This article reviews the history of press self-regulation in Britain, from the 1947 Ross Commission to the 2012 Leveson Inquiry Commission. It considers the history of the Press Council and the Press Complaints Commission, analysing the ways they developed, their work, and how they have reached their current non-status. It is argued that the existing situation in Britain is far from satisfactory, and that the press should advance more elaborate mechanisms of self-control, (...) establishing a new regulatory body called the Public and Press Council that will be anchored in law, empowering the new regulator with greater and unprecedented authority, and equipping it with substantive sanctioning abilities. The Public and Press Council should be independent and effective, with transparent policies, processes and responsibilities. Its adjudication should be made in accordance with a written, detailed Code of Practice. (shrink)

For many years I sat on the Norwegian Press Complaints Commission. There, I learned to appreciate the importance of the editor: the person in charge who could answer responsibly, coordinate a diver...

In the December 2015 Issue of the Police Journal Sam Poyser and Rebecca Milne addressed the subject of miscarriages of justice. Cold case investigations can address some of these wrongs. The salient points for attention are those just before his sudden death: Milligan was appointed Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, the then Minister of Arms in the Conservative government in 1994. The known facts are as follows: 1. Stephen David Wyatt Milligan was found deceased on Tuesday 8th February 1994 at (...) his Chiswick, West London house where he lived alone. His body was found by his secretary Vera Taggart who was told by Julie Kirkbride where a spare key to his London house was kept and who decided to go to his house that day because he was not answering his telephone. Police said he had made one last telephone call on Saturday evening at 9.00pm. 2. Stephen David Wyatt Milligan had been the elected Member of Parliament (‘MP’) for Eastleigh in Hampshire since 1992. 3. The important topics this MP was addressing in 1994 at the time of his death included: (i) rail privatization plans and the impact through job losses on communities, especially his own constituency of Eastleigh; (ii) arms dealings with Saudi Arabia, especially with his previous intelligence gathered as an economics journalist for esteemed publications; (iii) the UK military industry; (iv) homosexuality among senior government Ministers, as revealed by British footballer Fasanu; (v) personal relationship and planned marriage to his fiancée (Julie Kirkbride) who at the time was a political journalist. 4. Stephen Milligan was also appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, Arms Minister and this position must have required that he came ‘up to speed’ on international arms trade and indeed its relation to bribery and corruption across jurisdictions. Milligan’s experience and knowledge as a former high-level political and economics journalist must have been of huge benefit to government minister Jonathan Aitken who was later imprisoned for perjury. 5. Regarding Stephen Milligan’s death in 1994, the Guardian newspaper in their immediate obituary said that ‘The death of one of the government's most outspoken and loyal supporters will pose a stiff electoral test for the Tories to surmount. He was on the left of the Tory party - he had even had a brief flirtation with the SDP when it was formed - and was a noted Euro-enthusiast… the death of one of the government's most outspoken and loyal supporters will pose a stiff electoral test for the Tories to surmount. Regarding Stephen Milligan’s sudden and unexpected death in 1994, MP David Willetts (Conservative, Havant) said in March 2015, in his address in the House of Commons. ‘…The inevitable ups and downs and triumphs and disasters of politics are among the great features of this place. There are colleagues in all parts of the House who are tolerant and understanding. There are friendships that keep the downs as well as the ups of politics in perspective. Having entered the House in 1992, I think particularly of two good friends, Judith Chaplin and Stephen Milligan, who both died within two years of being elected; that loss stayed with me for a long time...’ 6. On 28 February 2000, in the House of Commons, at Column 106, Mr Mike Hancock (Portsmouth) said, on the deaths of Michael Colvin and of Stephen Milligan MP: ‘I knew Michael Colvin for nearly 30 years, from when he was first elected to Hampshire county council. During my time as leader of that council, he and the late former Member of Parliament for Eastleigh, Stephen Milligan, were usually the only Members of Parliament who readily supported the council when necessary. Michael Colvin supported many ventures in the county of Hampshire. He will be missed here, in his constituency, and in Europe, and I stress that Hampshire has lost a staunch supporter. I am sure that the county will at some stage want to record its regret at his death and its deepest appreciation of the part that he played in its life....’ -/- Mike Hancock had, like Stephen Milligan, served on the Select Committee on Defence. It is interesting that he mentioned Stephen Milligan’s support as MP for Eastleigh when Milligan had only been so appointed a couple of years before his sudden death, as compared to 30 years of support from Mike Colvin. 7. Mr Andrew Robathan (for Blaby) said in the House of Commons Hansard Debates on 27 January1997, (Column 62) (on the registering of sex offenders): ‘I remember the death of my honourable friend Stephen Milligan, who represented Eastleigh. The press reports of the time stated that each Metropolitan police station had a police officer in the pay of newspapers. I do not know whether that is true, but I am aware that the police are not renowned for being entirely secure with their information…’ This statement is mischievous and it has been demonstrated time and time again, as being untrue, especially during the recent press inquiry leading to the four-volume Leveson Report, published in November 2012, into phone hacking and the ethics and culture of the UK media, pursuant to section 26 of the Inquiries Act 2005, and ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 29 November 2012, ISBN: 9780102981063, by the Stationery Office Limited on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. In Volume 4 of the 2012 Leveson Report, chapter 4 concluded on the Press Complaints Commission (‘PCC’) and its effectiveness and revealed that the PCC does not initiate its own investigations other than those ‘needed to head off criticism of the press or self-regulation- or to accept complaints from third parties across the board and on a transparent basis… and the report states that ‘the resources of the police are limited’ in terms of being able to fully inspect the Press and media reports. (shrink)

This essential reference text on the life, thought and writings of Plato uses over 160 short, accessible articles to cover a complete range of topics for both the first-time student and seasoned scholar of Plato and ancient philosophy. It is organized into five parts illuminating Plato’s life, the whole of the Dialogues attributed to him, the Dialogues’ literary features, the concepts and themes explored within them and Plato’s reception via his influence on subsequent philosophers and the various interpretations of his (...) work. This fully updated 2nd edition includes 19 newly commissioned entries on topics ranging across comedy, tragedy, Xenophon, metatheatre, gender, musical theory, animals, Orphism, political theory, religion, time, Hellenistic philosophy and post-Platonic ancient commentaries. It also features revisions to the majority of articles from the 1st edition, including 8 which have been completely re-written, and 12 which have had the references substantially revised. Reflecting the growing diversity of Plato scholarship across the world, this edition includes contributions from a wide range of scholars who enrich the field and provide students and scholars with a vital resource for study and reference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IRBs Under the MicroscopeJonathan D. Moreno (bio)The spring and summer of 1998 were seasons in the sun for institutional review board (IRB) aficionados. Rarely have the arcana of the local human subjects review panels been treated to so much attention in both the executive and the legislative branches of government, not only at the federal but also at the state level. And it looks as if the attention will (...) continue for some time. The spate of interest is due to a series of coincidences: a powerful House of Representatives subcommittee held hearings after its chairman learned about the IRB system during a previous session on research in underdeveloped communities; the Department of Health and Human Services’s Inspector General (DHHS-IG) released a report on IRBs; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Extramural Research completed a report on clinical trial monitoring; the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) readied a report on research involving persons with mental disorders; the states of Maryland and New York completed studies of research with subjects who lack decision-making capacity; and advocacy groups protested a psychiatric research project involving inner city children.Underlying these proximate causes for the IRB blitz is a growing realization that the already considerable clinical trial enterprise will expand significantly over the next few years. Congress is talking about giving the politically popular NIH half again the budget it currently receives, which in turn will stimulate more commercially supported research. The director of the National Cancer Institute is considering a five-fold increase in the number of subjects enrolled in oncology studies over the next several years. Phase I cancer studies are among the most ethically sensitive, so IRBs will have more work cut out for them if this goal is reached. Adding to the rush of interest in IRBs are the government’s recent apology to the survivors of the syphilis study in Tuskegee, continuing congressional dissatisfaction with the way the Pentagon handled its vaccine distribution during the Gulf War, and the controversy about AZT trials in developing countries.On the HillCongressman Christopher Shays, the moderate Connecticut Republican who has developed an interest in human research issues, convened hearings on human [End Page 329] subjects research and the IRB system on 11 June 1998. Shays chairs the House Government Reform/Human Resources Subcommittee. The committee’s ranking minority member is Edolphus Towns of Brooklyn, NY, who shares Shays’s interest in this area.The immediate rationale for the hearings was the release that day of the DHHS-IG report, Institutional Review Boards: A Time for Reform. The subtitle was changed from A System in Jeopardy apparently after some people in DHHS expressed reservations about its seemingly alarmist tone, but the IG staffers who testified before Shays’s subcommittee insisted that they stood behind the message that the IRB system is in trouble if considerable reforms are not undertaken. Among the factors in the research environment cited as support for the bleak forecast: managed care, commercialization, multi-site trials, high IRB workloads, minimal IRB oversight of approved studies, conflicts of interest, insufficient training of IRB members and investigators, and lack of IRB self-studies (DHHS-IG 1998).As is normally the case for congressional oversight hearings, the first panel of witnesses consisted of executive branch officials, including Eric Meslin, Executive Director of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and Gary Ellis, Director of the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR). Shays pressed Ellis on the extent to which OPRR conducts on-site investigations of complaints about abuse of human subjects. Admitting that on-site investigations are rare, Ellis suggested that the agency is inadequately staffed to follow up on complaints as quickly as it might wish. The members of Congress who were present at the hearings generally expressed concern about the DHHS-IG’s findings.The second panel that day, which Shays was unable to attend, set a different tone. Four of the panelists—Paul Appelbaum of the University of Massachusetts at Worcester, Robert Levine of Yale University, Angela Bowen of the Western IRB (a private clinical trials review firm), and I—were invited as authorities on the current condition of the IRB system. Bert Spilker... (shrink)

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly selected to (...) have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

Fourth-year medical students at the University of Colorado School of Medicine distributed cards to patients in the emergency department asking, "What Worries You Most?" The patients' responses provided insight about their most pressing concerns, often unrelated to their "chief complaints.".

