the feminist commitment to politicizing the personal has surprising conclusions regarding the politics of abortion. But these feminist insights also support the conclusion that, conditional on fetal moral status, (...) care for unwanted fetuses would be a social obligation that only derivatively falls to women who are unwillingly pregnant. (shrink)

Inspired by, and in close relation with, the contributions of this special issue, Kuperberg elegantly links event comprehension, production, and learning. She proposes an overarching hierarchical generative framework of processing events enabling us to make sense of the world around us and to interact with it in a competent manner.

Background: Family members are often required to act as substitute decision-makers when health care or research participation decisions must be made for an incapacitated relative. Yet most families are unable to accurately predict older adult preferences regarding future health care and willingness to engage in research studies. Discussion and documentation of preferences could improve proxies' abilities to decide for their loved ones. This trial assesses the efficacy of an advance planning intervention in improving the accuracy of substitute decision-making and increasing (...) the frequency of documented preferences for health care and research. It also investigates the financial impact on the healthcare system of improving substitute decision-making. Methods/DesignDyads (n = 240) comprising an older adult and his/her self-selected proxy are randomly allocated to the experimental or control group, after stratification for type of designated proxy and self-report of prior documentation of healthcare preferences. At baseline, clinical and research vignettes are used to elicit older adult preferences and assess the ability of their proxy to predict those preferences. Responses are elicited under four health states, ranging from the subject's current health state to severe dementia. For each state, we estimated the public costs of the healthcare services that would typically be provided to a patient under these scenarios. Experimental dyads are visited at home, twice, by a specially trained facilitator who communicates the dyad-specific results of the concordance assessment, helps older adults convey their wishes to their proxies, and offers assistance in completing a guide entitled My Preferences that we designed specifically for that purpose. In between these meetings, experimental dyads attend a group information session about My Preferences. Control dyads attend three monthly workshops aimed at promoting healthy behaviors. Concordance assessments are repeated at the end of the intervention and 6 months later to assess improvement in predictive accuracy and cost savings, if any. Copies of completed guides are made at the time of these assessments. DiscussionThis study will determine whether the tested intervention guides proxies in making decisions that concur with those of older adults, motivates the latter to record their wishes in writing, and yields savings for the healthcare system. Trial RegistrationISRCTN89993391. (shrink)

Several philosophers of education argue that schooling should facilitate students’ development of autonomy. Such arguments fall into two main categories: Student-centered arguments support autonomy education to help enable students to lead good lives; Public-goods-centered arguments support autonomy education to develop students into good citizens. Critics challenge the legitimacy of autonomy education—of the state imposing a schooling curriculum aimed at making children autonomous. In this paper, I offer a unified solution to the challenges of legitimacy that both arguments for autonomy education (...) face. I first defend a particular construal of liberal legitimacy, and then consider each legitimacy challenge in light of that construal. I argue that the legitimacy challenges confronting both types of argument can be overcome. Further, I explain why we should pursue both arguments, rather than resting the entire case for autonomy education on one or the other. I conclude that each argument—if it can justify autonomy education at all—can justify autonomy education consistent with the requirements of liberal democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a conceptualization of leadership as contemplative. Drawing on MacIntyre’s perspective on virtue ethics and Levinas’ and Gilligan’s work on the ethics of responsibility and care, we propose contemplative leadership as virtuous activity; reflexive, engaged, relational, and embodied practice that requires knowledge from within context and practical wisdom. More than simply offering another way to conceptualize the ethics of leadership, this research contributes to understanding the ethics of leadership in practice. Empirically, we analyze the narratives of (...) those in positions of formal authority and other organizational members in churches. We illustrate contemplative leadership as driven by a good purpose, derived from the unique organizational and broader societal context in which leadership occurs, and grounded in an ethical concern for the other. Contemplative leadership accounts for the complexity of experience and is discerned in mundane and everyday practices. We conclude with the implications for leadership theory, practice, and education. (shrink)

In this article, I develop and defend a prioritarian principle of justice for the distribution of educational resources. I argue that this principle should be conceptualized as directing educators to confer a general benefit, where that benefit need not be mediated by improved academic outcomes. I go on to argue that it should employ a metric of all-things-considered flourishing over the course of the student's lifetime. Finally, I discuss the relationship between my proposed prioritarian principle and the meritocratic principle that (...) it is presumed to supplement. (shrink)

