In March 2003, President Bush declared the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the anticipated commencement of intensive American-led military operations in Iraq. With this declaration, the media began intense coverage of military operations from the field. For the first time, viewers were able to see images of actual events. This was due to three developments: the advancement of technology allowing immediate transmission of text and images, the actual presence of journalists identified as "embedded journalists" at military sites, and the fierce (...) competition among networks for viewers. One result of this constant coverage was significant pressure on decision makers within the television and cable news networks to decide within a matter of seconds which images to air. In particular, producers and broadcasters of competing networks experienced this pressure. Though the radio and broadcasting industry has a published code of standards, it is "general and advisory rather than specific and restrictive." Therefore, it did not address the unique time sensitive decision-making required within this new environment. Issues such as the security of soldiers, confidentiality of troop maneuvers, and the safety of the embedded journalists were critically important. Equally serious were the concerns about the impact of the immediate airing of information and violent images to the public. This research used Patrick Primeaux's ' mind-heart-sou¾ model of decision-making as its theoretical framework. The study investigated the gender and industry experience of selected professionals in a cable news network, MSNBC, to explore how ethical codes of behavior are integrated when people make decisions. Decision-making in both their professional and personal lives was examined. It is from this perspective that their professional decisions to air/not to air material from Operation Iraqi Freedom were studied. The findings on decisions about airing/not airing material from Operation Iraqi Freedom yielded both expected and unexpected results. There was no clear gender difference regarding ethical decision-making, but there was a difference when analyzed by industry experience. When the study focused on questions regarding the respondents' personal lives, the original hypothesis that there was a gender difference was validated. (shrink)

Using a Solomon four-group design, we investigate the effect of a case-based critical thinking intervention on students’ critical thinking skills. We randomly assign 31 sessions of business classes to four groups and collect data from three sources: in-class performance, university records, and Internet surveys. Our 2 × 2 ANOVA results showed no significant between-subjects differences. Contrary to our expectations, students improve their critical thinking skills, with or without the intervention. Female and Caucasian students improve their critical thinking skills, but males (...) and non-Caucasian do not. Positive performance goals and negative mastery goals enhance and decrease improvements of their CTA scores, respectively. ACT and age are related to pre- and post-test. Gender is related to pre-test. GPA is related to post-test. Results shed light on the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect, ability, motivation, and opportunity as signals for human capital, and business ethics. (shrink)

Theories in the behavioral sciences are constrained so that stated relationships are empirically testable and explanations have predictive power. These constraints constitute the classical paradigm, and are trivial just when ?causal relationships? do not hold. It appears that such relationships do not hold for linguistic, and presumably other, behaviors, thus precluding study within the classical paradigm. This compels study of those behaviors in terms of the non?traditional approach to testability and explanation developed in Chomskyan linguistics. These constitute the grammatical paradigm. (...) The existence of two paradigms requires that any inquiry begin by determining which paradigm is appropriate. (shrink)

Five faculty members in the College of Business at Northern Illinois University received a grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation to integrate ethics into the graduate business curriculum. This was the second phase of a comprehensive program to integrate ethics into the business curriculum. Each faculty member taught a required course in the MBA program. The faculty members represented each of the five functional departments in the College of Business.This paper describes the ethics content, materials, and approaches that were (...) used to cover ethics by each of the five faculty members. Hopefully, this description will help other faculty and universities integrate ethics more effectively into the business curriculum. (shrink)

The ethicist's role in the clinical context is not presently well defined. Ethicists can be thought of as moralists, technicians, Sophists, or as teachers and learners. Each of these roles is examined in turn. An argument is made for the ethicist as a teacher who must also learn a great deal about the clinical setting in order to encourage an effective critical examination of basic values. Four specific tasks of this teaching role are discussed: describing moral experience, eliciting assumptions, considering (...) multiple alternatives and justifying choices. (shrink)

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they (...) clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. (shrink)