Shortly after the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was constituted in 2010 and days before the commission members were to join a conference call to discuss possible topics for their deliberation, Craig Venter held a press conference announcing that his lab had created a synthetic chromosome for a species of mycoplasma and had inserted this genetic material into organisms of another species of mycoplasma (the genes of which had been deactivated), transforming the host species (...) into the donor species. While not overtly claiming to have “created life in the test tube,” Venter's publicity seemed cleverly designed to provoke the media into reporting his discovery in just that way. The resulting uproar caused President Obama to give his new bioethics commission the assignment of investigating the ethics of the emerging field of synthetic biology. The commission went right to work. It formed working groups to deliberate about parts of the report, feeding ideas and language to the staff members who would do the actual writing, and then present the working group suggestions to the commission as a whole for public deliberation at open meetings. One of those working groups was charged with coming up with ethical principles that would guide the analysis. Having served as a member of that working group, I report here on the process by which these principles emerged and reflect upon the suitability of that process for the work of public bioethics commissions. (shrink)

Opponents and proponents alike of the freedom of the UK press to print prejudicial content about marginalised groups typically frame the debate in classic ‘free speech’ vs ‘harm principle’ terms. Those in favour of press freedom argue that the print press' right to freedom of expression beats any perceived or actual harm caused, and those against argue the opposite. Predictably, little progress is made in either party convincing the other. I suggest that we ought to instead ask, (...) what grounds the freedom of the press? I propose that one plausible answer is: the value of agential epistemic participation. And I argue that we cannot uphold that value at the same time as permitting discriminatory reporting against collectives of individuals. This offers a strong basis from which to argue for a change in UK press regulatory policy, to allow discrimination claims against groups of individuals to be heard. Further, when we consider the role of epistemic participation in one’s ability to perform as a person, we ought to find that most complaints will in practice find in the favour of the group in question, rather than the PPM. (shrink)

Ethics commissions provide expert advice to governments on what policies to implement regarding pressing ethical issues, most often in bioethics. These commissions distinguish themselves by having members from the professions we are most likely to think of as moral experts, if we believe that these exist. The relationship between moral experts and the composition of ethics commissions is worthy of further exploration, especially because of the highly controversial nature of whether moral expertise exists and, if so, how, and whether, we (...) can identify moral experts. Moreover, it has been argued that the emergence of ethics commissions and how they have been composed have led to a “thinner” debate. In the first part of the article, the problem regarding checks for identifying moral experts is discussed. I argue that one way to handle this difficulty is through the application of Rawls’ concept of comprehensive doctrines. These doctrines have inherent standards that function similarly to independent checks, making it possible to identify moral experts from within such different doctrines. Using this approach makes it manageable to appoint moral experts to ethics commissions. In the second part, I consider the implications of seeing moral expertise through the prism of comprehensive doctrines for the composition of ethics commissions. One natural conclusion is that we should select moral experts representing different reasonable comprehensive doctrines to serve as members of ethics commissions. I consider six challenges to my proposal and demonstrate why these lack merit, and I point out some practical concerns that need further inquiry. (shrink)

In the forty‐year history of U.S. bioethics commissions, these government‐sanctioned forums have often demonstrated their power to address pressing problems and to enable policy change. For example, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, established in 1974, left a legacy of reports that were translated into regulations and had an enormous practical impact. And the 1982 report Splicing Life, by the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and (...) Biomedical and Behavioral Research, became the basis for the National Institutes of Health's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee as well as for the Food and Drug Administration's developing “Points to Consider” when contemplating the introduction of recombinant DNA into human beings. Some efforts of bioethics commissions, however, are not tightly connected to policy change or to outcomes directly linked to a specific report. While direct policy impact is indeed a useful metric for government bioethics commissions, it is not their only legitimate utility. For instance, bioethics commissions can also be incubators for deliberation on a hot topic, giving policy‐makers time to think through options while the political heat has some time to dissipate. Or a bioethics commission may stake out a position that enables a politician to take action while not necessarily following its recommendations. (shrink)

Using the recommendations of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, we ask today's media consumers how they rate the performance of modern American journalism. We employ original survey data collected from journalism students at a major Midwest university, framing our findings in the context of the commission's 1947 recommendations. The result is presentation of contemporary opinions about the performance of American media in the context of journalism ideals articulated more than 60 years ago.

In light of a history of an unethical news media system used by the state as an instrument of oppression, media ethics in South Africa is intended to uphold the foundational tenets of journalism and play a pivotal role in addressing issues of diversity, equity, and social justice. Most recently, the 2021 Inquiry into Media Ethics and Credibility report instructed media watchdogs, such as the South African Press Council, to track data concerning ethical breaches based on the potential that (...) such data can contribute to transparency and accountability. This study examines the trends in ethical issues raised in rulings by the South African Press Council (PCSA) over the period 2018–2022. Our analysis found that most of the South African news media publications registered with PCSA have a good track record when it comes to upholding ethical standards. However, a few publications have a disproportionate share of the complaints against them. (shrink)

In its January 20th, 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court ruled that certain restrictions on independent expenditures by corporations for political advocacy violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, which provides that “Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Justice Kennedy, writing for the (...) 5-4 majority, held that “[b]y suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and non-profit, the Government prevents their voices and view-points from reaching the public and advising voters on which person or entities are hostile to their interests” (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 38-9 (2010); emphasis added). Much of the language of the opinion, and some of its reasoning, as this passage illustrates, presupposes that corporations are agents capable of speech, and that it is (at least in part) in the light of this that limitations on political advocacy by corporations are prohibited by the Constitution. -/- While there are other strands in the argument, they are interwoven with the conception of the corporation as agent and speaker, with its voice and its viewpoints. The dissenters on the court objected on precisely this point (among others). Justice Stevens wrote sarcastically in his dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, that “[u]nder the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech” (558 U.S. 33 (2010)). Justice Sotomayor suggested in oral argument that the Court’s century-old practice of treating corporations as persons rests on a conceptual mistake. -/- My concern in this essay is not with the question whether the restrictions violate the Constitution. There are many issues that bear on this which will be outside the scope of my discussion. My concern is with the proper conceptual framework for understanding the agency of corporations and corporate speech, and the role that conceptions of these play in the background of the majority’s reasoning. The issue is legal, but it also has philosophical, conceptual and semantic aspects. It will be the latter aspects, and their potential to shed light on legal reasoning, that are my main focus. An adequate framework requires saying what properly speaking the corporation is, how agency is expressed through the corporation, whose agency it is, centrally whether the corporation is an agent or person in its own right, and in what sense it can be said to be capable of speech. I draw on recent work in collective action theory, particularly with respect to the semantics of collective action sentences (Ludwig 2007) and the analysis of the proxy agency in collective action (Ludwig 2014), to show (i) that corporations are neither genuine agents nor (therefore) capable of engaging in genuine speech, (ii) that consequently the First Amendment does not apply to corporations per se, and (iii) that a better understanding of the mechanisms of corporate agency casts doubt on more indirect arguments for extending the First Amendment to “corporate speech” as well. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the printing history of Hugo Grotius's Mare liberum . It examines the political circumstances which prompted the pamphlet's publication, but then seemed to conspire against it, and relates these to Grotius's revision of chapter 12 of Ms. BPL 917 in Leiden University Library, the one surviving copy of De iure praedae . While preparing chapter 12 for the press, he made a serious effort to tone down its bellicose rhetoric, erasing, for example, all references to the (...) Spanish claims to the Americas. His aim was to placate the French envoy Pierre Jeannin and his own political patron Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the driving forces behind the negotiations for the Twelve Years' Truce . In the context of these negotiations, Grotius was at pains to downplay his radical rights theories. The subjective right of punishment only received a mention in the conclusion of Mare liberum, for example. Yet a discarded outline for the pamphlet's preface shows that the argument of De iure praedae remained uppermost in his mind, witness the outline's denunciation of the 'poisonings, perfidy and crimes of the Portuguese'. Both De iure praedae and Mare liberum had been commissioned by the Dutch East India Company for the express purpose of influencing political developments in its favour. Yet neither treatise had the impact originally intended by Grotius and the VOC directors. Ironically, these occasional writings became classics of international law instead. (shrink)

