With rapid advances in the biosciences, bioethics has become an important, if not vital part of a comprehensive bioscience education. Students who successfully complete a course in bioethics will be better equipped for writing manuscripts for publication, preparing research proposals for funding bodies and completing applications for research ethics committees. Given the importance of both grant writing and successful publication in a bioscience career, bioscience students who do not receive training in bioethics will be disadvantaged. Graduates who move into careers (...) other than research, such as science policy, administration or education, will also benefit from the inclusion of bioethics in their bioscience education because they will need to consider the ethical issues that arise in the context of policy, public relations and public health. Given the importance of including bioethics in a bioscience education, this paper presents the findings of an empirical study that was designed to evaluate the different ways to design and deliver a bioethics module for bioscience students. The study considers the aims and objectives; the teaching, learning and assessment strategies and the content of a ‘bioethics for bioscience’ module. At a more fundamental level, the study explores why bioethics should be taught, at what level bioethics should be delivered, how much time should be committed to the teaching of bioethics and the core topics that should be included in a bioethics module. (shrink)

The role of the Research Ethics Committee (REC) in the design, conduct and dissemination of scientific research is still evolving and many important questions remain unanswered. Hence, the aim of this paper is to address some of the uncertainty that exists around the role and responsibilities of RECs and to discuss some of the controversy that exists over the criteria that RECs should follow when evaluating a research proposal. The discussion is organised around five of the major roles currently performed (...) by RECs when assessing proposals in the biomedical sciences. It will be shown that these five roles need to be critically evaluated and reassessed. The five roles addressed are: assessing the legitimacy and validity of the informed consent process, second, conducting a comprehensive risk/benefit analysis, third, assessing the validity of a research proposal, fourth, ensuring that researchers observe the social norms, values, customs, traditions and laws that prevail in the community or jurisdiction in which the research will be conducted and finally, monitoring the research project as it unfolds and providing an ongoing advisory and consultancy service to both new and experienced researchers. In reassessing the role of the REC, this paper concludes with a set of general recommendations for RECs. These provide some guidance on the minimum criteria that should be followed when RECs evaluate proposals. These guidelines will be beneficial for new and experienced members of REC, and will help to make the process a more objective, efficient and standardised process. The guidelines will also be beneficial for researchers in the biomedical sciences who are preparing proposals for ethical review. (shrink)

This article examines some of the controversial issues emerging from the privatization of biomedical research and commercialization of biotechnology. The aim is to identify the dominant social, political, and ethical risks associated with the recent shift from academic to corporate science and from the increasing emphasis on investing in research projects that will result in the award of a monopoly patent. Identifying these risks may ultimately assist policy makers in designing new policies or reforming existing practices that will come closer (...) to achieving an equitable balance between science pursued for the advance of knowledge and science pursued for patents and profit. The discussion may also assist the research directors or managers of biopharmaceutical companies in designing corporate policies that will optimize the balance between the serendipity of scientific discovery and the discipline of strategic business planning. (shrink)

This document is designed to give guidance on assessing researchers in bioethics/medical ethics. It is intended to assist members of selection, confirmation and promotion committees, who are required to assess those conducting bioethics research when they are not from a similar disciplinary background. It does not attempt to give guidance on the quality of bioethics research, as this is a matter for peer assessment. Rather it aims to give an indication of the type, scope and amount of research that is (...) the expected in this field. It does not cover the assessment of other activities such as teaching, policy work, clinical ethics consultation and so on, but these will be mentioned for additional context. Although it mentions the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, it is not intended to be a detailed analysis of the place of bioethics in the REF. (shrink)

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, (...) diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. (shrink)

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. -/- Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. -/- Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

In Epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker makes a tremendous contribution to theorizing the intersection of social epistemology with theories of justice. Theories of justice often take as their object of assessment either interpersonal transactions (specific exchanges between persons) or particular institutions. They may also take a more comprehensive perspective in assessing systems of institutions. This systemic perspective may enable control of the cumulative effects of millions of individual transactions that cannot be controlled at the individual or institutional levels. This is true (...) not only with respect to the overall distribution of such goods as income and wealth, but also with respect to the goods of testimonial and hermeneutical justice. Cognitive biases that may be difficult for even epistemically virtuous individuals to correct on their own may be more susceptible to correction if we focus on the principles that should govern our systems of testimonial gathering and assessment. Hence, while Fricker’s focus on individual epistemic virtue is important, we also need to consider what epistemic justice as a virtue of social systems would require. My paper will indicate some directions forward on this front, focusing on the need for integration of diverse institutions and persons engaged in inquiry. (shrink)

