A business ethics course can be viewed by students as primarily a topics course in which students discuss current events and voice their opinions about what the right course of action is for a company to take. A review of recent business ethics texts supports this perception as most texts expose students to many different normative theories and ethical issues, and provide tools to encourage a discussion of what conduct is right or wrong for a business to undertake. In these (...) texts, it is often hard to find a comprehensive framework for holding the course together in a meaningful, lasting way. This paper offers a semester long class project to complement existing texts by charging the class to establish criteria for determining the Most Ethical Company in My Town, thereby challenging students to develop their own framework. This article provides the steps of the project, tasks sheets, and summary of the resulting proposal that was presented to the Dean of the Business College for consideration for an annual college award. The resulting program is a learning tool for future classes as they play a role in annually nominating and evaluating submissions of ethical businesses for future awards. (shrink)

People in a prevention focus tend to view their goals as duties and obligations, whereas people in a promotion focus tend to view their goals as hopes and aspirations. The current research suggests that people’s attention goes to somewhat different experiences when they describe their hopes versus duties. Two studies randomly assigned participants (N = 953) to describe a hope versus duty. Specifically, Study 1 asked participants to describe a personal experience of pursuing a hope versus duty, and Study 2 (...) asked participants to describe a current hope versus duty they had. I analyzed these descriptions with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015. Consistent with earlier research on regulatory focus, participants wrote more about positive outcomes when describing hopes and social relationships when describing duties. The current research suggests that the effectiveness of common regulatory focus and regulatory fit manipulations could depend on participants’ freedom to choose the experiences they bring to mind when they describe their hopes and duties. (shrink)

Prevention focus is a self-regulatory orientation that serves the need for security, and promotion focus is a self-regulatory orientation that serves the need for growth. From mid-March to early April 2020, did people judge prevention focus to be more useful than promotion focus for responding to COVID-19? Our study tested and showed support for this hypothesis with 401 American and Canadian participants, who we sampled in 100-person waves on the first four Thursdays of the pandemic. For this study, we developed (...) a new measure of the judged usefulness of promotion and prevention focus. Additionally, results showed that the judged usefulness of promotion and prevention focus related positively to support of the psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness, respectively, in responding to COVID-19. Exploratory analyses showed that day-to-day differences in autonomy, competence, and relatedness support and in promotion and prevention focus tended to be small, which is notable given the large-scale changes to social distancing, employment, and media coverage of the virus during this time. Our research could be useful for crafting persuasive advocacy and narrative communications that encourage social distancing to protect others about whom people care most. (shrink)

When, why, and how does interpersonal forgiveness occur? These questions guided recent research that compared the relative abilities of empathy versus motivated reasoning models to account for the influence of relationship closeness on interpersonal forgiveness. Consistent support was provided for the Model of Motivated Interpersonal Forgiveness. This model hypothesizes that following relationship transgressions, relationship closeness leads to a desire to maintain a relationship. Desire to maintain a relationship leads to motivated reasoning. And motivated reasoning fosters interpersonal forgiveness. The goal of (...) the present research was to examine two concerns that emerged from the initial support for the Model of Motivated Interpersonal Forgiveness. First, were the measures of motivated reasoning and interpersonal forgiveness conflated, thus reducing the potential for empathy to account for interpersonal forgiveness? Second, did the analytic estimation used reduce the power to detect the mediational role of empathy? The present research examined these questions. When motivated reasoning was measured by thought listings (in addition to the original questionnaire items) and when the analytic estimation provided greater power, the Model of Motivated Interpersonal Forgiveness was replicated. (shrink)

Numerous major holidays celebrate socially gathering in person. However, in major holidays that happened during the pandemic, desires to nurture relationships and maintain holiday traditions often conflicted with physical distancing and other measures to protect against COVID-19. The current research sought to understand wellbeing during American Thanksgiving in 2020, which happened 8months into the COVID-19 pandemic, after months of physical distancing and stay-at-home orders. American Thanksgiving is a major holiday not limited to any religion. We asked 404 American adults how (...) they spent Thanksgiving Day and to report on their experiences of that day. Predictors of wellbeing that we drew from self-determination theory were satisfaction of the fundamental needs for social connection, for doing what one really wants, and feeling effective. The predictors of wellbeing that we drew from regulatory focus theory were a focus on growth, and a focus on security. We found that feeling socially connected and focusing on growth related most strongly to wellbeing. Additionally, participants who saw even one other person face-to-face reported significantly higher relatedness satisfaction, promotion focus, and wellbeing than those who did not. Our research could help construct persuasive messages that encourage nurturing close relationships at major holidays while remaining safe against the virus. (shrink)