In the mid-twentieth century American architectural journals, including Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, and Progressive Architecture, routinely ran features on the state of contemporary church architecture in the United States. Rapid suburban expansion and the revival of religious life in the post-Depression, postwar era generated tremendous amounts of construction, with a great deal of work available for architects. This article examines the concerns and hopes of modernist editors in the 1940s–1960s, as they sought to stabilize a “direction” for church architecture. Specifically, (...) it examines the role of the architectural press as the self-established gatekeepers for acceptable church design, and their relationship with theologians, liturgists, and building commissions within the Catholic Church. Questions of authority and expertise lay behind the stark assertions commonplace in these discussions. Editors, generally not themselves Catholic, used their professional positions to weigh in on hot debates within the Catholic Church over the purpose of a church building, the relationship of the Church to modernity, and the appropriateness of new materials and engineering techniques. (shrink)

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) may have set the lengthy standard for books treating whales, but D. Graham Burnett has more than matched that standard with his hefty, almost eight-hundred page tome, The Sounding of the Whale. The requisite explanatory subtitle specifies the author’s intent to write the history of what he refers to as “whale science” spanning the twentieth century. The book divides rather naturally into three complementary sections. The opening two chapters discuss early conservation efforts aimed at managing (...) the whale industry. Next, two more chapters investigate the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). A final chapter argues that dolphin research in the 1960s and 1970s led to the strident environmental concerns of the late twentieth century, including the drive to “save the whale” (the five chapters are bracketed by a lengthy introduction and conclusion).The most compelling features of Burnett’s book are delivered in the first four chapters. As .. (shrink)

For the large public, the only enduring legacy of Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) is the choragic monument on Calton Hill commissioned by the Royal Society of Edinburgh soon after his death, in 1828, an...

Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics is a series of newly commissioned—though not always new or original—essays on a variety of topics in bioethics. The editors, David Thomasma and Thomasine Kushner, offer a broad interpretation of the meaning of bioethics; in addition to showcasing some of the usual concerns of bioethics, they include several topics usually absent from such volumes. While the collection is unusually broad, it is also unusually shallow.

Andrew Abbott's Department and Discipline calls to mind an exchange I once had with an economist—prompted by my characterization of a recent work of urban sociology as part of the “Chicago‐school tradition”—who reminded me that in his profession “Chicago school” was associated with Milton Friedman, free market ideology, and a world made up of rational, self‐interest‐maximizing actors. What I had in mind could hardly be further from that: the highly contextual, neighborhood‐based mode of analysis that became a hallmark of the (...) University of Chicago Department of Sociology from the late 1910s through the 1930s and that explained such phenomena as juvenile delinquency, race relations, poverty, and urban ennui as the products of complex, historically rooted social processes, ecologies, and group interactions.The essays that make up Department and Discipline ask that we rethink “conventional” notions of “Chicago‐school” sociology as a body of work produced by a particular group of faculty and students in a bygone era. Instead, in an engaging, unapologetically polemical, and ultimately prescriptive blend of historical analysis and disciplinary critique, Abbott conceptualizes the Chicago school as a tradition that was invented and reinvented over time, and within the ever‐changing relationship between the department and the broader discipline over the first half of the twentieth century. With this as his central theme, Abbott contemplates the—highly contested—meaning of the Chicago school in historiography and departmental history; the historical transformation of the Chicago‐based American Journal of Sociology from early, shaping influence to a mere organ of an increasingly narrow, professionalized discipline; and the capacity of the discipline to transcend what Abbott believes to be its contemporary state of professional and intellectual exhaustion.Even within sociology, “Chicago school” has had varying connotations over the years. Some associate it with Robert Park and his cyclical, assimilationist vision of race relations; others with the organic, ecological view of urban growth and mobility patterns captured in such still‐ubiquitous concepts as ethnic “succession”; still others with symbolic interactionism, the social psychological study of how people engage with, give meaning to, and ultimately act within the object world around them. More recently there has been talk of a “second Chicago school,” a post–World War II generation of qualitative and interactionist scholars who kept those traditions alive even as the discipline was headed in more quantitative, grand theoretical directions. Complicating matters still further, members of the initial, now‐legendary founding generation did not think of themselves as engaged in a single intellectual project or “school” of thought. Indeed, Abbott tells us that it was not until the 1970s, decades after Chicago lost its dominance in the discipline, that “the loose tangle of maxims and practices that had sustained the department in its glory years” was actually presented as “the Chicago school” .So does it make sense to talk about a or the Chicago school of sociology? Abbott argues that it does, albeit not as something that exists in the ideas, the body of research, or the considerable institutional apparatus that characterized the department during its interwar “glory years.” Rather, it existed in the interactions among a methodologically diverse, often deeply conflicted department faculty, out of which emerged an eclectic tradition of inquiry dedicated to understanding social processes in the context of time and place. Ironically, it took a moment of crisis—a year‐long self‐study in 1951–1952 prompted by administrative pressure and foundation efforts to define sociology as a bona fide science—to bring this vision of the Chicago‐school tradition into full view. By then, the tradition was on the way out: its practitioners retiring or moving elsewhere; its sensibilities displaced by a type of analysis C. Wright Mills would scornfully refer to as abstracted empiricism, dedicated to the construction and manipulation of variables outside of time and place.Though not a book for the uninitiated—Abbott's detailed rendering of behind‐the‐scenes personalities and squabbles requires some knowledge of the department and its landmark works—Department and Discipline makes an important contribution to social science history as well as to the literature on the Chicago school. Informed by extensive archival research, the book is animated by a powerful argument that is likely to resonate with historians, if not with the AJS editors who declined to publish the essay they had commissioned from Abbott for the journal's centenary: that sociology must reconnect with and reinvigorate the tradition of contextual analysis. While intriguing, Abbott's argument that the Chicago “school” exists in departmental processes and faculty relationships is less fully realized—occasional references to the Chicago‐school tradition in its 1920–1930s “heyday” sound awfully like the conventional view. It also makes for a book that gives short shrift to the actual ideas and body of research associated with Chicago sociology—and to their extraordinarily enduring influence among social practitioners and analysts alike. Still, when Abbott does turn to the work, the discussion is, like the rest of the book, original, thought provoking, and rewarding to read. (shrink)

This study compares the codes of media ethics adopted by the PCCPress Complaints Commission, the IFJInternational Federation of Journalists and the SPJSociety of Professional Journalists based on the claim that it is the public's right to know, and examines the origins of this concept. A new approach is presented here which falls between the liberal-democratic approach on the one hand and on the other, the extreme ultra-Orthodox approach that claims that it is the public's duty not to know. (...) This new approach which indicates that it is the public's duty to know has evolved from the analysis of Jewish texts from Biblical times and from the study of events in Jewish community life throughout the world. This novel approach is likely to effect a change in the contents of broadcasts and in the boundaries of media ethics. (shrink)

String theory has been very influential within theoretical physics for the past few decades. It is the most popular attempt to solve the problem of formulating a viable theory of quantum gravity. Furthermore, it also unifies the other fundamental forces within one theoretical framework. In string theory, it is assumed that what before was thought to be point particles should really be seen as one-dimensional extended entities, i.e. strings. Different particles are supposed to correspond to various vibrational patterns of the (...) strings.In recent years, much critique has been directed towards string theory, and the fact that it inhabits such a strong position within the theoretical physics community. The main complaint is the complete lack of empirical confirmation of new predictions derived from string theory. The books, criticizing string theory, that have received most attention are the ones written by Smolin (2006), Woit (2006), but there are many more critics some of which express much harsher criticism towards string theory than the above-mentioned authors. (shrink)

This will be an admittedly opinionated review that gives with one hand and takes with the other. Let me be clear though from the outset that there is much to admire and agree with here. Perhaps, the biggest complaint is the failure of the author to engage with other highly relevant literature in philosophy of science and metaphysics that would yield her natural allies or would provide natural foils that ought to be named and engaged. On the allies side, there (...) are many people now writing in the vein of emergence that have made many of the same claims and used many of the same case studies to bolster their claims as Thalos. Surely, this requires a response on her part given that “emergence” is one of her primary foils. Rather than discussing those people’s work, she chooses to focus on a particular brand of emergence as a foil and thereby throws out the baby with the bathwater. Thalos also fails to engage the huge and highly relevant literature on the causal (or d .. (shrink)