Responsible public policy making in a technological society must rely on complex scientific reasoning. Given that ordinary citizens cannot directly assess such reasoning, does this call the democratic legitimacy of technical public policies in question? It does not, provided citizens can make reliable second-order assessments of the consensus of trustworthy scientific experts. I develop criteria for lay assessment of scientific testimony and demonstrate, in the case of claims about anthropogenic global warming, that applying such criteria is easy for anyone of (...) ordinary education with access to the Web. However, surveys show a gap between the scientific consensus and public opinion on global warming in the U.S. I explore some causes of this gap and argue that democratic reforms of our culture of political discourse may be able to address it. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science argue that dominant (...) knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how gender has played a.. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the work (...) ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today. (shrink)

"The terms do not have to be spelled out, because they have been set not by a meeting of minds of the parties, but by a default baseline defined by corporate, property, and employment law that establishes the legal parameters for the constitution of capitalist firms." p. 2.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2014, given by Elizabeth Anderson, an American philosopher.

This chapter contains sections titled: Democracy as a Way of Life The Values of a Democratic Way of Life Intrinsic and Instrumental Values of Democracy References.

Individuals in capitalist societies are increasingly exposed to market risks. Luck egalitarian theories, which advocate neutralizing the influence of luck on distribution, fail to cope with this problem, because they focus on the wrong kinds of distributive constraints. Rules of distributive justice can specify (1) acceptable procedures for allocating goods, (2) the range of acceptable variations in distributive outcomes, or (3) which individuals should have which goods, according to individual characteristics such as desert or need. Desert-catering luck egalitarians offer rules (...) of the third type. Their theories fail because considerations of market efficiency, freedom, and dignity undermine the claims of desert to inform standards of justice for society as a whole. Responsibility-catering luck egalitarians offer rules of the first type. Their theories fail because such rules don’t constrain the downside risks of market choices. To solve this problem, we need rules of the second type, which allow market forces, and hence luck, to influence distributive outcomes, but only within an acceptable egalitarian range. The ideal of equality in social relations helps us devise acceptable constraints at the top, bottom, and middle of the income range. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea that straight talk can actually pose certain dangers for democracy by asking two interrelated questions. First, does our belief in the importance of sincerity necessarily improve political deliberation? Second, does our belief cause us to under-appreciate other important communicative resources? We will see that much hinges on our answers to these questions because they deal directly with whose voices are to be considered legitimate and authoritative in our public sphere. This paper begins from a deliberative (...) democratic standpoint: democracy is a logocentric enterprise—that is, language is at the center of democratic political projects. So it is critical that we pay attention to how we evaluate political words. Otherwise, not only can we not really understand what is going on in the public sphere, but we are also more likely to make poor judgments about what sort of speech and speakers make our democracy more robust. -/- To explore these questions, this paper examines the discourse ethics that underwrite much of deliberative democratic theory (section I). It then goes on to discuss some of the dangers that the particular ethic of sincerity poses for democratic communication. The paper argues that the emphasis on sincerity: -/- 1) too easily collapses the relation between claims to truthfulness and truth claims and contributes to an undemocratic epistemology; 2) oversimplifies human psychology, ignoring the possibility of multiple and complexly related intentions; 3) denigrates “rhetorical” forms of speech; and 4) privileges a seemingly non-rhetorical mode of communication: hyper-sincerity. (shrink)

John Dewey (1859-1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It emancipated its slaves, but subjected them to white supremacy. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were (...) integrated into the urban industrial economy. It granted women the vote, but resisted their full integration into educational and economic institutions. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were up to the task of coping with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing so as to effectively address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to be thoroughly reconstructed, so that it contained within itself the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction. (shrink)