Foreign nationals who marry U.S. citizens have an expedited track to naturalization. U.S. immigration officials require that “green card” petitioning couples demonstrate that their relationships are “valid and subsisting” and not fraudulent. These requirements are ostensibly gender and racially neutral, but migration itself is not; men and women petitioners seek partners in different regions and solicit advice from similar others about the potential obstacles to their petitions’ success. Using an online ethnography and textual analysis of conversation threads on a large (...) online immigration forum where U.S. petitioners exchange such information, I examine how gendered standards of legitimacy are applied to family and sexuality and used discursively among petitioners to achieve genuineness and define red flags indicating potential marriage fraud. I argue that forum members police immigration requests even before cases reach an immigration officer. Petitioners use the formal criteria of U.S. immigration in ways that reveal gender ideologies, expectations for conformity to a gendered hegemonic family ideal, and sexual double standards surrounding sexual agency, fertility, and desirability. These intersectional norms shape members’ online discussions about the suitability of marriages and of the migration of noncitizen partners to the United States. (shrink)

Despite women’s increased labor force participation, household divisions of labor remain highly unequal. Properly implemented, gender egalitarian political interventions such as work time regulation, dependent care provisions, and family leave initiatives can induce families to share work more equally than they currently do. But do these interventions constitute legitimate uses of political power? In this article, I defend the political legitimacy of these interventions. Using the conception of citizenship at the heart of political liberalism, I argue that citizens would accept (...) political interventions aimed at protecting the ‘genuinely available option’ to enact gender egalitarian lifestyles. More strongly still, I argue that under certain circumstances, citizens would insist on the enactment of political interventions to protect this option. According to political liberalism’s constraints on legitimacy, this insistence renders these interventions not only legitimate but positively mandatory. It is legitimate for a state to exercise power to preserve the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle, and under certain circumstances, it is illegitimate for a state to fail to do so. (shrink)

According to Stereotype Threat Hypothesis, fear of confirming gendered stereotypes causes women to experience anxiety in circumstances wherein their performance might potentially confirm those stereotypes, such as high-stakes testing scenarios in science, technology, engineering, and math courses. This anxiety causes women to underperform, which in turn causes them to withdraw from math-intensive disciplines. STH is thought by many to account for the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields, and a growing body of evidence substantiates this hypothesis. In considering the plausibility (...) of STH as an explanation for women's disproportionate attrition from undergraduate philosophy programs, one is struck by dissimilarities between STEM and philosophy that appear to undermine the applicability of STH to the latter. In this paper, I argue that these dissimilarities are either merely apparent or merely apparently relevant to the plausibility of STH as an explanation for gender disparities in philosophy. I argue further that, if research from STEM uncovers promising strategies for confronting stereotype threat, we should think about how to apply those strategies in our introductory philosophy classrooms. (shrink)

Despite women’s increased labor force participation, household divisions of labor remain highly unequal. Properly implemented, gender egalitarian political interventions such as work time regulation, dependent care provisions, and family leave initiatives can induce families to share work more equally than they currently do. But do these interventions constitute legitimate uses of political power? In this article, I defend the political legitimacy of these interventions. Using the conception of citizenship at the heart of political liberalism, I argue that citizens would accept (...) political interventions aimed at protecting the ‘genuinely available option’ to enact gender egalitarian lifestyles. More strongly still, I argue that under certain circumstances, citizens would insist on the enactment of political interventions to protect this option. According to political liberalism’s constraints on legitimacy, this insistence renders these interventions not only legitimate but positively mandatory. It is legitimate for a state to exercise power to preserve the genuinely available option to enact a gender egalitarian lifestyle, and under certain circumstances, it is illegitimate for a state to fail to do so. (shrink)

The real-world navigation of ethics-in-practice versus the bureaucracy of institutional ethics remains challenging. This is especially true for research with children and young people who may be co...

Since their inception, reproductive technologies have been the subject of ethical examination, while also being analyzed in terms of their economic, sociopolitical, cultural, feminist, and religiou...