Butte, Montana, lies at the headwaters of the nation's largest Superfund site. Donald MacMillan's book is a morality tale about this environmental travesty—a story of damaged health and environment, futile efforts by citizens and government to halt that damage, and demoralization resulting from those failed efforts.MacMillan's story covers the period from the 1880s to the 1930s. In the first phase, he describes the struggle between the young city of Butte and negligent smelter owners. In the second, the smelter owners shifted (...) the problem to a nearby town and surrounding farmers. In the third, the federal government attempted to enforce conservation policy.When miners first settled Butte in the 1860s, they found a lush valley high amid the peaks of the Continental Divide. By 1890 Butte was a major source of copper for a growing nation. Ore was roasted in open heaps a city block long. Sulfur and arsenic fumes killed vegetation for miles around. When winter inversions trapped smoke, residents suffered nosebleeds and vomited in the streets. Up to eighty people a month died in this town of just 40,000.The city sent abatement notices. Mine owners ignored them, arguing, “No smoke, no wages for workingmen.” Though open heap roasting ended because it was inefficient, new roasting furnaces did little to ease the problem. The growth of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company did end the problem—at least for Butte residents. By 1906 nearly all of Butte's ore was shipped twenty‐six miles down the valley to ACM's Anaconda smelter. Each day it belched thirty tons of arsenic and 2,500 tons of sulfur into the air. Whole herds of horses, cattle, and sheep lay wasted in the fields. ACM paid $330,000 for damages within five miles of the Washoe but refused compensation to more distant farmers.Afflicted farmers filed a lawsuit, offering to settle for a $1,175,000 buyout of their 60,525 acres. ACM declared their land not worth $500,000 and then spent nearly $1 million to prove it. Farmers lost when the judge—who socialized with ACM executives—found against the farmers in 1909. ACM had utilized “best known methods” and therefore should not be liable for any damages.Smoke poisoned national forest lands as well as farmers' fields. Trees within twenty‐five miles of Anaconda were dead or damaged. President Theodore Roosevelt and Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot initiated an investigation through the U.S. attorney general's office that eventually sought $4 million in damages from ACM. The company stalled, hoping for a more tolerant administration following the elections of 1908. In 1911 President William Howard Taft, trusting industry to do the right thing, created the “Anaconda smoke commission”—a group of industry and government advisors—to oversee ACM's implementation of pollution controls. In 1916 ACM's smelter still emitted sixty‐two tons of arsenic and 1,700 tons of sulfur each day.In 1924 ACM finally took effective steps to remove most of the arsenic from its emissions. Because of high demand for arsenic insecticides to fight boll weevils, ACM made considerable profit on arsenic recovery. Problems with farmers ended when the farmers, financially bankrupt from their lawsuit, sold “smoke rights” or easements to ACM. Problems with the federal government ended after 1928 when President Herbert Hoover, who promoted government‐industrial partnership, approved the swap of healthy ACM timberlands for damaged national forest.As a resident of Butte, it is hard for me to keep in mind that this is a historical account. Although ACM's smelting operations ended in 1974, the legacy of cultural and environmental damage lingers on. The morning newspaper reported forty‐six homes in Butte contaminated with lead and arsenic: “The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is conducting an investigation, and encourages all children to be tested.”. (shrink)

Barbara Koziak’s wide-ranging Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender criticizes political theory for sidelining emotion and develops an account of political emotion based on Aristotle’s treatment of thumos. Koziak hopes her project will be of particular interest to feminist political theorists—both women and emotion having been badly served by history and often on the basis of a supposed link between being female and being emotional. For, contrary to the scholarly opinion that thumos is the particular trait of spiritedness, Koziak (...) argues that in Aristotle, it is the capacity for emotion in general which, in Aristotle’s psychology, is responsive to reason. What are the consequences of this conception of emotion for politics? Aristotle directs us to educate, rather than ignore or repress, the emotions—not only the aggressive emotions already cultivated by institutions such as the military or the disagreeable emotions of “managed despair, imaginative fear, bourgeois anger, and sexual dread” employed in welfare reform rhetoric, but also pity, sympathy, generosity, and friendship. We may also follow Aristotle in evaluating social arrangements in terms of the emotions they support or hinder: for example, Aristotle argues for private property on the grounds that one needs to have something of one’s own to give away in order to practice generosity, and, as a moral virtue, generosity has a necessary emotional content ; again, he argues against big economic disparities because they create “unfortunate emotions, specifically the emotions of arrogance, malice, envy, and contempt”. An Aristotelian conception of emotion also helps us to acknowledge the emotional “labor”, usually performed by women, which holds society together. Finally, the insights of care feminism can be incorporated into and justified by an Aristotelian framework. Although Koziak’s work opens up many avenues for discussion, I will here concentrate on three: the complaints about political theory’s marginalization of emotion that motivate her book, her interpretation of thumos in Plato, and her appropriation of an Aristotelian conception of the emotions for contemporary purposes. (shrink)

After the Provisional Basic Law (Provisional Constitution) had been adopted on 11 March 1990, it soon became clear that it did not meet the new needs of the society and the state. It became clear that the new Constitution had to be drafted promptly. Its drafting was taking place at the time of heated discussions about various things, but especially about the structure of branches of state power, the empowerment thereof and their interrelations. The author of the article was a (...) member of the working group drafting the new Constitution. In his article, the author presents passages from the notes made by him about the sittings of the Provisional Commission for Drafting the Constitution and those of its working group. The notes disclose the variety of the views of the deputies and legal specialists and show the difficult way of emergence of the draft Constitution. This is confirmed by the time-line of drafting the Constitution. In 1990 and at the beginning of 1991, the first draft Constitutions were published, which had been drafted by the members of the societies of Lithuanian philosophers and lawyers, by the Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party, etc. Prior to the resolution of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania of 7 November 1990, a group of deputies was formed for drafting an outline of the concept of the Constitution. On 22 October 1991, the Council of the Seimas of the Lithuanian Sąjūdis Movement made a statement “On the Restoration of the Institution of the President of the Republic”. On 5 November 1991, the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania adopted a Resolution “On the Development of the Lithuanian Constitutionalism”, whereas by its resolution of 10 December 1991 it formed the Provisional Commission for Drafting the Constitution. On 3 March 1992, the said Provisional Commission approved the draft Constitution that it prepared; it was submitted to the Supreme Council. Three members of the Provisional Commission had submitted alternatives to a number of articles of the Constitution. On 21 April 1992, the Supreme Council assented to the work done by the Provisional Commission and decided to publish the draft Constitution so that it could be discussed by the public. On 6 May 1992, the Lithuanian Sąjūdis Movement, the Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Lithuanian Nationalist Union formed a coalition for drafting an alternative draft Constitution; soon the press published the alternative draft Constitution prepared by the Sąjūdis Movement Coalition “For the Democratic Lithuania”. On 23 May 1992, the referendum on the restoration of the institution of the President of the Republic took place—that referendum did not approve the proposal. Thus, two alternative draft Constitutions appeared. The essential difference between those drafts was a different approach to the system of branches of state powers, their empowerment and their interrelation. The draft Constitution prepared by the Provisional Commission was based on the parliamentary republic form of governance, whereas in the draft prepared by the Sąjūdis Movement Coalition “For Democratic Lithuania” the model of half-presidential republic was dominant. In order to prepare a single draft Constitution, which could then be proposed for the referendum of the Nation, political and legal compromises were sought. For this purpose, the Group for the Adjustment of Constitutional Issues was formed. At the end of September and at the beginning of October 1992, one single (the so-called “compromise”) draft Constitution was prepared from the existing two alternative drafts. The Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania was adopted by the Nation in the referendum of 25 October 1992 and came into force on 2 November 1992. (shrink)

What are the moral obligations of participants and bystanders during—and in the wake of –a conflict? How have theoretical understandings of justice, peace and responsibility changed in the face of contemporary realities of war? Drawing on the work of leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, political theory, international law, religious studies and peace studies, the collection significantly advances current literature on war, justice and post-conflict reconciliation. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues of international and civil conflict, including (...) the tension between attributing individual and collective responsibility for the wrongs of war, the trade-offs made between the search for truth and demands for justice, and the conceptual intricacies of coming to understand just what is meant by ‘peace’ and ‘conflict.’ Individual essays also address concrete topics including the international criminal court, reparations, truces, political apologies, truth commissions and criminal trials, with an eye to contemporary examples from conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and North and South America.​. (shrink)

As use of the Internet has increased, many issues of trust have arisen. Users wonder: will may privacy be protected if I provide information to this Internet vendor? Will my credit card remain secure? Should I trust that this party will deliver the goods? Will the goods be as described? These questions are not merely academic. A recent Boston Consulting Group study revealed that one out of ten consumers have ordered and paid for items online that never were delivered (Williams, (...) 2001). This year consumers filed around 11 000 complaints with the Federal Trade Commission alleging auction fraud, a figure up from the 107 lodged in 1997. It is no wonder that people are increasingly worried about whom to trust in online interactions. This paper explores the conditions under which online trust thrives and looks at examples of best and worst corporate practices. Online trust issues arise in a wide array of forums - chat rooms, news postings, e-catalogues, and retail transactions, to name a few. This paper focuses primarily on the online retail market, but the analysis applies to informational and entertainment sites as well. (shrink)

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin — and sex. Although the sex provision was treated as a joke at the time (and was originally introduced by a Southern Congressman in an attempt to defeat the bill), the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) — charged with enforcing the Act — discovered in its first year of operation that 40% or more of the complaints warranting (...) investigation charged discrimination on the basis of sex. According to a report by the EEOC, nearly 6,000 charges of sex discrimination were filed with that agency in 1971 alone, a 62% increase over the previous year. Title VII extends as well to practices which aid and abet discrimination. For example, the Act forbids job advertisements from indicating a preference for one sex or the other unless sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for employment. In interpreting this provision, the EEOC has ruled that even the practice of labeling help-wanted columns as "Male" or "Female" should be considered a violation of the law. (shrink)

