We prove that degrees that are low for Kurtz randomness cannot be diagonally non-recursive. Together with the work of Stephan and Yu [16], this proves that they coincide with the hyperimmune-free non-DNR degrees, which are also exactly the degrees that are low for weak 1-genericity. We also consider Low(M, Kurtz), the class of degrees a such that every element of M is a-Kurtz random. These are characterised when M is the class of Martin-Löf random, computably random, or Schnorr random reals. (...) We show that Low(ML, Kurtz) coincides with the non-DNR degrees, while both Low(CR, Kurtz) and Low(Schnorr, Kurtz) are exactly the non-high, non-DNR degrees. (shrink)

We give two new characterizations of K-triviality. We show that if for all Y such that Ω is Y-random, Ω is -random, then A is K-trivial. The other direction was proved by Stephan and Yu, giving us the first titular characterization of K-triviality and answering a question of Yu. We also prove that if A is K-trivial, then for all Y such that Ω is Y-random, ≡LRY. This answers a question of Merkle and Yu. The other direction is immediate, so (...) we have the second characterization of K-triviality.The proof of the first characterization uses a new cupping result. We prove that if A≰LRB, then for every set X there is a B-random set Y such that X is computable from Y⊕A. (shrink)

We study the sets that are computable from both halves of some (Martin–Löf) random sequence, which we call 1/2-bases. We show that the collection of such sets forms an ideal in the Turing degrees that is generated by its c.e. elements. It is a proper subideal of the K-trivial sets. We characterize 1/2-bases as the sets computable from both halves of Chaitin’s Ω, and as the sets that obey the cost function c(x,s)=Ωs−Ωx−−−−−−−√. Generalizing these results yields a dense hierarchy of (...) subideals in the K-trivial degrees: For k<n, let Bk/n be the collection of sets that are below any k out of n columns of some random sequence. As before, this is an ideal generated by its c.e. elements and the random sequence in the definition can always be taken to be Ω. Furthermore, the corresponding cost function characterization reveals that Bk/n is independent of the particular representation of the rational k/n, and that Bp is properly contained in Bq for rational numbers p<q. These results are proved using a generalization of the Loomis–Whitney inequality, which bounds the measure of an open set in terms of the measures of its projections. The generality allows us to analyze arbitrary families of orthogonal projections. As it turns out, these do not give us new subideals of the K-trivial sets; we can calculate from the family which Bp it characterizes. We finish by studying the union of Bp for p<1; we prove that this ideal consists of the sets that are robustly computable from some random sequence. This class was previously studied by Hirschfeldt [D. R. Hirschfeldt, C. G. Jockusch, R. Kuyper and P. E. Schupp, Coarse reducibility and algorithmic randomness, J. Symbolic Logic81(3) (2016) 1028–1046], who showed that it is a proper subclass of the K-trivial sets. We prove that all such sets are robustly computable from Ω, and that they form a proper subideal of the sets computable from every (weakly) LR-hard random sequence. We also show that the ideal cannot be characterized by a cost function, giving the first such example of a Σ03 subideal of the K-trivial sets. (shrink)

We explore the interaction between Lebesgue measure and dominating functions. We show, via both a priority construction and a forcing construction, that there is a function of incomplete degree that dominates almost all degrees. This answers a question of Dobrinen and Simpson, who showed that such functions are related to the proof-theoretic strength of the regularity of Lebesgue measure for Gδ sets. Our constructions essentially settle the reverse mathematical classification of this principle.

There is a perfect thin class whose upward closure in the Turing degrees has full measure . Thus, in the Muchnik lattice of classes, the degree of 2-random reals is comparable with the degree of some perfect thin class. This solves a question of Simpson [S. Simpson, Mass problems and randomness, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 11 1–27].