In Democratic Authority, David Estlund 2008 presents a major new defense of democracy, called epistemic proceduralism. The theory claims that democracy exercises legitimate authority in virtue of possessing a modest epistemic power: its decisions are the product of procedures that tend to produce just laws at a better than chance rate, and better than any other type of government that is justifiable within the terms of public reason. The balance Estlund strikes between epistemic and non-epistemic justifications of democracy is open (...) to question, both for its neglect of the roles of non-epistemic values of equality and collective autonomy in democracy, and for the ways his use of the public reason standard overshadows empirically based epistemic arguments for democracy. Nevertheless, Estlund presents telling critiques of rival theories and develops a sophisticated alternative that illuminates some central normative features of democracy. (shrink)

The bioethical principle of respect for a person’s bodily autonomy is central to biomedical and healthcare ethics. In this article, we argue that this concept of autonomy is often annulled in the maternity field, due to the maternal two-in-one body (and the obstetric focus on the foetus over the woman) and the history of medical paternalism in Western medicine and obstetrics. The principle of respect for autonomy has therefore become largely rhetorical, yet can hide all manner of unethical practice. We (...) propose that large institutions that prioritize a midwife–institution relationship over a midwife–woman relationship are in themselves unethical and inimical to the midwifery philosophy of care. We suggest that a focus on care ethics has the potential to remedy these problems, by making power relationships visible and by prioritizing the relationship above abstract ethical principles. (shrink)

Linking specific nursing actions to outcomes in the healthcare setting is challenging. Patient outcomes are varied and influenced by a myriad of factors, and always involve a wider team than any one nurse. It is difficult to control for a single action or set of actions of a particular nurse. Furthermore, practice is seldom about any ‘one’ action, for one thing leads to another, all within a complex interplay of influencing factors. In this article, we outline a research method which (...) combined Dewey's pragmatism with Gadamer's hermeneutics to explore the consequences of the nurse's use of advanced assessment skills in the acute care setting of medical and surgical wards. This pragmatic hermeneutic methodological approach allowed the complex interplay of influences to be revealed in the unfolding story. Reflection of the nurse brought insights that may otherwise have been passed over. The philosophical notions of Dewey drew attention to the play of ‘means’ and ‘ends’. A hermeneutic approach that calls for ‘thinking’ extends understanding and raises insights that can inform education and practice. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that mass incarceration belongs to a category of social status interventions by which the modern state either withholds the ordinary protections and benefits of the law from outlawed groups or subjects them to private punishment based on their mere membership in those groups. In the US these groups include immigrants and resident Latinos, the homeless, the poor and poor blacks, sex workers, and ex-convicts. Outlawry is a fundamentally anti-democratic practice that cannot be justified in terms (...) of deterrence and is incompatible with public safety. (shrink)

The speech-to-song illusion ( Deutsch et al., 2011 ) tracks the perceptual transformation from speech to song across repetitions of a brief spoken utterance. Because it involves no change in the stimulus itself, but a dramatic change in its perceived affiliation to speech or to music, it presents a unique opportunity to comparatively investigate the processing of language and music. In this study, native English-speaking participants were presented with brief spoken utterances that were subsequently repeated ten times. The utterances were (...) drawn either from languages that are relatively difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce, or languages that are relatively easy for a native English speaker to pronounce. Moreover, the repetition could occur at regular or irregular temporal intervals. Participants rated the utterances before and after the repetitions on a 5-point Likert-like scale ranging from “sounds exactly like speech” to “sounds exactly like singing.” The difference in ratings before and after was taken as a measure of the strength of the speech-to-song illusion in each case. The speech-to-song illusion occurred regardless of whether the repetitions were spaced at regular temporal intervals or not; however, it occurred more readily if the utterance was spoken in a language difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce. Speech circuitry seemed more liable to capture native and easy-to-pronounce languages, and more reluctant to relinquish them to perceived song across repetitions. (shrink)

In _On Paradox_ literary and legal scholar Elizabeth S. Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation (...) of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision. She shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox. (shrink)