Table of contentsI1 Proceedings of the 4th World Conference on Research IntegrityConcurrent Sessions:1. Countries' systems and policies to foster research integrityCS01.1 Second time around: Implementing and embedding a review of responsible conduct of research policy and practice in an Australian research-intensive universitySusan Patricia O'BrienCS01.2 Measures to promote research integrity in a university: the case of an Asian universityDanny Chan, Frederick Leung2. Examples of research integrity education programmes in different countriesCS02.1 Development of a state-run “cyber education program of research ethics” in (...) KoreaEun Jung Ko, Jin Sun Kwak, TaeHwan Gwon, Ji Min Lee, Min-Ho LeeCS02.3 Responsible conduct of research teachers’ training courses in Germany: keeping on drilling through hard boards for more RCR teachersHelga Nolte, Michael Gommel, Gerlinde Sponholz3. The research environment and policies to encourage research integrityCS03.1 Challenges and best practices in research integrity: bridging the gap between policy and practiceYordanka Krastev, Yamini Sandiran, Julia Connell, Nicky SolomonCS03.2 The Slovenian initiative for better research: from national activities to global reflectionsUrsa Opara Krasovec, Renata SribarCS03.3 Organizational climate assessments to support research integrity: background of the Survey of Organizational Research Climate and the experience with its use at Michigan State UniversityBrian C. Martinson, Carol R. Thrush, C.K. Gunsalus4. Expressions of concern and retractionsCS04.1 Proposed guidelines for retraction notices and their disseminationIvan Oransky, Adam MarcusCS04.2 Watching retractions: analysis of process and practice, with data from the Wiley retraction archivesChris Graf, Verity Warne, Edward Wates, Sue JoshuaCS04.3 An exploratory content analysis of Expressions of ConcernMiguel RoigCS04.4 An ethics researcher in the retraction processMichael Mumford5. Funders' role in fostering research integrityCS05.1 The Fonds de Recherche du Québec’s institutional rules on the responsible conduct of research: introspection in the funding agency activitiesMylène Deschênes, Catherine Olivier, Raphaëlle Dupras-LeducCS05.2 U.S. Public Health Service funds in an international setting: research integrity and complianceZoë Hammatt, Raju Tamot, Robin Parker, Cynthia Ricard, Loc Nguyen-Khoa, Sandra TitusCS05.3 Analyzing decision making of funders of public research as a case of information asymmetryKarsten Klint JensenCS05.4 Research integrity management: Empirical investigation of academia versus industrySimon Godecharle, Ben Nemery, Kris Dierickx5A: Education: For whom, how, and what?CS05A.1 Research integrity or responsible conduct of research? What do we aim for?Mickey Gjerris, Maud Marion Laird Eriksen, Jeppe Berggren HoejCS05A.2 Teaching and learning about RCR at the same time: a report on Epigeum’s RCR poll questions and other assessment activitiesNicholas H. SteneckCS05A.4 Minding the gap in research ethics education: strategies to assess and improve research competencies in community health workers/promoteresCamille Nebeker, Michael Kalichman, Elizabeth Mejia Booen, Blanca Azucena Pacheco, Rebeca Espinosa Giacinto, Sheila Castaneda6. Country examples of research reward systems and integrityCS06.1 Improving systems to promote responsible research in the Chinese Academy of SciencesDing Li, Qiong Chen, Guoli Zhu, Zhonghe SunCS06.4 Exploring the perception of research integrity amongst public health researchers in IndiaParthasarathi Ganguly, Barna Ganguly7. Education and guidance on research integrity: country differencesCS07.1 From integrity to unity: how research integrity guidance differs across universities in Europe.Noémie Aubert Bonn, Kris Dierickx, Simon GodecharleCS07.2 Can education and training develop research integrity? The spirit of the UNESCO 1974 recommendation and its updatingDaniele Bourcier, Jacques Bordé, Michèle LeducCS07.3 The education and implementation mechanisms of research ethics in Taiwan's higher education: an experience in Chinese web-based curriculum development for responsible conduct of researchChien Chou, Sophia Jui-An PanCS07.4 Educating principal investigators in Swiss research institutions: present and future perspectivesLouis Xaver Tiefenauer8. Measuring and rewarding research productivityCS08.1 Altimpact: how research integrity underpins research impactDaniel Barr, Paul TaylorCS08.2 Publication incentives: just reward or misdirection of funds?Lyn Margaret HornCS08.3 Why Socrates never charged a fee: factors contributing to challenges for research integrity and publication ethicsDeborah Poff9. Plagiarism and falsification: Behaviour and detectionCS09.1 Personality traits predict attitude towards plagiarism of self and others in biomedicine: plagiarism, yes we can?Martina Mavrinac, Gordana Brumini, Mladen PetrovečkiCS09.2 Investigating the concept of and attitudes toward plagiarism for science teachers in Brazil: any challenges for research integrity and policy?Christiane Coelho Santos, Sonia VasconcelosCS09.3 What have we learnt?: The CrossCheck Service from CrossRefRachael LammeyCS09.4 High p-values as a sign of data fabrication/falsificationChris Hartgerink, Marcel van Assen, Jelte Wicherts10. Codes for research integrity and collaborationsCS10.1 Research integrity in cross-border cooperation: a Nordic exampleHanne Silje HaugeCS10.3 Research integrity, research misconduct, and the National Science Foundation's requirement for the responsible conduct of researchAaron MankaCS10.4 A code of conduct for international scientific cooperation: human rights and research integrity in scientific collaborations with international academic and industry partnersRaffael Iturrizaga11. Countries' efforts to establish mentoring and networksCS11.1 ENRIO : a network facilitating common approaches on research integrity in EuropeNicole FoegerCS11.2 Helping junior investigators develop in a resource-limited country: a mentoring program in PeruA. Roxana Lescano, Claudio Lanata, Gissella Vasquez, Leguia Mariana, Marita Silva, Mathew Kasper, Claudia Montero, Daniel Bausch, Andres G LescanoCS11.3 Netherlands Research Integrity Network: the first six monthsFenneke Blom, Lex BouterCS11.4 A South African framework for research ethics and integrity for researchers, postgraduate students, research managers and administratorsLaetus OK Lategan12. Training and education in research integrity at an early career stageCS12.1 Research integrity in curricula for medical studentsGustavo Fitas ManaiaCS12.2 Team-based learning for training in the responsible conduct of research supports ethical decision-makingWayne T. McCormack, William L. Allen, Shane Connelly, Joshua Crites, Jeffrey Engler, Victoria Freedman, Cynthia W. Garvan, Paul Haidet, Joel Hockensmith, William McElroy, Erik Sander, Rebecca Volpe, Michael F. VerderameCS12.4 Research integrity and career prospects of junior researchersSnezana Krstic13. Systems and research environments in institutionsCS13.1 Implementing systems in research institutions to improve quality and reduce riskLouise HandyCS13.2 Creating an institutional environment that supports research integrityDebra Schaller-DemersCS13.3 Ethics and Integrity Development Grants: a mechanism to foster cultures of ethics and integrityPaul Taylor, Daniel BarrCS13.4 A culture of integrity at KU LeuvenInge Lerouge, Gerard Cielen, Liliane Schoofs14. Peer review and its role in research integrityCS14.1 Peer review research across disciplines: transdomain action in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology “New Frontiers of Peer Review ”Ana Marusic, Flaminio SquazzoniCS14.2 Using blinding to reduce bias in peer reviewDavid VauxCS14.3 How to intensify the role of reviewers to promote research integrityKhalid Al-Wazzan, Ibrahim AlorainyCS14.4 Credit where credit’s due: professionalizing and rewarding the role of peer reviewerChris Graf, Verity Warne15. Research ethics and oversight for research integrity: Does it work?CS15.1 The psychology of decision-making in research ethics governance structures: a theory of bounded rationalityNolan O'Brien, Suzanne Guerin, Philip DoddCS15.2 Investigator irregularities: iniquity, ignorance or incompetence?Frank Wells, Catherine BlewettCS15.3 Academic plagiarismFredric M. Litto16. Research integrity in EuropeCS16.1 Whose responsibility is it anyway?: A comparative analysis of core concepts and practice at European research-intensive universities to identify and develop good practices in research integrityItziar De Lecuona, Erika Löfstrom, Katrien MaesCS16.2 Research integrity guidance in European research universitiesKris Dierickx, Noémie Bonn, Simon GodecharleCS16.3 Research Integrity: processes and initiatives in Science Europe member organisationsTony Peatfield, Olivier Boehme, Science Europe Working Group on Research IntegrityCS16.4 Promoting research integrity in Italy: the experience of the Research Ethics and Bioethics Advisory Committee of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Cinzia Caporale, Daniele Fanelli17. Training programs for research integrity at different levels of experience and seniorityCS17.1 Meaningful ways to incorporate research integrity and the responsible conduct of research into undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral and faculty training programsJohn Carfora, Eric Strauss, William LynnCS17.2 "Recognize, respond, champion": Developing a one-day interactive workshop to increase confidence in research integrity issuesDieter De Bruyn, Bracke Nele, Katrien De Gelder, Stefanie Van der BurghtCS17.4 “Train the trainer” on cultural challenges imposed by international research integrity conversations: lessons from a projectJosé Roberto Lapa e Silva, Sonia M. R. Vasconcelos18. Research and societal responsibilityCS18.1 Promoting the societal responsibility of research as an integral part of research integrityHelene IngierdCS18.2 Social responsibility as an ethical imperative for scientists: research, education and service to societyMark FrankelCS18.3 The intertwined nature of social responsibility and hope in scienceDaniel Vasgird, Stephanie BirdCS18.4 Common barriers that impede our ability to create a culture of trustworthiness in the research communityMark Yarborough19. Publication ethicsCS19.1 The authors' forum: A proposed tool to improve practices of journal editors and promote a responsible research environmentIbrahim Alorainy, Khalid Al-WazzanCS19.2 Quantifying research integrity and its impact with text analyticsHarold GarnerCS19.3 A closer look at authorship and publication ethics of multi- and interdisciplinary teamsLisa Campo-Engelstein, Zubin Master, Elise Smith, David Resnik, Bryn Williams-JonesCS19.4 Invisibility of duplicate publications in biomedicineMario Malicki, Ana Utrobicic, Ana Marusic20. The causes of bad and wasteful research: What can we do?CS20.1 From countries to individuals: unravelling the causes of bias and misconduct with multilevel meta-meta-analysisDaniele Fanelli, John PA IoannidisCS20.2 Reducing research waste by integrating systems of oversight and regulationGerben ter Riet, Tom Walley, Lex Marius BouterCS20.3 What are the determinants of selective reporting?: The example of palliative care for non-cancer conditionsJenny van der Steen, Lex BouterCS20.4 Perceptions of plagiarism, self-plagiarism and redundancy in research: preliminary results from a national survey of Brazilian PhDsSonia Vasconcelos, Martha Sorenson, Francisco Prosdocimi, Hatisaburo Masuda, Edson Watanabe, José Carlos Pinto, Marisa Palácios, José Lapa e Silva, Jacqueline Leta, Adalberto Vieyra, André Pinto, Mauricio Sant’Ana, Rosemary Shinkai21. Are there country-specific elements of misconduct?CS21.1 The battle with plagiarism in Russian science: latest developmentsBoris YudinCS21.2 Researchers between ethics and misconduct: A French survey on social representations of misconduct and ethical standards within the scientific communityEtienne Vergès, Anne-Sophie Brun-Wauthier, Géraldine VialCS21.3 Experience from different ways of dealing with research misconduct and promoting research integrity in some Nordic countriesTorkild VintherCS21.4 Are there specifics in German research misconduct and the ways to cope with it?Volker Bähr, Charité22. Research integrity teaching programmes and their challengesCS22.1 Faculty mentors and research integrityMichael Kalichman, Dena PlemmonsCS22.2 Training the next generation of scientists to use principles of research quality assurance to improve data integrity and reliabilityRebecca Lynn Davies, Katrina LaubeCS22.3 Fostering research integrity in a culturally-diverse environmentCynthia Scheopner, John GallandCS22.4 Towards a standard retraction formHervé Maisonneuve, Evelyne Decullier23. Commercial research and integrityCS23.1 The will to commercialize: matters of concern in the cultural economy of return-on-investment researchBrian NobleCS23.2 Quality in drug discovery data reporting: a mission impossible?Anja Gilis, David J. Gallacher, Tom Lavrijssen, Malwitz David, Malini Dasgupta, Hans MolsCS23.3 Instituting a research integrity policy in the context of semi-private-sector funding: an example in the field of occupational health and safetyPaul-Emile Boileau24. The interface of publication ethics and institutional policiesCS24.1 The open access ethical paradox in an open government effortTony SavardCS24.2 How journals and institutions can work together to promote responsible conductEric MahCS24.3 Improving cooperation between journals and research institutions in research integrity casesElizabeth Wager, Sabine Kleinert25. Reproducibility of research and retractionsCS25.1 Promoting transparency in publications to reduce irreproducibilityVeronique Kiermer, Andrew Hufton, Melanie ClyneCS25.2 Retraction notices issued for publications by Latin American authors: what lessons can we learn?Sonia Vasconcelos, Renan Moritz Almeida, Aldo Fontes-Pereira, Fernanda Catelani, Karina RochaCS25.3 A preliminary report of the findings from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer biologyElizabeth Iorns, William Gunn26. Research integrity and specific country initiativesCS26.1 Promoting research integrity at CNRS, FranceMichèle Leduc, Lucienne LetellierCS26.2 In pursuit of compliance: is the tail wagging the dog?Cornelia MalherbeCS26.3 Newly established research integrity policies and practices: oversight systems of Japanese research universitiesTakehito Kamata27. Responsible conduct of research and country guidelinesCS27.1 Incentives or guidelines? Promoting responsible research communication through economic incentives or ethical guidelines?Vidar EnebakkCS27.3 Responsible conduct of research: a view from CanadaLynn PenrodCS27.4 The Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity: a national initiative to promote research integrity in DenmarkThomas Nørgaard, Charlotte Elverdam28. Behaviour, trust and honestyCS28.1 The reasons behind non-ethical behaviour in academiaYves FassinCS28.2 The psychological profile of the dishonest scholarCynthia FekkenCS28.3 Considering the implications of Dan Ariely’s keynote speech at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity in MontréalJamal Adam, Melissa S. AndersonCS28.4 Two large surveys on psychologists’ views on peer review and replicationJelte WichertsBrett Buttliere29. Reporting and publication bias and how to overcome itCS29.1 Data sharing: Experience at two open-access general medical journalsTrish GrovesCS29.2 Overcoming publication bias and selective reporting: completing the published recordDaniel ShanahanCS29.3 The EQUATOR Network: promoting responsible reporting of health research studiesIveta Simera, Shona Kirtley, Eleana Villanueva, Caroline Struthers, Angela MacCarthy, Douglas Altman30. The research environment and its implications for integrityCS30.1 Ranking of scientists: the Russian experienceElena GrebenshchikovaCS30.4 From cradle to grave: research integrity, research misconduct and cultural shiftsBronwyn Greene, Ted RohrPARTNER SYMPOSIAPartner Symposium AOrganized by EQUATOR Network, Enhancing the Quality and Transparency of Health ResearchP1 Can we trust the medical research literature?: Poor reporting and its consequencesIveta SimeraP2 What can BioMed Central do to improve published research?Daniel Shanahan, Stephanie HarrimanP3 What can a "traditional" journal do to improve published research?Trish GrovesP4 Promoting good reporting practice for reliable and usable research papers: EQUATOR Network, reporting guidelines and other initiativesCaroline StruthersPartner Symposium COrganized by ENRIO, the European Network of Research Integrity OfficersP5 Transparency and independence in research integrity investigations in EuropeKrista Varantola, Helga Nolte, Ursa Opara, Torkild Vinther, Elizabeth Wager, Thomas NørgaardPartner Symposium DOrganized by IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersRe-educating our author community: IEEE's approach to bibliometric manipulation, plagiarism, and other inappropriate practicesP6 Dealing with plagiarism in the connected world: An Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers perspectiveJon RokneP7 Should evaluation of raises, promotion, and research proposals be tied to bibliometric indictors? What the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is doing to answer this questionGianluca SettiP8 Recommended practices to ensure conference content qualityGordon MacPhersonPartner Symposium EOrganized by the Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science of ICSU, the International Council for ScienceResearch assessment and quality in science: perspectives from international science and policy organisationsP9 Challenges for science and the problems of assessing researchEllen HazelkornP10 Research assessment and science policy developmentCarthage SmithP11 Research integrity in South Africa: the value of procedures and processes to global positioningRobert H. McLaughlinP12 Rewards, careers and integrity: perspectives of young scientists from around the worldTatiana Duque MartinsPartner Symposium FOrganized by the Online Resource Center for Ethics Education in Engineering and Science / Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society of the National Academy of EngineeringP13 Research misconduct: conceptions and policy solutionsTetsuya Tanimoto, Nicholas Steneck, Daniele Fanelli, Ragnvald Kalleberg, Tajammul HusseinPartner Symposium HOrganized by ORI, the Office of Research Integrity; Universitas 21; and the Asia Pacific Research Integrity NetworkP14 International integrity networks: working together to ensure research integrityPing Sun, Ovid Tzeng, Krista Varantola, Susan ZimmermanPartner Symposium IOrganized by COPE, the Committee on Publication EthicsPublication without borders: Ethical challenges in a globalized worldP15 Authorship: credit and responsibility, including issues in large and interdisciplinary studiesRosemary ShinkaiPartner Symposium JOrganized by CITI, the Cooperative Institutional Training InitiativeExperiences on research integrity educational programs in Colombia, Costa Rica and PeruP16 Experiences in PeruRoxana LescanoP17 Experiences in Costa RicaElizabeth HeitmanP18 Experiences in ColumbiaMaria Andrea Rocio del Pilar Contreras NietoPoster Session B: Education, training, promotion and policyPT.01 The missing role of journal editors in promoting responsible researchIbrahim Alorainy, Khalid Al-WazzanPT.02 Honorary authorship in Taiwan: why and who should be in charge?Chien Chou, Sophia Jui-An PanPT.03 Authorship and citation manipulation in academic researchEric Fong, Al WilhitePT.04 Open peer review of research submission at medical journals: experience at BMJ Open and The BMJTrish GrovesPT.05 Exercising authorship: claiming rewards, practicing integrityDésirée Motta-RothPT.07 Medical scientists' views on publication culture: a focus group studyJoeri Tijdink, Yvo SmuldersPoster Session B: Education, training, promotion and policyPT.09 Ethical challenges in post-graduate supervisionLaetus OK LateganPT.10 The effects of viable ethics instruction on international studentsMichael Mumford, Logan Steele, Logan Watts, James Johnson, Shane Connelly, Lee WilliamsPT.11 Does language reflect the quality of research?Gerben ter Riet, Sufia Amini, Lotty Hooft, Halil KilicogluPT.12 Integrity complaints as a strategic tool in policy decision conflictsJanneke van Seters, Herman Eijsackers, Fons Voragen, Akke van der Zijpp and Frans BromPoster Session C: Ethics and integrity intersectionsPT.14 Regulations of informed consent: university-supported research processes and pitfalls in implementationBadaruddin Abbasi, Naif Nasser AlmasoudPT.15 A review of equipoise as a requirement in clinical trialsAdri LabuschagnePT.16 The Research Ethics Library: online resource for research ethics educationJohanne Severinsen, Espen EnghPT.17 Research integrity: the view from King Abdulaziz City for Science and TechnologyDaham Ismail AlaniPT. 18 Meeting global challenges in high-impact publications and research integrity: the case of the Malaysian Palm Oil BoardHJ. Kamaruzaman JusoffPT.19 University faculty perceptions of research practices and misconductAnita Gordon, Helen C. HartonPoster Session D: International perspectivesPT.21 The Commission for Scientific Integrity as a response to research fraudDieter De Bruyn, Stefanie Van der BurghtPT. 22 Are notions of the responsible conduct of research associated with compliance with requirements for research on humans in different disciplinary traditions in Brazil?Karina de Albuquerque Rocha, Sonia Maria Ramos de VasconcelosPT.23 Creating an environment that promotes research integrity: an institutional model of Malawi Liverpool Welcome TrustLimbanazo MatandikaPT.24 How do science policies in Brazil influence user-engaged ecological research?Aline Carolina de Oliveira Machado Prata, Mark William NeffPoster Session E: Perspectives on misconductPT.26 What “causes” scientific misconduct?: Testing major hypotheses by comparing corrected and retracted papersDaniele Fanelli, Rodrigo Costas, Vincent LarivièrePT.27 Perception of academic plagiarism among dentistry studentsDouglas Leonardo Gomes Filho, Diego Oliveira GuedesPT. 28 a few bad apples?: Prevalence, patterns and attitudes towards scientific misconduct among doctoral students at a German university hospitalVolker Bähr, Niklas Keller, Markus Feufel, Nikolas OffenhauserPT. 29 Analysis of retraction notices published by BioMed CentralMaria K. Kowalczuk, Elizabeth C. MoylanPT.31 "He did it" doesn't work: data security, incidents and partnersKatie SpeanburgPoster Session F: Views from the disciplinesPT.32 Robust procedures: a key to generating quality results in drug discoveryMalini Dasgupta, Mariusz Lubomirski, Tom Lavrijssen, David Malwitz, David Gallacher, Anja GillisPT.33 Health promotion: criteria for the design and the integrity of a research projectMaria Betânia de Freitas Marques, Laressa Lima Amâncio, Raphaela Dias Fernandes, Oliveira Patrocínio, and Cláudia Maria Correia Borges RechPT.34 Integrity of academic work from the perspective of students graduating in pharmacy: a brief research studyMaria Betânia de Freitas Marques, Cláudia Maria Correia Borges Rech, Adriana Nascimento SousaPT.35 Research integrity promotion in the Epidemiology and Health Services, the journal of the Brazilian Unified Health SystemLeila Posenato GarciaPT.36 When are clinical trials registered? An analysis of prospective versus retrospective registration of clinical trials published in the BioMed Central series, UKStephanie Harriman, Jigisha PatelPT.37 Maximizing welfare while promoting innovation in drug developmentFarida LadaOther posters that will be displayed but not presented orally:PT.38 Geoethics and the debate on research integrity in geosciencesGiuseppe Di Capua, Silvia PeppoloniPT.39 Introducing the Professionalism and Integrity in Research Program James M. DuBois, John Chibnall, Jillon Van der WallPT.40 Validation of the professional decision-making in research measureJames M. DuBois, John Chibnall, Jillon Van der Wall, Raymond TaitPT.41 General guidelines for research ethicsJacob HolenPT. 42 A national forum for research ethicsAdele Flakke Johannessen, Torunn EllefsenPT.43 Evaluation of integrity in coursework: an approach from the perspective of the higher education professorClaudia Rech, Adriana Sousa, Maria Betânia de Freitas MarquesPT.44 Principles of geoethics and research integrity applied to the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory, a large-scale European environmental research infrastructureSilvia Peppoloni, Giuseppe Di Capua, Laura BeranzoliF1 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of fundersPaulo S.L. Beirão, Susan ZimmermanF2 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of countriesSabine Kleinert, Ana MarusicF3 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of institutionsMelissa S. Anderson, Lex Bouter. (shrink)