The hippocampal formation is a structure critical to navigation and many forms of memory. In mammals, the firing of place cells is widely regarded as the fundamental unit of HF information processing. Supporting homology between the avian and mammalian HF, context-specific patterns of Egr1 have been reported in birds that are comparable to those produced by place cell firing in mammals. Recent electrophysiological data, however, suggest that many avian species lack place cells, potentially undermining the correspondence between Egr1 and place (...) cell-related firing in the avian brain. To clarify this, the current study examines Egr1 expression in Japanese quail under conditions known to elicit only weakly spatially modulated firing patterns and report robust context-dependent Egr1 expression. These data confirm that context-dependent expression of Egr1 is not dependent on precise place fields and provide insight into how these birds are able to perform complex spatial tasks despite lacking mammalian-like place cells. (shrink)

EveryK-trivial set is computable from an incomplete Martin-Löf random set, i.e., a Martin-Löf random set that does not compute the halting problem.

A real is called properly n-generic if it is n-generic but not n+1-generic. We show that every 1-generic real computes a properly 1-generic real. On the other hand, if m > n ≥ 2 then an m-generic real cannot compute a properly n-generic real.

We define the Scott complexity of a countable structure to be the least complexity of a Scott sentence for that structure. This is a finer notion of complexity than Scott rank: it distinguishes between whether the simplest Scott sentence is $\Sigma _{\alpha }$, $\Pi _{\alpha }$, or $\mathrm {d-}\Sigma _{\alpha }$. We give a complete classification of the possible Scott complexities, including an example of a structure whose simplest Scott sentence is $\Sigma _{\lambda + 1}$ for $\lambda $ a limit (...) ordinal. This answers a question left open by A. Miller.We also construct examples of computable structures of high Scott rank with Scott complexities $\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$ and $\mathrm {d-}\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$. There are three other possible Scott complexities for a computable structure of high Scott rank: $\Pi _{\omega _1^{CK}}$, $\Pi _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$, $\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$. Examples of these were already known. Our examples are computable structures of Scott rank $\omega _1^{CK}+1$ which, after naming finitely many constants, have Scott rank $\omega _1^{CK}$. The existence of such structures was an open question. (shrink)

We investigate the role of continuous reductions and continuous relativization in the context of higher randomness. We define a higher analogue of Turing reducibility and show that it interacts well with higher randomness, for example with respect to van Lambalgen’s theorem and the Miller–Yu/Levin theorem. We study lowness for continuous relativization of randomness, and show the equivalence of the higher analogues of the different characterizations of lowness for Martin-Löf randomness. We also characterize computing higher [Formula: see text]-trivial sets by (...) higher random sequences. We give a separation between higher notions of randomness, in particular between higher weak 2-randomness and [Formula: see text]-randomness. To do so we investigate classes of functions computable from Kleene’s [Formula: see text] based on strong forms of the higher limit lemma. (shrink)

Despite the supreme political and economic significance of boundaries--and ongoing challenges to existing national boundaries--scant attention has been paid to their ethics. This volume explores how diverse ethical traditions understand the political and property rights reflected in territorial and jurisdictional boundaries. It is the first book to bring together thinkers from a range of traditions, both religious and secular, to discuss the ethics of boundaries. Each contributor represents a tradition's views on questions surrounding the use of boundaries to delimit property (...) and political rights. What does it mean to own something? What resources should not be privately owned? What justifies the erection of political boundaries between one people and another? How ''hard'' should such boundaries be? What rights extend to minorities within a state? Should territorial boundaries coincide with social ones? Does national autonomy have an ethical basis, or is it an aspect of modern power politics? Should we aim for a more inclusive community than that afforded by modern nation-states? Cross-chapter dialogue and a substantive conclusion draw out similarities and differences among the traditions represented, traditions that include Christianity, classical liberalism, Confucianism, international law, Islam, Judaism, liberal egalitarianism, and natural law. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Nigel Biggar, Joseph Boyle, Joseph Chan, Russell Hardin, Will Kymlicka, Loren Lomasky, Robert McCorquodale, Richard B. Miller, David Novak, Sulayman Nyang, Michael Nylan, Raul C. Pangalangan, Daniel Philpott, Jeremy Rabkin, Hillel Steiner, M. Raquibuz Zaman, and Noam J. Zohar. (shrink)

Review by: Johanna N. Y. Franklin The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 115-118, March 2013.