Children and adolescents with an intellectual disability and autistic traits often attend special needs schools where they are surrounded by peers with diverse characteristics. Given the role that peers can play in social development, we examined whether autistic traits development in students with ID and high levels of such characteristics are influenced by the level of autistic traits among the schoolmates they like most. Furthermore, we investigated the degree to which this peer influence susceptibility depends on students’ gender. A longitudinal (...) design, with data collection points at the beginning and the end of a school year, was used. Staff reported on 330 students with high levels of autistic traits who attended 142 classrooms in 16 Swiss special needs schools. Results showed that students’ future individual level of autistic traits was not predicted by the autistic traits level of preferred peers, controlling for individual autistic traits at T1, level of general functioning, gender, and age. However, the peer effect was significantly moderated by students’ gender, indicating that girls but not boys were susceptible to peer influence. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding autistic traits development and directions of support for children and adolescents in their peer context. (shrink)

As the grandchild of Italian immigrants, photographer Gina J. Grillo has a personal impetus in her photographic studies of ethnic and immigrant life in the United States. In Between Cultures, Grillo explores the struggles immigrant children face as they develop their cultural identity in an environment completely new and foreign to them. Following the tradition of the pioneering photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, Grillo portrays the immigrant experience through children's eyes, unearthing a complex and poignant world. She begins (...) with images of newly arrived immigrant families at O'Hare International Airport during their first few hours in the United States, and then follows them through the gates and into Chicago's urban life: through her chronicle of citizenship ceremonies, cultural celebrations, weddings and dances, and other everyday scenes of immigrant life, Grillo captures the crucial elements that shape not only the characters of the children, but also the neighborhoods in which they reside. For adults, emigration to America is filled with both hope and fear, yet it is tempered by a mature understanding. For children, however, this same journey unfolds in the unrelenting present as they must constantly negotiate their individual identities and allegiances to culture, country, and kin. With moving quotations and drawings by immigrant children woven into Grillo's visual sequence, Between Cultures is a unique meditation on the development of individual identity through the reconciliation of multiple cultural heritages. (shrink)

The use of African American as a new denomination for a group previously referred to as Black has rapidly become standard practice in American society. This paper analyzes how the introduction of African American in our ordinary language marks the elaboration of a new social reality. As the concept becomes part of our social life, it is transformed into a real “phenomenon” of social representation that formalizes behaviour and orients communication. Such a transformation requires that the new term infiltrates people's (...) everyday lives sufficiently to concretize it into a common reality. The analysis presented here outlines three key processes in the emergence and formation of the social representation of African American. The first one is anchoring which familiarizes the new object by linking it with preexisting categories in our minds. The second process is objectification which assures the crystallization of the object. A figurative core is created to allow the projection of images. At this point people can talk about the object, and through communication the object takes on meaning. This naturalization is the third process to conclude the transformation of the object into a social reality. These steps have allowed African American to become the carrier for a modification of cognitions and broadening of attitudes concerning the group. (shrink)

Little previous research has examined attitudes about societal and ethical issues (SEI) among interns participating in research experience for undergraduate programs (REUs) in nanotechnology, thus neglecting an important population for understanding the burgeoning views of the next generation of nanotechnology researchers. This study surveyed a sample of interns (N = 85) participating in the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network’s (NNIN) REU program during the summer of 2012. Our questions focused on interns’ experiences with education on ethical issues, as well as their (...) attribution of responsibility for considering ethical issues, motivations to talk about ethical issues, and comfort level of discussing ethical issues with faculty, mentors, lab staff, and other REU students. Among key findings was that lab culture related to the extent to which REU interns felt comfortable discussing ethical issues. In addition, those who reported more discussions about ethical issues with their mentors were more likely to consider themselves as responsible for considering ethical issues. We conclude with recommendations and future research directions. (shrink)

Crediting scientific discovery for prolonging life is pervasive in biomedical histories of the genetic blood disorder, sickle cell disease. This includes the preventive strategies, such as newborn screening, that have underwritten the success of its life-extending interventions. Newborn screening is a technology that relies not only upon intact health infrastructures but also expertise and enhanced vigilance on the part of caregivers to anticipate complications while they are still open to circumvention. This paper posits that even after overcoming institutional barriers to (...) make newborn screening equitably available, care and vigilance are resources that are themselves subject to what I term anticipatory politics, where structural conditions also stratify expectations for the future, including the affective appeal of medical innovations. This paper elaborates the paradigm of anticipatory politics through an ethnographic examination of newborn screening to connect the comprehensive care practices that have improved survival for sickle cell disease, and as the burden of mortality shifts to young adulthood, to expose how those who are resourced to care for these futures preferentially stand to benefit from preventive interventions. (shrink)