At a time when monuments are falling, learning processes and discourses accelerating, it seems apposite to pay attention also to artworks commissioned by established institutions in order to give form to good intentions. This essay focuses on a commissioned portrait of female professors, on art education, Dutch art policy / politics and the former colonial site that the University of Amsterdam occupies, in order to aide this institution’s desired process to become more inclusive. It proposes Art Research as a realm (...) that can contribute a differentiated and thoughtful positioning of research and universities in visual and public domains: a necessary ally. Since the essay was written in Summer 2019, much has happened: the Faculty in question has been found to be the locus of ongoing sexual harassment. The student victims did not feel that the complaints procedures were safeguarding them sufficiently. They went to the media. The university’s ombudsperson asked to investigate found no systemic deficiencies. Since George Floyd’s death, such a conclusion is no longer possible, and the Board of the university has admitted shameful and systemic failures.[1] We now know better what “systemic” means. This essay’s case study is meant to show that art and philosophy can jointly analyze systems and organizations as a basis for necessary conversations, followed by a broad range of people taking responsibility and acting accordingly. In Covid lock-down times, it became deceptively obvious how unimportant art is. Through an essay such as this, it is hopefully also evident how art can be an indicator of institutional culture: e.g. in relation to how embedded the principle to consult specialists is, even if this seems to be unimportant. And that is a matter of life and death. [1] https://www.folia.nl/actueel/138876/fred-weerman-en-geert-ten-dam-dit-is-ongehoord-beschamend. (shrink)