The birth of a new science is long, drawn out, and often fairly messy. Comparative psychology has its roots in Darwin’s Descent of Man, was fertilized in academic psychology departments, and has branched across the universities into departments of biology, anthropology, primatology, zoology, and philosophy. Both the insights and the failings of comparative psychology are making their way into contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence and machine learning (Chollett 2019; Lapuschkin et al. 2019; Watson 2019). It is the right time to (...) turn a philosophical lens onto the methodologies of comparative psychology. That is the aim of this Element. -/- Comparative psychology is the umbrella covering the different ways scientists study animal mind and behavior. Comparative psychologists study animal behavior and mentality, including the mechanisms and inner states that allow crows to form hooks, vervet monkeys to give warnings, crabs to make trade-off decisions, and humans to use language. While focus is on the similarities and differences between different species, capacities are often studied in terms of their evolutionary history, development, and current ecological or cultural context. What this entails is that comparative psychologists have a range of different kinds of training, different areas of expertise, and different research questions. One comparative cognition researcher compares children and dogs on causal reasoning abilities (Daphna Buchsbaum), another looks at memory in corvids (Nicola Clayton). An animal behaviorist examines raccoon territories in a city (Suzanne MacDonald). One anthropologist looks at war in wild chimpanzees (John Mitani), another looks at how innovations are adopted in capu- chin monkeys (Susan Perry). One ethologist looks at play in wolves (Marc Bekoff), and another looks at deception in birds (Carolyn Ristau). One biologist looks at male alliances in dolphins (Richard Connor), and another examines economic game performance in apes and monkeys (Sarah Brosnan). An animal welfare scientist studies the effect of enrichment on mink (Georgia Mason). A learning theorist looks at gambling in pigeons (Thomas Zentall). A zoologist studies social learning in bees (Lars Chittka). It is not easy to guess in which department you’ll find a comparative psychologist. -/- This Element aims to examine the methods of comparative psychology, which remains especially concerned about how to study animal minds and behavior without falling prey to fuzzy thinking. Animals can be cute, so humans are often intrinsically drawn to them; and this love of animals is sometimes taken to be at odds with being a careful scientist. The methods of comparative psychology reflect this worry with their special emphases on avoiding bias and on avoiding developing warm relationships with animal subjects. The first two sections analyze three textbooks to examine what young scientists are taught. Section 1 investigates three methodological principles students are taught to follow: Anti-anthropomorphism, Morgan’s Canon, and Anti-anthropocentrism. I argue that the first two principles should be discarded, and that developing relationships with animals should no longer be discouraged, as relationships promote understanding. Building on this critique, in Section 2 I challenge the common prohibition against including animal consciousness in comparative psychology by arguing that it does not harm the science, but promotes it. Setting aside the special prohibitions for comparative psychology, in Section 3 I examine how the quest for objectivity in comparative psychology introduces its own bias and argue that the different disciplines of comparative psychology will introduce different biases; the best scientists can do is identify the sources of bias. The quest to eliminate all bias is a misguided one. Section 4 applies these issues to recent debates in ape cognition research between scientists who work in the field and those who work in the lab, and suggests best practices for integrating knowledge from both sources. -/- I have had the opportunity to work with a number of comparative psychologists in a variety of contexts, including a stint at Lou Herman’s dolphin communication lab in the 1990s, collaborative studies with Peter Verbeek on the child’s theory of mind at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Child Development, conducting research on orangutan pantomime communication with Anne Russon at her field sites in Borneo, research on rat social learning with Noam Miller at Wilfrid Laurier University, and co-teaching a field course in dolphin communication with Kathleen Dudzinski. As a philosopher of science who has been in the field and in the lab, I have a perspective from which to compare the comparative psychologists. This Element is my attempt to synthesize almost thirty years of experience and thinking about how to study animal minds. (shrink)