Ethical business practices have been widely prescribed, but why? Consumers views on unethical business practices have been studied, but possibly more important to marketers and researchers are consumer actions and reactions to unethical business practices and the businesses themselves. Do consumers react negatively, or in such a way as to "punish" the unethical business? If so, what is the nature and extent of the punishment? This research seeks answers to these questions by examining consumer reactions, such as complaining and switching, (...) to instances of unethical business practices. Using equity theory, this research proposes that consumers should be willing to tolerate some unethical behavior as long as they feel their investments and outcomes remain proportionately equal. Consumers who perceive that their outcome/investment ratio is proportionately unequal to their comparison other will respond by switching or complaining. In this research consumers were exposed to two types of service failures with different levels of service recovery in vignettes. Costs incurred by the consumer during the service transaction were also manipulated in the vignettes. Significant differences were found for complaint behavior in the failure recovery vignettes tested. Specifically, voice complaint was higher in the high cost service encounters in both types of services tested. The recovery attempt used (ethical, unethical, or none) led to significance differences in the variables of complaint, voice complaint, satisfaction, and quality. Higher satisfaction and quality ratings were found for the ethical recovery attempt and higher intentions to use complaint and voice complaint in the unethical recovery attempts. One significant interaction between cost and recovery attempt was found. Intentions to use voice complaint were higher in the high cost situations of ethical and unethical recovery, while approaching equality at the no recovery attempt. (shrink)

For much of his career, British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was identified with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies. He has been called by some a guru to the Tories, while others have considered him one of the last proponents of British Idealism. Best known for such books as _Experience and Its Modes_ and _Rationalism in Politics_, Oakeshott has been the subject of numerous studies, but always with an emphasis on his political thought. Elizabeth Campbell Corey now makes the case that (...) Oakeshott’s moral and political philosophies are more informed by religious and aesthetic considerations than has previously been supposed. Hers is the first book-length study of this premise, arguing that Oakeshott’s views on aesthetics, religion, and morality are intimately linked in a creative moral personality that underlies his political theorizing. Corey focuses on a wealth of early material from Oakeshott’s career that has only recently been published, as well as his acclaimed “Tower of Babel” essays, to show that these works illuminate his thinking in ways that could not have been realized prior to their publication. She places Oakeshott squarely in the Augustinian tradition, citing his 1929 essay “Religion and the World,” and then identifies his departure from it. She explores Oakeshott’s recurring theme of “living one’s life in the present”; examines his explicit discussions of religion, aesthetics, and morality; and then considers his political thought in light of this moral vision. She finally compares his idea of Rationalism to Eric Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism and considers both thinkers’ treatment of Hobbes to delineate their philosophical differences. Through this insightful analysis, Corey shows Oakeshott to be not merely a political philosopher but a thinker with humanistic interests—one who throughout his life was deeply interested in the question of what it means to be human and was moved by art, poetry, and religion while recognizing the necessary evil of political arrangements in order for those activities to flourish. Her work is a major step in a reevaluation of Oakeshott, showing that his conservatism has been greatly misunderstood and that he is more properly regarded as a philosopher whose vision of the human condition, while oftentimes detached and skeptical, is also romantic and inspired. (shrink)

Concerns about children's ability to fully comprehend and evaluate advertising messages has stimulated substantial research and heated debate among scholars, business leaders, consumer advocates, and public policy makers for more than three decades. During that time, some very fundamental questions about the fairness of marketing to children have been raised, yet many remain unresolved today. With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated advertising media, promotional offers and creative appeals in recent years, new issues have also developed. This paper provides a basis (...) for further examination of some the key questions in this area, and suggests how children's advertising research can be employed to illuminate them. (shrink)

The frequency of earnings restatements has been increasing over the last decade. Restating previous earnings erodes perceived trustworthiness and competence of management, giving firms strong incentives to take actions to enhance perceived credibility of future financial reports [Farber, D. B.: 2005, The Accounting Review 80(2), 539–561.]. Using an experimental case, we examine the ability of post-restatement actions taken by a firm to positively influence non-professional investors’ perceptions of management’s financial reporting credibility. Our examination considers credibility judgments following two types of (...) restatements – those resulting from fraud in which the character, ethics, and values of an organization may be called into question [cf. Copeland, Jr., J. E.: 2005, Accounting Horizons 19(1), 35–43.], and those resulting from non-fraud (i.e., aggressive accounting). Based on the information in the experimental case, non-professional investors take the role of potential equity investors and make a judgment about management’s financial reporting credibility after reviewing a set of post-restatement actions taken by a firm. The possible actions include changes in four corporate governance mechanisms (i.e., internal audit function, external audit firm, board of directors, CFO) and a buyback of company stock. Our results provide an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that among non-professional investors, perceptions of management’s financial reporting credibility are affected both by the post-restatement action taken and the nature of the restatement. These results offer insight into the formation of a key credibility judgment made by non-professional investors following a trust-destroying event, an earnings restatement. (shrink)

Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Elizabeth Anderson on 18 June 2014.