Speaking of the public response to the deaths of children at the Bristol Royal Infirmary before 2001, the BMJ commented that the NHS would be ‘all changed, changed utterly’. Today, two inquiries into the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust suggest nothing changed at all. Many patients died as a result of their care and the stories of indifference and neglect there are harrowing. Yet Bristol and Mid Staffordshire are not isolated reports. In 2011, the Health Services Ombudsman reported on the care (...) of elderly and frail patients in the NHS and found a failure to recognise their humanity and individuality and to respond to them with sensitivity, compassion and professionalism. Likewise, the Care Quality Commission and Healthcare Commission received complaints from patients and relatives about the quality of nursing care. These included patients not being fed, patients left in soiled bedding, poor hygiene practices, and general disregard for privacy and dignity. Why is there such tolerance of poor clinical standards? We need a better understanding of the circumstances that can lead to these outcomes and how best to respond to them. We discuss the findings of these and other reports and consider whether attention should be devoted to managing individual behaviour, or focus on the systemic influences which predispose hospital staff to behave in this way. Lastly, we consider whether we should look further afield to cognitive psychology to better understand how clinicians and managers make decisions? (shrink)

In April 2004 the Irish Government commissioned Judge Maureen Harding Clark to compile a report to ascertain the rate of caesarean hysterectomies at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, Republic of Ireland. The report came about as a result of complaints by midwives into questionable practices that were mainly (but not solely) attributed to one particular obstetrician. In this article we examine the findings of this Report through a feminist lens in order to explore what a feminist reading (...) of the Report and the events that led to the inquiry will bring to light. We consider how sex and gender feature in the Lourdes case, draw attention to the deeply gendered asymmetries of power and privilege that existed between the men and women at the centre of this inquiry, and explore the impact such asymmetries had on this particular situation. (shrink)

Of all the scientific disciplines chemistry seems to be particularly concerned about its public image. Indeed, popular associations with chemistry range from poisons, hazards, chemical warfare, and environmental pollution to alchemical pseudo-science, sorcery, and mad scientists. Despite repeated campaigns for convincing the public that chemistry would bring health, comfort, and welfare, chemists frequently meet with hostility in popular culture. As student enrollment numbers has been shrinking, chemistry departments have been closed in several countries. Also in humanist culture chemistry has a (...) very low profile; philosophers in particular keep to their traditional neglect of anything related to chemistry. Of course, chemists have always been complaining about their low prestige, the lack of public acknowledgment of their achievements, and the misguiding popular associations with chemistry, such that we now have a long record of complaints of almost two centuries. More recently, in response to their public image, chemists have tried to launch slogans such as ‘green chemistry’ or even dropped the term ‘chemistry’ altogether and adopted more fashionable labels such as ‘materials science’, ‘molecular science’, or ‘nanotechnology’. Surprisingly or not, chemists have never translated their complaints into serious research programs to understand the public image of chemistry in its cultural and historical contexts. To be sure, chemical societies and, particularly, the chemical industry have commissioned many reports for promotional or marketing purposes. Yet, such reports usually scratch only on the surface and may well have recommended one or the other camouflage tactics. Even the recent boost of academic research in Public Understanding of Science (PUS) has virtually excluded chemistry and, instead, focused on topics such as ‘Frankenfood’ and genetic engineering. The failure to deal with chemistry in PUS studies is more serious than the traditional neglect in the humanities, because stereotypes of chemistry have dominated the popular image of science in general.. (shrink)