Since the middle of the 20th century there has been a significant debate about the attribution of capacities of living systems, particularly humans, to technological artefacts, especially computers—from Turing’s opening gambit, to subsequent considerations of artificial intelligence, to recent claims about artificial life. Some now argue that the capacities of future technologies will ultimately make it impossible to draw any meaningful distinctions between humans and machines. Such issues center on what sense, if any, it makes to claim that gadgets can (...) actually think, feel, act, live, etc. I outline this debate and offer a critique of its persistent polarization. I characterize two of the debate’s major camps (associated roughly with Turing and Searle); argue that the debate’s structure (including key assumptions inherent to each camp) precludes resolution; and, contend that some central clashes within the debate actually stem from an inadequately drawn distinction between claims about the capacities of artifacts and claims about the proper criteria for assessing such attributions. I offer a different perspective in which I: challenge some central elements of the debate that contribute to its perennially irresolvable state; hold that the debate needs to be placed more squarely in sync with how we in fact treat the attribution of such capacities to humans themselves; and, offer (unlike the other two camps) a foothold for making moral assessments of such proposed technologies. (shrink)

Dual-track assessment directs research ethics committees to assess the risks of research interventions based on the unclear distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic interventions. The net risks test, in contrast, relies on the clinically familiar method of assessing the risks and benefits of interventions in comparison to the available alternatives and also focuses attention of the RECs on the central challenge of protecting research participants.Research guidelines around the world recognise that clinical research is ethical only when the risks to participants are (...) reasonable.1 Appropriate implementation of this requirement is vital to protecting research participants and allowing research to proceed when it poses acceptable risks. Unfortunately, as the US National Bioethics Advisory Commission notes: “current regulations do not further elaborate how risks and potential benefits are to be assessed, and little additional guidance is available to IRBs.”1The NBAC, as well as numerous commentators, recommend that research ethics committees , ethics review committees and institutional review boards should adopt what may be called dual-track risk assessment.2–5 Yet, dual-track assessment unnecessarily divides research interventions into two different categories before assessing their risks and relies on the unclear distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic interventions. As a result, dual-track assessment provides RECs with confusing guidance and has the potential to block valuable research that poses acceptable risks. This paper describes one alternative, the net risks test, and argues that this approach offers a better method for assessing research risks, one that puts RECs in a position to protect participants without blocking appropriate research studies.BACKGROUNDClinical research exposes participants to interventions and procedures to gather systematic data that may be used to improve overall health and well-being. To ensure that research is ethical, RECs must ensure that the risks and burdens to participants are not excessive and that …. (shrink)

Gentzen’s sequent calculi LK and LJ are landmark proof systems. They identify the structural rules of weakening and contraction as notable inference rules, and they allow for an elegant statement and proof of both cut elimination and consistency for classical and intuitionistic logics. Among the undesirable features of those sequent calculi is that their inferences rules are low-level and frequently permute over each other. As a result, large-scale structures within sequent calculus proofs are hard to identify. In this paper, we (...) present a different approach to designing a sequent calculus for classical logic. Starting with Gentzen’s LK proof system, we examine the proof search meaning of his inference rules and classify those rules as involving either don’t care nondeterminism or don’t know nondeterminism. Based on that classification, we design the focused proof system LKF in which inference rules belong to one of two phases of proof construction depending on which flavor of nondeterminism they involve. We then prove that the cut rule and the general form of the initial rule are admissible in LKF. Finally, by showing that the inference rules for LK are all admissible in LKF, we can give a relative completeness proof for LKF provability with respect to LK provability. We shall also apply these properties of the LKF proof system to establish other meta-theoretic properties of classical logic, including Herbrand’s theorem. (shrink)