Feminist perspectives have been increasingly influential on philosophy of science. Feminism and Philosophy of Science is designed to introduce the newcomer to the central themes, issues and arguments of this burgeoning area of study. Elizabeth Potter engages in a rigorous and well-organized study that takes in the views of key feminist theorists - Nelson, Wylie, Anderson, Longino and Harding - whose arguments exemplify contemporary feminist philosophy of science. The book is divided into six chapters looking at important themes: naturalized (...) feminist empiricism feminist value theory feminist conceptual empiricism standpoint epistemologies of science value-free science Arranged thematically, F eminism and Philosophy of Science looks at the spectrum of views that have arisen in the debate, and unpicks the arguments on key topics such as value-free science, values, objectivity, point of view and relativism. It assumes no previous knowledge of the subject, and is written in an accessible, student-friendly style. It will be an important read for students of philosophy, philosophy of science, gender studies and feminist studies. (shrink)

The frequency of earnings restatements has been increasing over the last decade. Restating previous earnings erodes perceived trustworthiness and competence of management, giving firms strong incentives to take actions to enhance perceived credibility of future financial reports [Farber, D. 2005, The Accounting Review 80, 539-561.]. Using an experimental case, we examine the ability of post-restatement actions taken by a firm to positively influence nonprofessional investors' perceptions of management's financial reporting credibility. Our examination considers credibility judgments following two types of restatements (...) -those resulting from fraud in which the character, ethics, and values of an organization may be called into question [cf. Copeland, Jr., J. E.: 2005, Accounting Horizons 19, 35-43.], and those resulting from non-fraud. Based on the information in the experimental case, non-professional investors take the role of potential equity investors and make a judgment about management's financial reporting credibility after reviewing a set of postrestatement actions taken by a firm. The possible actions include changes in four corporate governance mechanisms and a buyback of company stock. Our results provide an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that among non-professional investors, perceptions of management's financial reporting credibility are affected both by the postrestatement action taken and the nature of the restatement. These results offer insight into the formation of a key credibility judgment made by non-professional investors following a trust-destroying event, an earnings restatement. (shrink)

Do terminally ill patients who have exhausted all other available, government-approved treatment options have a constitutional right to experimental treatment that may prolong their lives? On May 2, 2006, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a startling opinion, Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Von Eschenbach, held “Yes.” The plaintiffs, Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs and Washington Legal Foundation, sought to enjoin the Food and Drug (...) Administration from refusing to allow the sale of investigational new drugs that had not yet received FDA approval. The terminally ill plaintiffs contended that they quite literally could not wait that long for the drugs. With no other treatment options available, the plaintiffs urged the court to recognize a fundamental, constitutional right to take potentially life-saving or life-prolonging drugs, even though the treatment had not been fully tested through human trials for safety and effectiveness and could not be legally marketed to the public. (shrink)

Possibilities for critical social theory and Foucault’s work: a toolbox approach The benefits and constraints of philosophical frameworks using the work of Michel Foucault and critical social theorists, such as Fay, Giroux and McLaren, are examined in the light of their traditions. The reasons nurse researchers adopt these frameworks are explored, as are the tensions between the respective theories. A complementary ‘toolbox’ approach to the research process addresses some of the theoretical and methodological challenges presented by each framework. Such an (...) approach provides distinctive insights into nursing practice that the other has ignored or missed. It is argued that by converging the two frameworks into a toolbox approach, it is possible to examine or deconstruct existing practices, whilst also providing an avenue for nurses to reconstruct or change such practices. (shrink)

This book examines the dialogue between Roman Stoic ethics and the work of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. Elizabeth Agnew Cochran illuminates key theological convictions that provide a foundation for constructing a contemporary Protestant virtue ethic consistent with a number of theological beliefs characteristic of the historical Reformed tradition. Building on this conversation, this book develops the claims that faith holds a unique value among possible moral goods; virtue has a unity that coincides with a soteriology that (...) conceives justification as radically transforming a Christian from a sinner to one who is righteous before God; and moral responsibility is realized through a dispositional consent to God's loving providence. (shrink)