From an informal group of a dozen faculty and graduate students at Temple University, the Jean Piaget Society grew in seven years to 500 members who have interests in the application of genetic epistemology to their own disciplines and professions. At the outset Piaget endorsed the concept of a society which bore his name and presented a major address on equilibration at the society's first symposium in May, 1971. Had he not done so the society would no doubt have remained (...) a small parochial group, like so many others throughout the country, interested in Piaget and his theory. With the encouragement of Genevans and the leadership of its first four presidents, Lois Macomber, Barbara Press eisen, Marilyn Appel, and John Mickelson, the society undertook a number of programs to collect and disseminate the results of scholarly work in genetic epistemology. Particular emphasis was placed upon applications of Piaget's theory to developmental psychology, philos ophy, and education. One of these programs was the publication of an annual series on the development of knowing, of which this volume is the first. In 1973, the society asked Hans Furth with the assistance of Willis Overton and Jeanette Gallagher to initiate and plan a series of yearbooks with the result that in addition to this volume, a second volume on education was commissioned, and a third one on the decalage issue was planned. (shrink)

Luck permeates our lives, and this raises a number of pressing questions: What is luck? When we attribute luck to people, circumstances, or events, what are we attributing? Do we have any obligations to mitigate the harms done to people who are less fortunate? And to what extent is deserving praise or blame a ected by good or bad luck? Although acquiring a true belief by an uneducated guess involves a kind of luck that precludes knowledge, does all luck undermine (...) knowledge? And how accurate are our luck attributions anyway? The academic literature has seen growing, interdisciplinary interest in luck, and this volume brings together and explains the most important areas of this research. It consists of 39 newly commissioned chapters, written by an internationally acclaimed team of philosophers and psychologists, for a readership of students and researchers. Its coverage is divided into six sections: (i) The History of Luck, (ii) The Nature of Luck, (iii) Moral Luck, (iv) Epistemic Luck, (v) The Psychology of Luck, and (vi) Future Research. The chapters in these sections cover a wide range of topics, from the problem of moral luck, to anti-luck epistemology, to the relationship between luck attributions and cognitive biases, to meta-questions regarding the nature of luck itself, to a range of other theoretical and empirical questions currently being investigated by ethicists, epistemologists, and psychologists. By bringing this research together, the Handbook serves as both a touchstone for understanding the relevant issues and a first port of call for future philosophical and psychological research on luck. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering by Mara van der LugtStefano BrogiMara van der Lugt. Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 450. Hardback, $37.00.Mara van der Lugt's book (awarded Honorable Mention for the JHP Book Prize in 2022) has the merit of bringing attention to some crucial yet often overlooked topics by providing a (...) contribution that cannot fail to elicit broad interest. Her book does not simply discuss the theodicy and anti-theodicy of the modern age; against this background, she also brings out the often-ignored tradition of philosophical pessimism. What interests van der Lugt, however, is not "future-oriented" pessimism, which is opposed to "progressivist" theories of history, but an ontological or "value-oriented" pessimism that stresses "the terrible side of [End Page 163] life" in order to answer a series of crucial questions in a way very different from Leibniz's or Pope's approaches: Are there more evils than goods in our lives? Is life worth living for all of us, for any of us? Why do some people choose death despite their blessings? Why do some people choose life despite their sufferings? Do animals suffer as we do? Are we responsible for our own happiness? Is it better never to have been? According to van der Lugt, "The various ways in which these questions have been answered throughout the centuries have created the competing philosophical traditions known as optimism and pessimism. This book traces the intersection of the debate on the problem of evil with the debate on pessimism from the late seventeenth century onwards, seeking throughout to evaluate pessimism on its own terms" (20).A reassessment of this kind of pessimism serves an explicitly theoretical and moral purpose: van der Lugt herself states that her book is not exclusively a contribution to the history of philosophy, but "partly ethical or evaluative" (18). Indeed, pessimism and optimism "go hand in hand": they stem from a moral need and aim to respond to the evil present in the world by opening up glimmers of "hope, compassion, and consolation" (12, emphasis in original). Pessimism, in particular, is not intended to be "a philosophy of despair"; rather, it draws its strength from an "ethical commitment." Stemming from the latter is a tradition that "may be reinterpreted as a moral source" (22) and which "has not only its own epistemological and methodological concerns and presuppositions but, crucially, its own sets of virtues and moral aims" (13).The theoretical/moral purpose of Dark Matters is evident through its unfolding, even though eight of its nine chapters are roughly devoted to providing an accurate historical-philosophical reconstruction. Here, in brief, are the titles of the chapters that make up the over four hundred pages of this volume, which provide a good idea of the main authors discussed: (1) "The Complaint: Bayle and Malebranche on Physical Evil"; (2) "The Optics of Optimism: Leibniz and King Respond to Bayle"; (3) "Of Hope and Consolation: Voltaire and the Deists"; (4) "When Stoicism Meets Pessimism: La Mettrie and Maupertuis"; (5) "The Dispositional Problem of Evil: David Hume"; (6) "The Art of Suffering: Jean-Jacques Rousseau"; (7) "The Failure of Theodicy: Immanuel Kant"; (8) "The Flute-Playing Pessimist: Arthur Schopenhauer"; and (9) "Dark Matters: Pessimism as a Moral Source." To some extent, the rich itinerary provided by van der Lugt may be compared to those studies that have long undermined the idea of a monolithic and compact Enlightenment, characterized by unlimited faith in reason and its potential for liberation, and—more specifically—by a fundamental optimism with regard to human nature and the possibility of reformulating social and political structures in such a way as to enable each person to pursue happiness. However, the historical reconstruction provided here is based on an attempt to bring out the recurrent theoretical core of a philosophical perspective that first emerges with Pierre Bayle and runs through the modern and contemporary age, resurfacing in an evident way in the present-day antinatalism of David Benatar (often cited in the footnotes).According to van der Lugt, it is with Bayle (and not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKS OF FICTION AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS by Gregory Currie ii O peech act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what ficOtion is." So says Kendall Walton.1 My purpose here is to showjust how wrong diis judgment is. Not that I want to endorse all die attempts there have been to connect fiction with the notion of a speech act. Elsewhere I have argued diat the most prominent attempt at (...) such a theory, the one due to John Searle, fails.2 But my complaint is not mat Searle employs the idea of a speech act; rather it is that he employs it in too half-hearted a fashion. The idea of Searle and odiers is diat to write fiction is not to perform a speech act, but rather to pretend to do so. I, on the odier hand, take the view that the writer of fiction engages in an act of speech diat is distinctively fictional, and distinctively different from speech acts such as asserting, requesting, questioning, and so forth. What follows is a much simplified account of this idea.3 Following die program of Strawson and Grice, I believe diat the different kinds of speech acts are to be individuated in terms of the utterer's intentions.4 The intention of the one who asserts is to get a certain kind of response; perhaps to get the audience to believe the proposition asserted.5 The one who commands wants the audience to obey, die requester wants the audience to answer, etc. And in all these cases the utterer intends to get the response partly as a result of the audience's recognition of diat very intention. (This is the familiar Gricean mechanism.) The utterer of fiction, on the odier hand, wants to get the audience to make-believe die proposition uttered.6 Thus we have an act structurally similar to 304 Gregory Currie305 paradigmatic speech acts like asserting, commanding, and requesting (die structural similarity being given by the use in all cases of the Gricean intention ), but differing from diese odiers with respect to die content of the utterer's intention. Let us call such an act a.fictive illocutionary act. Pursuing this line in more detail leads to an intuitively satisfactory taxonomy of speech acts which places the uttering (usually writing) of fiction fully widiin die purview of the theory, rather dian shutting it off to one side as a pseudo-performance, as widi Searle. Is such a theory susceptible to the objections diat Walton brings? Walton is quite right to say (and here I suppose he has Searle in mind) that fiction is not simply the absence ofillocutionary force: "it is something positive, something special" (p. 79). As already indicated, my theory gives a positive account of fiction as a special kind of speech act. But Walton presses the issue further by suggesting that the essence of fiction has nodiing to do with die absence of assertive force. It is possible, he says, "to make an assertion by writing fiction." His point is not merely that fictional stories are sometimes told in order to get across some serious but not explicit point — everyone can agree to that. It is rather diat fictional works contain explicit assertions — e.g., some of Tolstoy's sentences about Napoleon in War and Peace — and that a fiction might contain nothing but assertions. He imagines a genre of historical fiction in which "authors are allowed no liberties with the facts, and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write" (p. 80). Let us grant that this is a possibility. What, dien, would distinguish a piece of fiction belonging to this genre from, say, a work of historical scholarship? The answer comes when we see that the same utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act. Thus if I say to someone "I have no money" it may be that I want him both to believe that I have no money and to give me the goods on credit. And in both cases I intend to get die desired responses via his recognition of my intentions. The same utterance can count both as an assertion... (shrink)