The concept of minimal risk has been used to regulate and limit participation by adolescents in clinical trials. It can be understood as setting an absolute standard of what risks are considered minimal or it can be interpreted as relative to the actual risks faced by members of the host community for the trial. While commentators have almost universally opposed a relative interpretation of the environmental risks faced by potential adolescent trial participants, we argue that the ethical concerns against the (...) relative standard may not be as convincing as these commentators believe. Our aim is to present the case for a relative standard of environmental risk in order to open a debate on this subject. We conclude by discussing how a relative standard of environmental risk could be defended in the specific case of an HIV vaccine trial among adolescents in South Africa. (shrink)

Accounting ethics failures have seized headlines and cost investors billions of dollars. Improvement of the ethical reasoning and behavior of accountants has become a key concern for the accounting profession and for higher education in accounting. Researchers have asked a number of questions, including what type of accounting ethics education intervention would be most effective for accounting students. Some researchers have proposed virtue ethics as an appropriate moral framework for accounting. This research tested whether Smithian virtue ethics training, based on (...) Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”, is effective in improving accounting student’s cognitive moral development. This research used a pre-test, treatment, post-test, quasi-experimental design utilizing the Defining Issues Test 2 instrument to measure students’ CMD. Analysis of DIT-2 gain scores did show a significant improvement in subjects’ personal interest scores and a significant improvement in an overall measure of CMD, the DIT N2 index, whereas their DIT-2 post-conventional scores did not improve significantly. This research supports the proposition that the concepts contained in Smithian virtue ethics can contribute to an effective accounting ethics education intervention. However, further research is required to determine what concepts should be included to improve accounting students’ post-conventional moral reasoning. (shrink)

Ethical guidelines for conducting clinical trials have historically been based on a perceived therapeutic obligation to treat and benefit the patient-participants. The origins of this ethical framework can be traced to the Hippocratic oath originally written to guide doctors in caring for their patients, where the overriding moral obligation of doctors is strictly to do what is best for the individual patient, irrespective of other social considerations. In contrast, although medicine focuses on the health of the person, public health is (...) concerned with the health of the entire population, and thus, public health ethics is founded on the societal responsibility to protect and promote the health of the population as a whole. From a public health perspective, research ethics should be guided by giving due consideration to the risks and benefits to society in addition to the individual research participants. On the basis of a duty to protect the population as a whole, a fiduciary obligation to realise the social value of the research and the moral responsibility to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly across society, how a public health perspective on research ethics results in fundamental re-assessments of the proper course of action for two salient topical issues in research ethics is shown: stopping trials early for reasons of efficacy and the conduct of research on less expensive yet less effective interventions. (shrink)

Researchers are developing a fertility preservation technique?testicular tissue cryopreservation (TTCP)?for prepubescent boys who may become infertile as a result of their cancer treatment. Although this technique is still in development, some researchers are calling for its widespread use. They argue that if boys do not bank their tissue now, they will be unable to benefit from any therapies that might be developed in the future. There are, however, risks involved with increasing access to an investigational procedure. This article examines four (...) methods of expanding access to TTCP: (1) expansion of institutional review board (IRB)-approved research trials; (2) offering TTCP as an innovative procedure in hospitals; (3) offering TTCP as a standard practice in hospitals; and (4) commercialization of TTCP. The ethical and practical implications of each are evaluated through a comparison with umbilical cord blood banking (UCBB), a technology that has achieved widespread use based on similar claims of future benefit. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 112-114.

A special report of The Hastings Center and the Association of American Medical Colleges addressed the ethical oversight of learning health systems, which seek to combine high‐quality patient care with routine data collection aimed at improving patient outcomes. The report contained two position papers, authored by a number of distinguished bioethicists, and several commentaries. The position papers urged two changes. First, they urged a rethinking of our approach to the regulation of human subjects research, so as to make it easier (...) in the future for learning health systems to function well. Second, they argued that the rethinking required dispensing with a strict distinction between research and therapy, which has been a major tenet of bioethics since the Belmont Report, which explicated basic ethical principles governing human subjects research. We fully support the objectives of the authors, and we agree that the learning health system is an important advance that serves patients well. Unnecessary regulatory burden ought not impede this progress. We disagree, however, that the best way to bring about these needed changes in the regulatory environment is to reject the basic distinction between research and treatment. Unfortunately, we find the arguments in favor of that strategy to be, in places, reminiscent of what we take to be basic conceptual errors that hampered the ethical understanding of human subjects research prior to adoption of the Belmont Report. To see why one need not reject the research‐treatment distinction in order to promote learning health systems, we first investigate in some detail the arguments offered for eliminating the distinction. We next turn to an issue not addressed by those authors, namely, the relationship between the physician or investigator and the patient or subject, to illustrate why the distinction is important and what is lost if it is jettisoned. (shrink)