The comorbidity of chronic pain and opioid addiction is a serious problem that has been growing with the practice of prescribing opioids for chronic pain. Neuroimaging research has shown that chronic pain and opioid dependence both affect brain structure and function, but this is the first study to evaluate the neurophysiological alterations in patients with comorbid chronic pain and addiction. Eighteen participants with chronic low back pain and opioid addiction were compared with eighteen age- and sex-matched healthy individuals in a (...) pain-induction fMRI task. Unified structural equation modeling (SEM) with Lagrange multiplier (LM) testing yielded a network model of pain processing for patient and control groups based on 19 a priori defined regions. Tests of differences between groups on specific regression parameters were determined on a path-by-path basis using z-tests corrected for the number of comparisons. Patients with the chronic pain and addiction comorbidity had increased connection strengths; many of these connections were interhemispheric and spanned regions involved in sensory, affective, and cognitive processes. The affected regions included those that are commonly altered in chronic pain or addiction alone, indicating that this comorbidity manifests with neurological symptoms of both disorders. Understanding the neural mechanisms involved in the comorbidity is crucial to finding a comprehensive treatment, rather than treating the symptoms individually. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

We typically think of prosecutorial ethics as encompassing a special set of obligations for prosecutors during the pretrial and trial stages of a criminal case. In the literature and in rules of professional responsibility much attention is paid to the charging function, contact with unrepresented persons, plea negotiations, discovery, and courtroom decorum. Our concern with prosecutorial ethics at these stages is rooted primarily in due process and fairness to the accused. [W]hile he may strike hard blows, the Supreme Court wrote (...) in Berger v. United States, [a prosecutor] is not at liberty to strike foul ones. Whether it is a recognition that the prosecutor acts as a representative of the sovereign or that he or she possesses extraordinary power over people's lives, we speak about the prosecutor's ethical duties as special or additional to those of ordinary lawyers. By preventing a prosecutor from litigating unfairly, the aim is to protect a criminal defendant from an unjust or unwarranted conviction. What, then, are the ethical duties of prosecutors after the defendant has had his fair shot at trial, but lost? The literature and standards are surprisingly silent, with rare exception, on the post-conviction ethics of prosecutors. Constraints on the prosecutorial function seem to reach their apex at trial. Why? Are the reasons for special or additional ethics for prosecutors non-existent on appeal? Is the vast discretion, present at the pretrial and trial stages and thought by some to justify special ethical duties, absent on appeal? As a recent case from Texas illustrates, ethical issues still abound even after a jury returns a verdict of guilty. Nevertheless, the traditional discourse on pre-conviction duties can help us determine how prosecutorial discretion should be exercised after a conviction has been obtained. (shrink)

The account of vagueness Bertrand Russell provided in his 1923 paper, entitled simply “Vagueness” (see Russell [1923]1997), has been thought by some to be inconsistent. One main objection, raised by Timothy Williamson (1994), is that Russell’s attempt early in the paper to distinguish vagueness from generality is at odds with the definition of vagueness he presents later in the same paper. It is as if, as Williamson puts it, Russell “backslides” from his previous distinction (1994, 60), resulting in a conflation (...) of generality and vagueness that is at best problematic for a rigorous account of the phenomenon of vagueness. In this paper, I will defend Russell from this particular objection. While his 1923 paper may not be as clear at various points as one might hope, I do believe it is possible to construct a single theory of vagueness that can be applied equally well to his earlier and later discussions. Thus, Russell’s view is not ultimately inconsistent. In this paper, I will first present the interpretation of Russell’s concept of vagueness that falls prey to the charge of conflating vagueness and generality. Once the problem is clear, I will present an alternative interpretation, one that arises from certain reflections on G. W. Leibniz’s theory of perception. This Leibnizian interpretation of Russell, I will argue, resolves the apparent contradiction in Russell’s account of vagueness. (shrink)

Drawing upon Leigh Schmidt’s work on the “spiritual left,” this article presents a genealogy of the Black Spiritual Left featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard Thurman, and Black Lives Matter activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Black Spiritual Leftists are defined as Black figures who separated from or were not part of Black churches and yet took on a spiritual orientation important to their progressive activism. Their faith is Spiritual, but not necessarily religious. In its most (...) recent manifestation, the Black Spiritual Left argues—in opposition to some Black Church pastors—that defense of Black lives requires respect for marginalized Black women, LGBTQ, and criminalized Black men and boys. (shrink)