Background Human brain organoids are a valuable research tool for studying brain development, physiology, and pathology. Yet, a host of potential ethical concerns are inherent in their creation. There is a growing group of bioethicists who acknowledge the moral imperative to develop brain organoid technologies and call for caution in this research. Although a relatively new technology, brain organoids and their uses are already being discussed in media literature. Media literature informs the public and policymakers but has the potential for (...) utopian or dystopian distortions. Thus, it is important to understand how this technology is portrayed to the public. Methods To investigate how brain organoids are displayed to the public, we conducted a systematic review of media literature indexed in the Nexis Uni database from 2013–2019. News and media source articles passing exclusion criteria (_n_ = 93) were scored to evaluate tone and relevant themes. Themes were validated with a pilot sample before being applied to the dataset. Thematic analysis assessed article tone, reported potential for the technology, and the scientific, social, and ethical contexts surrounding brain organoids research. Results Brain organoid publications became more frequent from 2013 to 2019. We observed increases in positively and negatively toned articles, suggesting growing polarization. While many sources discuss realistic applications of brain organoids, others suggest treatment and cures beyond the scope of the current technology. This could work to overhype the technology and disillusion patients and families by offering false hope. In the ethical narrative we observe a preoccupation with issues such as development of artificial consciousness and “humanization” of organoid-animal chimeras. Issues of regulation, ownership, and accuracy of the organoid models are rarely discussed. Conclusions Given the power that media have to inform or misinform the public, it is important this literature provides an accurate and balanced reflection of the therapeutic potential and associated ethical issues regarding brain organoid research. Our study suggests increasing polarization, coupled with misplaced and unfounded ethical concern. Given the inhibitory effects of public fear or disillusion on research funding, it is important media literature provides an accurate reflection of brain organoids. (shrink)

Changes in global patterns of grain production have affected the profitability of commercial, cash-crop agriculture in North America. The current financial crisis has highlighted a perceived conflict between the priorities of (1) strengthening net farm profit, (2) maintaining the productive potential of the land base, (3) enhancing the health and cohesiveness of the agricultural community, and (4) addressing societal demands for safe foodstuffs. Reducing input costs by reducing the need for privately owned machinery can minimize the scale-dependence of agricultural practices, (...) as illustrated with examples involving silage and intensively managed pasture in Ontario. This approach could improve farming opportunities for nontraditional, part-time farmers, and at the same time, create a niche for professional custom operators and managers. Enhancing the viability of nontraditional farm operations, a historically neglected component of the farming community, as well as commercial farms is viewed as one approach to sustaining and improving both the agricultural land base and the agricultural community. Applying resource-extensive rather than resource-intensive approaches to forage management reveals that these apparently divergent priorities are, in fact, interlocking pieces of the same puzzle. (shrink)

This article addresses the fiduciary issues raised by the current practice of plan fiduciaries of not only disclaiming any fiduciary responsibility for brokerage window investments, but also abdicating any role (fiduciary or otherwise) in assessing even the general suitability of those investments for a retirement plan, and concludes that the practice is in plain and notorious violation of what ERISA requires of fiduciaries.

The naturalistic fallacy is mentionedfrequently by evolutionary psychologists as anerroneous way of thinking about the ethicalimplications of evolved behaviors. However,evolutionary psychologists are themselvesconfused about the naturalistic fallacy and useit inappropriately to forestall legitimateethical discussion. We briefly review what thenaturalistic fallacy is and why it is misusedby evolutionary psychologists. Then we attemptto show how the ethical implications of evolvedbehaviors can be discussed constructivelywithout impeding evolutionary psychologicalresearch. A key is to show how ethicalbehaviors, in addition to unethical behaviors,can evolve by natural selection.

The Internet has drastically changed how people interact, communicate, conduct business, seek jobs, find partners, and shop. Millions of people are using social networking sites to connect with others, and employers are using these sites as a source of background information on job applicants. Employers report making decisions not to hire people based on the information posted on social networking sites. Few employers have policies in place to govern when and how these online character checks should be used and how (...) to ensure that the information viewed is accurate. In this article, we explore how these inexpensive, informal online character checks are harmful to society. Guidance is provided to employers on when and how to use these sites in a socially responsible manner. (shrink)

Histories -- Approaches -- Regimes and doctrines -- Debates.

