Authorship on publications has been described as a “meal ticket” for researchers in academic settings. Given the importance of authorship, inappropriate publication credit is a pertinent ethical issue. This paper presents an overview of authorship problems and policies intended to address them. Previous work has identified three types of inappropriate authorship practices: plagiarism, giving unwarranted credit and failure to give expected credit. Guidelines from universities, journals and professional organizations provide standards about requirements of authors and may describe inappropriate practices; to (...) a lesser extent, they provide guidance for determining authorship order. While policies on authorship may be helpful in some circumstances, they are not panaceas. Formal guidelines may not address serious power imbalances in working relationships and may be difficult to enforce in the face of particular departmental or institutional cultures. In order to develop more effective and useful guidelines, we should gain more knowledge about how students and faculty members perceive policies as well as their understanding of how policies will best benefit collaborators. (shrink)

Although authorship policies exist, researchers understand little about their impact on perceptions of authorship scenarios. Graduate students (N = 277) at a large university read 1 of 3 vignettes about a graduate student-faculty collaboration. One half of the surveys included the American Psychological Association's statement on authorship. Participants rated (a) the ethics of the professor as first author and (b) the likelihood of a dissatisfied student reporting the authorship result, as well as the effectiveness and negative consequences of reporting. Work (...) arrangements on the project had a consistent main effect. Also, an authorship policy impacted women's ratings of first authorship when the student contributed the idea for a project. For men, a policy impacted only ratings of the likelihood of reporting when a professor was first author on a student's dissertation. Apart from sex, no other demographic variables on participants were predictive. Discussion focuses on the policy's potential for making only some specific issues salient. (shrink)

Prior studies have shown a general preference among citizens for juries over judges. Researchers, however, have not considered whether race and ethnicity modify this preference. We hypothesized that minorities (African-Americans, Hispanics), who generally express less trust in the legal system, may also express less trust in juries than non-Hispanic whites. We asked a representative sample of 1,465 residents of Texas to state whether they would prefer a jury or a judge to be the decision maker in four hypothetical circumstances. Consistent (...) with expectations, non-Hispanic whites favored juries over judges, particularly if they imagined themselves as a defendant in a criminal trial. By comparison, although African-Americans and some Hispanics generally favored juries, they showed a much weaker set of jury preferences. African Americans had markedly lower support for the civil jury, but support was higher among minorities with prior jury service. Among Hispanics, respondents who took the survey in Spanish typically preferred a judge to make legal decisions. We consider the implications of our findings for trust in the jury system and trust in community members as decision makers. (shrink)

The crisis of democracy unfolding in the United States was identified by John Paul II as due to misunderstanding the relationship of truth and freedom. This crisis has grown worse due to a libertinism that sees objective moral truths as impositions on both free choice and fulfilling relationships, that identifies self-fulfillment with a self-creation in which one creates one’s own values, that seeks to build democracies apart from moral objectivity, and that dismisses the relevance of God for living well. I (...) argue that democracy cannot survive these libertine errors and that they cannot be successfully countered by utilitarianism, Rawls’s political liberalism, or democratic proceduralism. Survival requires adopting the Thomistic personalism formulated by Aquinas and developed by Karol Wojtyła as indispensable for understanding those lived experiences through which one encounters the ethical moment of self-determination, achieves moral objectivity, avoids loneliness by loving truly, and seeks—via collaboration with women exercising their feminine genius for discerning the welfare of others—the common good, without which democracies collapse into atheistic tyranny. (shrink)

Ultimate Normative Foundations: The Case for Personalist Natural Law Across the Globe explores the indefeasibility and universality of certain moral obligations and proscriptions. Rose Mary Hayden Lemmons defends the personalist natural law formulated by Aquinas as a normative foundation that is able to both meet those objections and specify interpersonal obligations as well as juridical obligations concerning inalienable rights, religious liberty, and Just War theory. Academics concerned with philosophy, theology, or law will find this book indispensable.