We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved spectators. (...) Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution. (shrink)

In recent decades, psychological research on the effects of mindfulness-based interventions has greatly developed and demonstrated a range of beneficial outcomes in a variety of populations and contexts. Yet, the question of how to foster subjective well-being and happiness remains open. Here, we assessed the effectiveness of an integrated mental training program The Art of Happiness on psychological well-being in a general population. The mental training program was designed to help practitioners develop new ways to nurture their own happiness. This (...) was achieved by seven modules aimed at cultivating positive cognition strategies and behaviors using both formal and informal practices. The program was conducted over a period of 9 months, also comprising two retreats, one in the middle and one at the end of the course. By using a set of established psychometric tools, we assessed the effects of such a mental training program on several psychological well-being dimensions, taking into account both the longitudinal effects of the course and the short-term effects arising from the intensive retreat experiences. The results showed that several psychological well-being measures gradually increased within participants from the beginning to the end of the course. This was especially true for life satisfaction, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, highlighting both short-term and longitudinal effects of the program. In conclusion, these findings suggest the potential of the mental training program, such as The Art of Happiness, for psychological well-being. (shrink)

The rotating spot method of timing subjective events involves the subject’s watching a rotating spot on a computer and reporting the position of the spot at the instant when the subjective event of interest occurs. We conducted an experiment to investigate factors that may impact on the results produced by this method, using the subject’s perception of when they made a simple finger movement as the subjective event to be timed. Seven aspects of the rotating spot method were investigated, using (...) a factorial experiment. Four of these aspects altered the physical characteristics of the computer generated spot or clock face and the remaining three altered the instructions given to the participant. We found compelling evidence that one factor, whether the subject was instructed to report the instant when the finger movement was initiated or the instant when it was completed, resulted in a systematic shift in the response. Evidence that three other factors affect the observed variability in the response was also found. In addition, we observed that there are substantial systematic differences in the responses made by different subjects. We discuss the implications of our findings and make recommendations about the optimal way of conducting future experiments using the rotating spot method. Our overall conclusion is that our results strongly validate the rotating spot method of timing at least the studied variety of subjective event. (shrink)

We argued last year in this journal that extensive integration of research and care is a worthy goal of health system design, and we second the call from Ruth Faden and colleagues to move toward learning health care systems. As they recognize, learning health care systems demand the coordination of research and medical ethics—two sets of normative commitments that have long been considered distinct. In offering a novel ethics framework for such systems, Faden et al. advance the scholarly debate about (...) how best to do this and challenge us to think more deeply about its practical implications. However, we believe that at least three issues they raise require additional attention. First, the research‐care distinction has more normative bite than they are willing to concede. Second, the role for independent oversight requires clarification. Finally, they neglect the concept of stewardship as a guiding obligation of learning health care systems. (shrink)

Given a theoryTextending that of dense linear orders without endpoints, in a language ℒ ⊇ {<}, we are interested in extensionsT′ ofTin languages extending ℒ by unary relation symbols that are each interpreted in models ofT′ as sets that are both dense and codense in the underlying sets of the models.There is a canonically “wild” example, namelyT= Th andT′ = Th. Recall thatTis o-minimal, and so every open set definable in any model ofThas only finitely many definably connected components. But (...) it is well known that 〈ℝ, <, +, · ℚ 〉 defines every real Borel set, in particular, every open subset of any finite cartesian power of ℝ and every subset of any finite cartesian power of ℚ. To put this another way, the definable open sets in models ofTare essentially as simple as possible, whileT′ has a model where the definable open sets are as complicated as possible, as is the structure induced on the new predicate.In contrast to the preceding example, if ℝalgis the set of real algebraic numbers andT′ Th, then no model ofT′ defines any open set that is not definable in the underlying model ofT. (shrink)