Commodity chain analysis (Bair and Ramsay, 2003 Multinational Companies and Global Human Resource Strategies) is used to explore where economic pressure (from consumers) or socio-political pressure (from governments and NGOs) can be applied to reduce worker exploitation. Six paths are illustrated with examples of successful and unsuccessful application of pressure. Three conclusions are reached :Economic pressure on companies and brand owners is more likely to lead to improved workplace conditions than socio-political pressure; Brand owners are more likely to implement improved (...) workplace conditions than retailers; and Retailers who are under extreme consumer price pressure will resist improving workplace conditions. (shrink)

This study examines the tensions between the western concept of professional independence and accountants’ commitment to significant others under the care perspective of guanxi. The principle of professional independence is founded on arm’s-length transactions to avoid undue influence on professional and ethical judgement. However, in the relational society of China, social interactions based on Confucianism elicit a duty of care and concern towards significant others in important relationships. For a professional accountant, the commitment to persons with whom they have guanxi (...) is potentially at odds with their commitment to professional independence. Data collected from interviews with Chinese accounting professionals, accounting academics and expatriate accountants working in China provide insight on how Chinese accounting professionals discharge their obligations under guanxi. Notions of guanxi and the rules of exchange identified in Hwang’s (Knowledge and action: A social psychological interpretation of Chinese cultural traditions, Sin-Li, Taipei, 1995) model of “Confucian ethics for ordinary people” provide the lens to explain the ethical dilemmas facing Chinese accountants. The findings suggest that accounting professionals prioritise the interests of their superiors and clients over the users of financial reports. Despite accountants’ moral obligation to protect the public interest, personal and professional obligations in China struggle to extend beyond client or employer interests mostly because of the absence of a formal relationship or connection with the public. This contrasts sharply with the notion of professional independence practised in western societies, where accounting professionals must be independent of their clients and superiors and commit to a duty to protect the public interest. The outcome of this study demonstrates the impediments to transplanting western concepts to different cultures. (shrink)

The Good Supervisor engages readers in dialogue and active reflection on the strategies of effective supervision of PhDs, postgraduate and undergraduate research. Accessibly written, it encourages supervisors to reflect on and enhance their research supervision practice with a diversity of students on a variety of research projects: Postgraduate and undergraduate levels, international and distance students practice and professional research research leading to creative process and products/creations the PhD by publication supervising your colleagues interpersonal skills managing diversity in learning styles, gender, (...) age and culture. The book is also useful for students undertaking research. There is special focus on research skills development.and on supporting students through and beyond the examination process. (shrink)

El desarrollo creciente de la novela negra neo-detectivesca en Chile es una prueba más de que atravesamos por un cambio artístico fundamental. Tecnológica y estéticamente impecables, las variantes de esta novela suelen ser producidas por escritores rigurosamente profesionales. Sin embargo y a pesar de los factores mencionados, ésta no está exenta de popularidad y éxito de ventas. Elalemán de Atacama de Roberto Ampuero es la segunda de la saga de su detective ficcional Cayetano Brulet. Como otras de sus novelas, ésta (...) conlleva una reflexión sobre el entreguismo de la nación-estado, los efectos devastadores de la economía global, la precariedad de los grupos étnicos y la destrucción ecológica. (shrink)

Embodying Asian/American Sexualities is an accessible reader designed for use in undergraduate and graduate American studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies classes as well as for a general public interested in related issues. It contains both overviews of the field and scholarly interventions into a range of topics, including history, literature, performance, and sociology.

Embodying Asian/American Sexualities is an accessible reader designed for use in undergraduate and graduate American studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies classes as well as for a general public interested in related issues. It contains both overviews of the field and scholarly interventions into a range of topics, including history, literature, performance, and sociology.