The most comprehensive collection available in paperback of Bacon’s philosophical and scientific writings, this volume offers Bacon's major works in their entirety, or in substantive selections, revised from the classic 19th century editions of Spedding, Ellis, and Heath. Selections from some of Bacon's natural histories round out this edition by showing the types of compilations that he believed would most contribute to the third part of his Great Instauration. Each work has a separate brief introduction indicating the major themes developed. (...) In her general Introduction, Sargent gives a biographical sketch of Bacon's early life, education, and legal career, discusses the major components of his philosophical project, and traces his influence on subsequent natural philosophy. In addition, she looks at the primarily negative evaluations of Bacon's methodological writings by philosophers of science in the first half of the twentieth century, the reassessments of his works that took place as the influence of logical empiricism declined, and the current revival of interest in Bacon that coincides with the focus on experimental practice today. A bibliography and index complete the text. (shrink)

After years of relative neglect, experimental science has once again become an object of scrutiny. Philosophers such as Hacking and Cartwright have examined contemporary science in an attempt to display the epistemic status of experimental results, while sociologists such as Shapin and Schaffer have focussed on historical cases in an attempt to display the conventional basis of experimentation. In this study I am concerned with the epistemological question: How can one justify the claim that it is rational to believe that (...) the methods of experimental science yield knowledge about the unobserved causal structures of our world? My answer to this question is produced by way of an historical analysis and philosophical retrieval of Robert Boyle's epistemological defense of experimental science. ;The first two chapters examine contemporary issues surrounding experimental science, particularly those challenges posed to its knowledge-producing ability by philosophical instrumentalists and sociological constructionists. I then turn to an examination of Boyle's version of experimental philosophy, which includes a detailed discussion of the background traditions from which he drew in its formulation, and his response to critics of experimentation, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. ;Boyle's work is not only historically important, but is philosophically significant in light of the fact that he developed epistemological strategies in defense of experimental techniques at a time when it was not clear that experimentation would become the standard of modern science. His philosophy is characterized as a sophisticated and complex method that employs the elements of inductive, retroductive, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning. This combination, he argues, yields a system of checks and balances on sense, reason, and ideology that, while fallible, offers us the best assurance that we have of coming closer to the truth about the processes operative in our world. ;In a concluding chapter it is argued that Boyle's philosophy of science, by virtue of its richness and complexity, is sufficient to respond to the general challenges to scientific objectivity posed by sociologists of knowledge, and the more specific challenges to the realist import of the theoretical claims of experimental science posed by philosophers such as Laudan and van Fraassen. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers of 17th-century England recognized a complex relationship between scientific values and civic virtues. Francis Bacon, motivated by his desire to promote the common good by producing useful knowledge, noted that the advancement of learning required a cooperative research effort guided by civility, charity, toleration, and intellectual modesty. This essay examines how the founders of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Boyle, put his advice into action by their efforts to establish an expanded and inclusive society of investigators (...) that would strengthen the habits of discourse in a civil society, while furthering the economic, political, and social benefits of scientific inquiry. (shrink)

In her recent case study, Elizabeth Potter attempts to show how Boyle's experimental method was biased by gender considerations. Part of her argument focuses on the combination of the “invisibility” of women in Boyle's published work together with his unpublished comments on female chastity, and part concerns Boyle's rejection of the animistic explanation of his air pump experiments by Francis Line. I argue that the historical and biographical elements of the case make Potter's arguments questionable. In addition, I address whether (...) and how such historical cases can shed light on current debates about gender issues and argue that Boyle's methodological writings could be used to better advantage in the feminist cause. (shrink)

In the 19 th century shift from virtue ethics to duty-oriented ethics, friendship and its role in ethics was marginalized. This paper explores the reason to this and examines the nature of friendship as a mutual intention of goodwill which depends upon a concrete context of particulars. This focus on contingent particulars makes friendship incompatible with Enlightenment ethics, but enables friendship to play two significant roles in moral development. These roles are explored as is the place of friendship in virtue (...) ethics. Finally, it is argued that the account of friendship from virtue ethics is confirms our ordinary experience of the significance of friendship in our lives. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review of empirical studies into online platforms for political participation. The objective was to diagnose the relationship between different types of digital participatory platforms, the real possibilities of participation generated by those initiatives and the impact of such participation on the decision-making process of governmental representatives. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review was conducted using pre-defined terms, expressions and criteria. A total of 434 articles from 1995 to 2015 were (...) gathered from the Web of Science database. And, 32 studies were selected from those articles for meta-synthesis, and the cases investigated were evaluated according to the e-participation ladder model. Findings The results indicated that online political participation worldwide remains timid both in quantity and quality. We have witnessed the growth of a kind of “rhetorical participation” promoted by policy-makers and the rise of a “participatory despotism”, in which only the privileged partake, while the majority remains silent. Practical implications The solutions found to promote increased participation and ensure its effectiveness ranged from shaping the platform design in accordance with citizens’ capacities and interests to a need for profound political–administrative change, which includes the world’s public agencies adopting a more transparent, inclusive and collaborative approach to decision-making. Originality/value This paper proposes a systematic review, mapping the studies on online platforms for political participation, analysing the questions, methods and conclusions found by the authors and evaluating each case study with a participation ladder. (shrink)