Contributors to this volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices or settings, as a framework that should (...) guide thinking. (shrink)

This study investigates the ethical climate types presented in the Korean tourism industry, the differences in the perceptions of these ethical climate types based on individual/organizational characteristics, and the influence of ethical climate types based on job satisfaction/organizational commitment. Empirical findings of this study identify six ethical climate types and demonstrate significant difference and significant influence of the proposed relationships. This research contributes to the existing body of academic work by using empirical data collected from 820 respondents across 14 companies (...) within the Korean tourism industry, to demonstrate the relationship between actual ethical climate types and ethical climate related factors. The findings of this study identify the new factor ‹moral caring,’ which describes an environment characterized by decisions that maximize collective interest, but based on an individual employee’s personal values and ethics. Such a factor has important implications for the service industry, where face-to-face encounters typify the relationship between employee and consumer. (shrink)

We are very grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our little article, ‘What Makes Killing Wrong?’ They raise many points, so we cannot respond to them all, but we do want to head off a few misinterpretations.Our critics in this journal avoid one careless misinterpretation, but less informed readers have pressed this misinterpretation in popular venues, so we need to start by renouncing it. We do not deny that killing humans is morally wrong. To the (...) contrary, we argue that killing humans is almost always morally wrong, because killing humans is almost always disabling, and disabling is morally wrong. Here we do not disagree with common sense. We also do not deny that killing partially or even profoundly disabled humans is morally wrong. People who are disabled in some ways still retain many other valuable abilities. This should be obvious. To kill a person with some disabilities but many other valuable abilities is to disable that person, so that is morally wrong. Here again we do not disagree with common sense. The one and only surprising application of our theory is to humans who are alive but totally disabled. We argue that, apart from special circumstances, it is not morally wrong to kill live humans who are totally disabled, whereas many people think that it would be morally wrong to kill even in these extreme and unusual cases, because they assume that killing is morally wrong for reasons apart from disabling.What could those reasons be? DeGrazia mentions three possibilities. First, ‘the harm of killing —in those ordinary cases in …. (shrink)

Over the past 5 years, a series of articles in leading American newspapers has revealed the extent to which the conduct of clinical trials may be affected by inducements offered by corporate research sponsors and accepted by some unscrupulous physicians. The cases described were disturbing. They involved physicians engaged in excessive “enrollment activities” in exchange for money. Some of these physicians perpetrated fraud, falsifying their recruitment records in order to increase their profits. Others ignored exclusion criteria designed to ensure the (...) safety of subjects and the validity of research results, referring their patients to research investigating treatments for conditions from which they did not suffer. One of the articles reports that physicians focusing exclusively on commercial research regularly divulge annual incomes upwards of $1,000,000 with profits in excess of $300,000. Two physicians accumulated well over $10,000,000 through clinical trials activities in less than a decade. (shrink)

, from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

:In this article, we present an educational intervention that embeds ethics education within research laboratories. This structure is designed to assist students in addressing ethical challenges in a more informed way, and to improve the overall ethical culture of research environments. The project seeks to identify factors that students and researchers consider relevant to ethical conduct in science, technology, engineering, and math and to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up (...) approach to developing context-specific, ethics-based guidelines. An important assumption behind this approach is that direct involvement in the process of developing laboratory specific ethical guidelines will positively influence researchers’ understanding of ethical research and practice issues, their handling of these issues, and the promotion of an ethical culture in the respective laboratory. The active involvement may increase the sense of ownership and integration of further discussion on these important topics. Based on the project experiences, the project team seeks to develop a module involving the bottom-up building of codes-of-ethics-based guidelines that can be used by a broad range of institutions and that will be distributed widely. (shrink)