Teaching the nuances of ethical decision making is particularly challenging in fully online, asynchronous courses where real-time discussion is not an option. Digital simulations, in the context of an integrative online ethics course, can offer applied learning and assessment experiences. However, scholarship on the impact of digital simulations for teaching ethical decision making is limited. The purpose of this study is to explore whether digital simulation used as an assessment for ethical reasoning and complex decision making is effective in helping (...) business students heighten their awareness of values in tension and discern ethical paths to resolution. We conduct an exploratory analysis of two ethics simulations used in teaching nine graduate business ethics classes offered in an asynchronous, online format. We discuss the results in terms of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics’ five-step ethical decision making framework and outline implications for teaching and future research on business ethics simulations. (shrink)

“Would you like to contribute to XYZ charity by adding a dollar to your bill today?” Point-of-sale campaigns for fundraising are common to grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants and warehouse clubs. Commonly referred to as ‘checkout charity,’ these fundraisers have generated over $4.1 billion in contributions for nonprofits over the past three decades. Yet little research has focused on the ethicality of this type of campaign. To address this need, we analyze the issue using behavioral ethics and normative theory. We consider (...) three stakeholder perspectives, including the nonprofit initiating the campaign, the business hosting the campaign, and the donor. Often ethical theories are seen as competing for primacy rather than being complementary perspectives in choosing the best action. We demonstrate that ethical discernment results in a richer analysis when consulting multiple frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to provide a set of ethical considerations for individuals to draw upon when devising and donating to checkout charity campaigns. This analysis will serve as a conceptual resource for scholars, practitioners, and students of nonprofit and for-profit management. (shrink)

The college athletics environment within the USA is ethically complex and often controversial. From an academic standpoint, athletes are often viewed as a privileged class receiving undue benefit. Yet closer inspection reveals that student athletes are at risk psychologically, physically, and intellectually in ways that undermine development and flourishing. This reality stands in troubling contrast to the prosocial, virtue-based goals expressed by university mission statements. Given the role of sport in many university business models, college athletics invites scrutiny from a (...) business ethics standpoint. Using a humanistic leadership perspective (Pirson in: Humanistic management: protecting dignity and promoting well-being, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017), we organize our analysis around three challenges facing the college athletics system: (1) navigating the tension between claiming college athletes are amateurs rather than professionals; (2) defining the ethical edge between winning and winning fairly; and (3) moderating the insatiable drive to win while protecting student athlete well-being. We then articulate three strategies for successfully addressing these challenges: leadership role modeling, putting structural supports in place and holding people accountable. We argue that humanistic leadership and a ‘balanced motivational drive mindset’ (Lawrence and Nohria in: J Bus Ethics 128:383–394, 2002, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2090-2 ; Pirson 2017) could help move college athletics from an economistic model toward a more humanistic model that prioritizes the dignity and well-being of its participants, particularly student athletes. (shrink)

According to our data, 38.5 % of S&P 1500 firms have at least one professor on their boards. Given the lack of research examining the roles and effects of academic faculty as members of boards of directors on corporate outcomes, this study investigates whether firms with professor–directors are more likely to exhibit higher corporate social responsibility performance ratings. Results indicate that firms with professor–directors do exhibit higher CSR performance ratings than those without. However, the influence of professor–directors on firm CSR (...) performance ratings depends on their academic background—the positive association between the presence of professor–directors and firm CSR performance ratings is significant only when their academic background is specialized. Finally, this positive association weakens when professor–directors hold an administrative position at their universities. (shrink)

Uses an ongoing legal controversy to explore the controversial subject of religious liberty and education.

Chelicerates (scorpions, horseshoe crabs, spiders, mites and ticks) are the second largest group of arthropods and are of immense importance for fundamental and applied science. They occupy a basal phylogenetic position within the phylum Arthropoda, and are of crucial significance for understanding the evolution of various arthropod lineages. Chelicerates are vectors of human diseases, such as ticks, and major agricultural pests, such as spider mites, thus this group is also of importance for both medicine and agriculture. The developmental genetics of (...) chelicerates is poorly understood and a challenge for the future progress for many aspects of chelicerate biology is the development of a model organism for this group. Toward this end, we are developing a chelicerate genetic model: the two‐spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae. T. urticae has the smallest genome of any arthropod determined so far (75 Mbp, 60% of the size of the Drosophila genome), undergoes rapid development and is easy to maintain in the laboratory. These features make T. urticae a promising reference organism for the economically important, poorly studied and species‐rich chelicerate lineage. BioEssays 29:489–496, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