Humanistic management requires an expansion of economistic management to focus on flourishing for all at work through dignity and well-being. A dignity framework engaging the humanistic management perspective is used to explore mattering in organizational contexts. The framework acknowledges moral and spiritual levels of the human experience and incorporates transcendent and religious motivations, representing a more fully humanistic conception. Existential and interpersonal mattering are linked to various levels of the dignity experience at work, providing a practical way of understanding a (...) highly philosophical concept. Implications of mattering at work for humanistic management research, theory, and practice are discussed. Dignity and mattering provide important, human-centered, relationally-oriented concepts to help us understand how people live and experience their lives at work. (shrink)

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education presents what the late Lawrence Kohlberg regarded as the definitive statement of his educational theory. Addressing the sociology and social psychology of schooling, the authors propose that school culture become the center of moral education and research. They discuss how schools can develop as just and cohesive communities by involving students in democracy, and they focus on the moral decisions teachers and students face as they democratically resolve problems. As the authors put it: "...we (...) propose an educational renewal of our democratic society.... We have attempted to establish schools that do more than just teach about democratic citizenship, that are themselves democratic societies.". (shrink)

Building on research demonstrating relationships between well being and perceptions of aspects of life as sacred, this study describes the rationale for and development of a scale measuring perceiving sacredness in life. It then explores associations between perceptions of sacredness in life and these four domains: religious/spiritual, personal, social, and situational. Participants responded to a mailing to a national random sample within the United States, completing 16 scales pertaining to the religious/spiritual, personal, social, and situational domains. While many variables were (...) correlated with perceiving sacredness in life, there were three overall predictors: intrinsic religiosity, mysticism, and community service attitude. (shrink)

The pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 has led to unprecedented changes to society, causing unique problems that call for extraordinary solutions. We consider one such extraordinary proposal: ‘safer infection sites’ that would offer individuals the opportunity to be intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2, isolate, and receive medical care until they are no longer infectious. Safer infection could have value for various groups of workers and students. Health professionals place themselves at risk of infection daily and extend this risk to their family members and (...) community. Similarly, other essential workers who face workplace exposure must continue their work, even if have high-risk household members and live in fear of infecting. When schools are kept closed because of the fear that they will be sites of significant transmission, children and their families are harmed in multiple ways and college students who are living on campus, whether or not they are attending classes in person, are contributing to high rates of transmission and experiencing high rates of exposure. We consider whether offering safer infection sites to these groups could be ethically defensible and identify the empirical unknowns that would need to resolve before reaching definitive conclusions. This article is not an endorsement of intentional infection with the coronavirus, but rather is meant to spark conversation on the ethics of out-of-the-box proposals. Perhaps most meaningfully, our paper explores the value of control and peace of mind for those among us most impacted by the pandemic: those essential workers risking the most to keep us safe. (shrink)

The Internet has drastically changed how people interact, communicate, conduct business, seek jobs, find partners, and shop. Millions of people are using social networking sites to connect with others, and employers are using these sites as a source of background information on jobapplicants.Employers report making decisions not to hire people based on the information posted on social networking sites. Few employers have policies in place to govern when and how these online character checks should be used and how to ensure (...) that the information viewed is accurate. In this article, we explore how these inexpensive, informal online character checks are harmful to society. Guidance is provided to employers on when and how to use these sites in a socially responsible manner. (shrink)

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Ca...

H. Jay Dinshah, the father of the modern vegan movement in America and founder of American Vegan Society, eloquently explains ethical reasons for veganism. His daughter Anne updates and edits his pioneering writings. Over forty vegan luminaries tell how they were influenced and inspired by Jay. Together they encourage readers to explore ways to promote positive action in the world towards veganism through “dynamic harmlessness.”.

This is a story about a single letter and its circulation. It began as a letter addressed to an unnamed nun in France in the mid-twelfth century, and made its way into a vita of a Franciscan holy woman in Italy in the late thirteenth century. The letter was composed by Arnulf, the bishop of Lisieux from 1141 to 1181. Arnulf later included it in the various collections of his letters that he prepared for publication. Although transmission of Arnulf's letter (...) in Italy was very minimal, it somehow got into the hands of Stefania, a member of the Sorores minores inclusae at San Silvestro in Capite, and it became part of her story about the founder of her community, Margherita Colonna. From Arnulf's hand to... (shrink)