ObjectivesTo investigate which of two sources of information about an older adult’s wishes—choices made in an advance directive or proxy’s opinion—provides better insight into the older adult’s preferences measured in hypothetical clinical situations involving decisional incapacity.MethodsSecondary analyses of data collected from 157 community-dwelling, decisionally competent adults aged 70 years and over who attended a group information session on advance directives with their proxy. Older adults were invited to complete a directive introduced during the session, designed to express healthcare preferences. An (...) average of 3 months later, older adults were asked during an interview whether they would want to receive each of four medical interventions and what their goals of care would be should they develop one of three sudden health events, assuming that they had severe dementia. Proxies were asked to guess the older adult’s answers in each of the seven scenarios.ResultsEighty per cent of the older adults completed the directive. Choices they made in the directive were more in line with the preferences they stated during the interview than were their proxies’ guesses at their answers. However, concordance was relatively low, with percentages of agreement ranging from 43% to 83% across scenarios.ConclusionsFindings suggest that a directive might provide better insight into a person’s wishes than the person’s proxy, although neither source is perfect. A multifaceted decision-making model that includes both sources of information might better serve the interests of older adults who have lost the capacity to make decisions on their own.Trial registration numberISRCTN89993391; Post-results. (shrink)

Classical Confucian philosopher Mengzi 孟子 offers resources that can help shed light on the metaphysical status of moral qualities and answer the question of how we come to perceive them. I argue that Mengzi puts forward an account of virtue as sensitivity similar to that offered by John McDowell. Both thinkers endorse a particular kind of motivationally internalist naturalistic moral realism, and both explain virtue as analogous to perception of secondary qualities. I offer an original contribution to existing literature by (...) further arguing that Mengzi’s view includes an understanding of moral perception as including perception of uniquely human roles and the moral obligations they generate. This essay thus offers a novel textual interpretation of the _Mengzi_. Based on this interpretation, it then puts forth the argument that Mengzi’s version of virtue as sensitivity allows the Confucian thinker to avoid criticisms of McDowell’s “Sensitivity Account” of virtue. In particular, I argue that Mengzi’s account of sensitivity—as one that includes sensitivity to human roles and relationships—is better able to explain variation in perceived moral qualities both over time and across cultures. This is because Mengzi’s view recognizes that what is called for morally shifts with the agent’s social roles. Thus, a Mengzian-influenced Sensitivity Account of virtue can better account for differences in moral judgment by emphasizing that moral facts are a feature of human relationships, which likewise vary between cultures and individuals and change over time. (shrink)

Fabiano argues that virtue theory offers the best “safety framework” for mitigating the risks of moral enhancement (1). He advances five desiderata for an ideal safety framework and then explains how virtue theory satisfies each. Among these desiderata is the “preservation of identity” (1). Fabiano argues that moral enhancement can safely preserve personal identity when carried out within the framework of virtue theory. We suggest Fabiano's argument for this conclusion falls short, since contra Fabiano’s claim, enhancing virtues may not preserve—and (...) could even damage—personal identity. We draw on three sources of evidence: 1) virtue theory scholarship that argues for the importance of habituation for virtue formation, 2) Focquaert and Schermer’s (2015) distinction between active and passive enhancement and attendant endorsement of more active paths to virtue enhancement, and 3) empirical research suggesting that technologies which support moral enhancements may have damaging effects on personal identity. (shrink)

Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility is a wonderful book.1 1 In the acknowledgements, Morton says that in order to write it, she needed to ‘unlearn’ her training to write like a philosopher. I’ve had some occasion to try to unlearn that training myself. Having found it quite difficult, I am in awe of Morton’s remarkable accomplishment. She is offering deep philosophical insights into a matter of urgent social concern, and she’s making (...) those insights broadly legible to people who are not philosophers. The book is philosophically rich, but not for the sake of being philosophically rich. Like Morton, I think philosophy has a lot to offer to college leaders and, indeed, to leaders of all social institution that influence the trajectories of people’s lives. But making those contributions on behalf of our discipline requires us to exercise discernment and care not just in making distinctions and unpacking assumptions; it requires discernment and care too in judging which of those distinctions and assumptions really need probing. With this book, Morton offers not only a penetrating philosophical treatment of some under-explored costs involved in social mobility. She also offers a model for how to bring the disciplinary tools of philosophy to bear in ways that empower a broad audience to understand and to act on the conclusions she defends. (shrink)