White-coated scientists versus black-robed preachers -- The images of evolution -- Doubts about Darwinism : an interview with Jonathan Wells -- Where science meets faith : an interview with Stephen C. Meyer -- The evidence of cosmology : beginning with a bang : an interview with William Lane Craig -- The evidence of physics : the cosmos on a razor's edge : an interview with Robin Collins -- The evidence of astronomy : the privileged planet : an interview with Guillermo (...) Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards -- The evidence of biochemistry : the complexity of molecular machines : an interview with Michael Behe -- The evidence of biological information : the challenge of DNA and the origin of life : an interview with Stephen C. Meyer -- The evidence of consciousness : the enigma of the mind : an interview with J.P. Moreland -- The cumulative case for a creator -- Appendix -- Deliberations : questions for refection or group study. (shrink)

In his great aria "La calumnia," Don Basillo, the music master of Rossini's Barber of Seville, graphically describes how evil whispers grow, with appropriate watering, into truly grand and injurious calumnies. For the less conniving among us, the same lesson may be read with opposite intent: in adversity, try to contain. The desire to pin evil deeds upon a single soul acting alone reflects this strategy; conspiracy theories have a terrible tendency to ramify like Basillo's whispers until the runaway solution (...) to "whodunit" becomes "everybodydunit." But conspiracies do occur. Even the pros and pols now doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald [202] acted alone; and everybody did do it on the Orient Express. 2.. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes by examining the translation (...) of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together. (shrink)

A lively, accessible, and thought-provoking introduction to physics, its history, and its practitioners.

In the course of a note on Aen. VIII. 86 sq. by Dr. J. W. Mackail , the Servian interpretation of line 96 is supported with the observation that 'note should be taken of Virgil's distinctive use of the ablative. “Placidoaequore siluas” in his language is practically equivalent to “placidas aequoreas siluas” just as “pictas abiete puppes” is to “pictas abiegnas puppes” or “uasta uoragine gurges” to “uastus uoraginosus gurges.”’.

. Is R.S. Peters' way of mentioning women in his texts detrimental to philosophy of education? Some considerations and questions. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 291-302. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.767002.

The tropomyosins are a family of actin filament binding proteins. In multicellular animals, they exhibit extensive cell type specific isoform diversity. In this essay we discuss the genetic mechanisms by which this diversity is generated and its possible significance to cellular function.

In the business ethics literature, a commons paradigm orients theorizing toward how civil society can promote collaboration and collectively govern shared resources, and implicates the common good—the ethics of providing social conditions that enable individuals and collectives to thrive. In the context of representative democracies, the shared resources of a nation can be considered commons, yet these resources are governed in a top-down, bureaucratic manner wherein public participation is often limited to voting for political leaders. Such governance, however, can be (...) motivated by values of solidarity and stewardship, and a bottom-up approach to participation, in ways that are consistent with a social commons ethos. We employ an inductive methodology focused on successes and possibilities, using data from interviews with 93 policy-makers and national-level government leaders in 5 democratic countries, and observational and archival data. We reveal how governments can operationalize a social commons ethos in decision-making. This approach to governance involves stakeholder engagement that is Broad, Deep, and Continual. In this model, leaders engage a wide breadth of stakeholders, engage them deeply and meaningfully throughout the decision-making process, and sustain this engagement in a continual manner. Implications for governance of non-governmental bureaucracies are discussed, including the normative and strategic benefits of engaging stakeholders in this manner. (shrink)

BackgroundHIV prevention research in resource-limited countries is associated with a variety of ethical dilemmas. Key amongst these is the question of what constitutes an appropriate standard of health care (SoC) for participants in HIV prevention trials. This paper describes a community-focused approach to develop a locally-appropriate SoC in the context of a phase III vaginal microbicide trial in Mwanza City, northwest Tanzania.MethodsA mobile community-based sexual and reproductive health service for women working as informal food vendors or in traditional and modern (...) bars, restaurants, hotels and guesthouses has been established in 10 city wards. Wards were divided into geographical clusters and community representatives elected at cluster and ward level. A city-level Community Advisory Committee (CAC) with representatives from each ward has been established. Workshops and community meetings at ward and city-level have explored project-related concerns using tools adapted from participatory learning and action techniques e.g. chapati diagrams, pair-wise ranking. Secondary stakeholders representing local public-sector and non-governmental health and social care providers have formed a trial Stakeholders' Advisory Group (SAG), which includes two CAC representatives.ResultsKey recommendations from participatory community workshops, CAC and SAG meetings conducted in the first year of the trial relate to the quality and range of clinic services provided at study clinics as well as broader standard of care issues. Recommendations have included streamlining clinic services to reduce waiting times, expanding services to include the children and spouses of participants and providing care for common local conditions such as malaria. Participants, community representatives and stakeholders felt there was an ethical obligation to ensure effective access to antiretroviral drugs and to provide supportive community-based care for women identified as HIV positive during the trial. This obligation includes ensuring sustainable, post-trial access to these services. Post-trial access to an effective vaginal microbicide was also felt to be a moral imperative.ConclusionParticipatory methodologies enabled effective partnerships between researchers, participant representatives and community stakeholders to be developed and facilitated local dialogue and consensus on what constitutes a locally-appropriate standard of care in the context of a vaginal microbicide trial in this setting.Trial registrationCurrent Controlled Trials ISRCTN64716212. (shrink)