To characterize human emotions, researchers have increasingly utilized Automatic Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), which automates the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and translates the facial muscular positioning into the basic universal emotions. There is broad interest in the application of FACS for assessing consumer expressions as an indication of emotions to consumer product-stimuli. However, the translation of FACS to characterization of emotions is elusive in the literature. The aim of this systematic review is to give an overview of how FACS (...) has been used to investigate human emotional behavior to consumer product-based stimuli. The search was limited to studies published in English after 1978, conducted on humans, using FACS or its action units to investigate affect, where emotional response is elicited by consumer product-based stimuli evoking at least one of the five senses. The search resulted in an initial total of 1,935 records, of which 55 studies were extracted and categorized based on the outcomes of interest including (i) method of FACS implementation; (ii) purpose of study; (iii) consumer product-based stimuli used; and (iv) measures of affect validation. Most studies implemented FACS manually (73%) to develop products and/or software (20%) and used consumer product-based stimuli that had known and/or defined capacity to evoke a particular affective response, such as films and/or movie clips (20%); minimal attention was paid to consumer products with low levels of emotional competence or with unknown affective impact. The vast majority of studies (53%) did not validate FACS-determined affect and, of the validation measures that were used, most tended to be discontinuous in nature and only captured affect as it holistically related to an experience. This review illuminated some inconsistencies in how FACS is carried out as well as how emotional response is inferred from facial muscle activation. This may prompt researchers to consider measuring the total consumer experience by employing a variety of methodologies in addition to FACS and its emotion-based interpretation guide. Such strategies may better conceptualize consumers' experience with products of low, unknown, and/or undefined capacity to evoke an affective response such as product prototypes, line extensions, etc. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the essentialism/antiessentialism debate among feminists is a variety of the idealist/realist split that Dewey addressed in The Quest for Certainty. I attempt to use Dewey's thought to subvert this opposition so that we can remove the feminist discussion from the structure of an idealist/realist either/or.

The caliber of recent discourse regarding geneticallymodified organisms (GMOs) has suffered from a lack of consensuson terminology, from the scarcity of evidence upon which toassess risk to health and to the environment, and from valuedifferences between proponents and opponents of GMOs. Towardsaddressing these issues, we present the thesis that GM should bedefined as the forcible insertion of DNA into a host genome,irrespective of the source of the DNA, and exclusive ofconventional or mutation breeding.Some defenders of the commercial use of GMOs (...) have referred to thescientific work of GMO critics as ``junk science.'''' Such a claim isfalse and misleading, given that many papers critical of both theutility and safety of GMOs have been published in peer reviewedjournals by respected scientists. In contrast, there is a dearthof peer reviewed work to substantiate the frequently heardassertions of either safety or utility in GMOs. The polarity,which now characterizes much of the public discourse on GMOs,reflects not simply scientific disagreement, but alsodisagreement in underlying value assumptions. Value differencesstrongly affect the assessment of both benefit and harm fromGMOs. (shrink)

The necessity of incorporating societal and environmental concerns into publicly funded agricultural initiatives in research, extension, and practice is increasingly evident. Agriculturalists are urged to acknowledge and respond to societal concerns before an insensitive and largely ill-informed urban majority assumes a dominant posture in agricultural policy. In recent history, the availability of unrealistically cheap energy encouraged the evolution of a form of commercial agriculture unfettered by sound ecological principles. At present, external, resource-intensive intervention of increasing magnitude is needed to compensate (...) for the apparent ecological instability generated by practices such as intensive cereal management or conservation tillage practices. Polarization of the enterprises of plant and animal agriculture to enable centralized, concentrate-intensive, confinement feeding has disrupted the natural cycling of nutrients and carbon in the soil, encouraged the withdrawal of perennial forages from crop rotations, and invoked a widely ramifying network of agricultural and societal problems. Solutions to these problems must evolve from a holistic and far-reaching appraisal of causes, rather than from a piecemeal approach to individual symptoms. (shrink)

Changes in global patterns of grain production have affected the profitability of commercial, cash-crop agriculture in North America. The current financial crisis has highlighted a perceived conflict between the priorities of (1) strengthening net farm profit, (2) maintaining the productive potential of the land base, (3) enhancing the health and cohesiveness of the agricultural community, and (4) addressing societal demands for safe foodstuffs. Reducing input costs by reducing the need for privately owned machinery can minimize the scale-dependence of agricultural practices, (...) as illustrated with examples involving silage and intensively managed pasture in Ontario. This approach could improve farming opportunities for nontraditional, part-time farmers, and at the same time, create a niche for professional custom operators and managers. Enhancing the viability of nontraditional farm operations, a historically neglected component of the farming community, as well as commercial farms is viewed as one approach to sustaining and improving both the agricultural land base and the agricultural community. Applying resource-extensive rather than resource-intensive approaches to forage management reveals that these apparently divergent priorities are, in fact, interlocking pieces of the same puzzle. (shrink)

A number of distinct definitions ofsustainable agriculture have been proposed. In this paper we criticize two such definitions, primarily for conflating sustainability with other objectives such as economic viability and ecological integrity. Finally, we propose and defend a definition which avoids our objections to the other definitions.