The expansion of ethics review, beyond its origins in medical research, is the subject of growing critical analysis internationally, especially from social science researchers. Our study builds on this analysis by considering ethics review specifically within tertiary-based educational research. As a foundation for a larger study, we explore the reporting of ethics review within articles from a snapshot of education journals. A cross-sectional review considered 125 articles from 24 journals spanning medical and nurse education, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, (...) and educational technology. Among similar types of research our findings highlight variation in institutional ethical review processes and outcomes. Despite most journals providing guidelines for reporting ethics review, adherence to these guidelines by authors or editors was not always evident, but more likely in health-related education journals. We argue that identified areas of variation may reflect the differing influence and proximity of biomedical values. This influence has been under examined in tertiary-based educational research but may contribute to inequitable learning, researching and publishing experiences, potentially adding to negative sentiment about ethics review. (shrink)

This is a book for scholars of Western philosophy who wish to engage with Buddhist philosophy, or who simply want to extend their philosophical horizons. It is also a book for scholars of Buddhist studies who want to see how Buddhist theory articulates with contemporary philosophy. Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy articulates the basic metaphysical framework common to Buddhist traditions. It then explores questions in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, epistemology, the philosophy of language and ethics as (...) they are raised and addressed in a variety of Asian Buddhist traditions. In each case the focus is on philosophical problems; in each case the connections between Buddhist and contemporary Western debates are addressed, as are the distinctive contributions that the Buddhist tradition can make to Western discussions. Engaging Buddhism is not an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, but an engagement with it, and an argument for the importance of that engagement. It does not pretend to comprehensiveness, but it does address a wide range of Buddhist traditions, emphasizing the heterogeneity and the richness of those traditions. The book concludes with methodological reflections on how to prosecute dialogue between Buddhist and Western traditions. (shrink)

Belief in Psychology tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in this sophisticated and original argument.Garfield proposes his own alternative to the apparent dilemma of either scrapping the propositional attitudes or of making room for them within a (...) dimly foreseen, futuristic cognitive science. He provides a characterization of the nature of propositional attitudes conceived as psychological states, and of their role in cognitive science. They must, he argues, be understood as relations between their bearers and their environments, including, in the case of persons, their social and linguistic environments. Understanding them in this way is consonant with current practice in empirical cognitive science and provides a philosophically useful analysis of mental representation.Along the way, Garfield discusses the relationship between the enterprise of science and our commonsense conception of ourselves and the world, and the ways in which this relation constrains our understanding of the propositional attitudes, and illuminates a realistic interpretation of a psychology of representational states and processes. Belief in Psychology is the only book that adopts such a view, and it is unique in providing a sustained critique of eliminativism, instrumentalism, and computational individualism - the main competing proposals within philosophy of cognitive science for eliminating or reconciling propositional attitudes.Jay Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College and a co-director of the University of Massachusetts Cognitive Science Institute. He is a co-author of Cognitive Science: An Introduction and editor of Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, both Bradford books. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications (...) in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

While the need to protect vulnerable research participants is universal, conceptual challenges with the notion of vulnerability may result in the under or over-protection of participants. Ethics review bodies making assumptions about who is vulnerable and in what circumstance can be viewed as paternalistic if they do not consider participant viewpoints. Our study focuses on participant vulnerability in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research. We aim to illuminate students’ views on participant vulnerability to contribute to critical analysis of the (...) role and processes of ethics review. Additionally, we aim to highlight the importance of seeking the views of participant communities, especially in research environments beyond ethics review’s medical origins. Thirty-four students from a health-related faculty at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand, participated in five focus groups. Participants discussed factors affecting their potential participation in research drawing upon a series of vignettes based on examples of published SoTL projects. Themes, generated using reflexive thematic analysis, built a participant-informed picture of vulnerability. Findings indicate that students do not generally consider themselves vulnerable and instead consider participation in SoTL research through an agentic lens. Students expect that participation will be voluntary, not negatively impact their grades, and not single them out so that others could judge them. Our study also highlights the value students place on relationships with one another and teaching staff and the implications these have for SoTL research participation and future professional practice. This research challenges research ethics committees to think further about vulnerability in the context of SoTL whilst highlighting the importance of providing opportunities for research participants more broadly to explore and vocalize their views as members of participant communities. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. _The Dialectical Imagination_ is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt (...) School. (shrink)