ABSTRACT. Cases of famine, governmental overreach, political abuse and neglect persist even in today’s globalised world. Corporate malfeasance, disregard of the environment, and blatant ignorance of the instigators of disasters large and small also continue to register high human costs. In trying to address this, theorists have attempted to elucidate a global ethics that would prescribe courses of actions even when individual and direct causal agency cannot be identified.

Following in this tradition, the author explores the concept of a global development ethics, taking in topics including famine, immigration, capitalism, race, and technology. He demonstrates that defining the constituents of a global development ethics depends on a successful analysis of the theoretical and practical structures that cause such global and seemingly intractable conditions. He challenges existing conceptions of global justice and argues for a theory of global ethics that relies on our commonality, such that enables us to welcome the `other’, thereby fuelling our recognition of the inequalities that motivate prospective development projects. Ideal for advanced-level students in global ethics, global justice and development studies, this text articulates a vital new ethics of human development.

ABSTRACT. A collection of white papers from TRACE covering essential topics in global anti-bribery compliance including international due diligence standards, individual liability and facilitation payments – a must have for any compliance professional.

ABSTRACT. This book offers a much needed overview of the neglected notion of responsibility. Instead of offering vague talk about “individual responsibility” or “corporate responsibility,” Daryl Koehn examines in detail four accounts of responsibility, taking care to specify what responsibility does and does not mean in each account. She argues for a return to the ancient concept of Socratic dialogical responsibility, a concept that avoids many of the problems inherent in the other accounts.

After examining the Anglo-American criminal legal system’s treatment of responsibility as intentional agency, she critiques Hans Jonas’s concept of responsibility as ontological care and Hannah Arendt’s notion of communicative responsibility. She provides a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to responsibility. The final chapter makes the case for Socratic dialogical responsibility. Dialogical responsibility has many strengths in its own right and avoids the major pitfalls of the other notions of responsibility examined in the book. It serves as an eminently practical way to hold ourselves responsible for our actions and speech. In addition, dialogical responsibility alone qualifies as a virtue integral to the good life.

ABSTRACT. Exemplary scientists have a characteristic way of viewing the world and their work: their mindset and methods all aim at discovering truths about nature. In An Instinct for Truth, Robert Pennock explores this scientific mindset and argues that what Charles Darwin called “an instinct for truth, knowledge, and discovery” has a tacit moral structure—that it is important not only for scientific excellence and integrity but also for democracy and human flourishing. In an era of “post-truth,” the scientific drive to discover empirical truths has a special value.

Taking a virtue-theoretic perspective, Pennock explores curiosity, veracity, skepticism, humility to evidence, and other scientific virtues and vices. He explains that curiosity is the most distinctive element of the scientific character, by which other norms are shaped; discusses the passionate nature of scientific attentiveness; and calls for science education not only to teach scientific findings and methods but also to nurture the scientific mindset and its core values.

Drawing on historical sources as well as a sociological study of over a thousand scientists, Pennock’s philosophical account is grounded in values that scientists themselves recognize they should aspire to. Pennock argues that epistemic and ethical values are normatively interconnected, and that for science and society to flourish, we need not just a philosophy of science, but a philosophy of the scientist.

ABSTRACT. Countless public health agencies are trying to solve our most intractable public health problems—among them, the obesity and opioid epidemics—by partnering with corporations responsible for creating or exacerbating those problems. We are told industry must be part of the solution. But is it time to challenge the partnership paradigm and the popular narratives that sustain it?

The Perils of Partnership describes the ways in which public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder initiatives create “webs of influence” that undermine the integrity of public health agencies; distort public health research and policy; and reinforce the framing of public health problems and their solutions in ways that are least threatening to the commercial interests of corporate “partners.” We should expect multinational corporations to develop strategies of influence—but public bodies can and should develop counter-strategies to insulate themselves from corporate influence in all its forms.

The book develops a robust account of institutional integrity, and folds this into a novel framework that can help public health agencies, schools of public health, and public health NGOs identify the systemic ethical implications of their current and proposed relationships with industry actors. Drawing on analogies from the law governing public-public interactions (separation of powers) and private-private interactions (antitrust), the book argues that the default public-private interaction should be at arm’s length: separation, not collaboration. The Perils of Partnership calls for a new paradigm that avoids the perils of corporate influence and more effectively protects and promotes public health.

ABSTRACT. The current refugee crisis is unparalleled in history in its size and severity. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are roughly 67 million refugees worldwide, the vast majority of whom are refugees as the result of wars and other military actions. This social and political crisis—1 in every 122 humans is a refugee—cries out for normative explanation and analysis. Morally and politically, how should we understand this crisis? How should we respond to it, and why?

I argue that war refugees have suffered, and continue to suffer, a series of harms, wrongs, and oppressions, and so are owed recompense, restitution, and aid—as a matter of justice—by socio-political institutions around the world. I make the case that war refugees should be viewed and treated differently than migrants, due to their particular circumstances, but that their circumstances do not wholly alleviate their own moral responsibilities. We must stop treating refugees as objects to be moved around on the global stage, I contend, and instead see them as people, with their own subjective experiences of the world, who might surprise us with their words and works.

ABSTRACT. It is widely recognized that professionals, such as doctors, nurses, engineers, and teachers have duties that go far beyond those of ordinary citizens, but there is much disagreement as to why they have such duties. In Professional Ethics: A Trust-Based Approach, Terrence Kelly argues that these duties come from the unique trust that professionals must invite, develop, and honor from those they serve. Without trust, professional practices would be significantly impoverished—both ethically and instrumentally—and the autonomy enjoyed by many professions would evaporate. Professionals, therefore, have good reasons to be “effectively trustworthy,” that is, to develop the virtues necessary to be responsive to the vulnerability of those they serve, and effectively communicate that responsiveness to others. Being effectively trustworthy requires a commitment by professionals as individual practitioners and as members of ethical communities committed to building a culture of trust. Such communities can, and should, both design virtue-based professional education that promotes trustworthy character formation and articulate an ethical vision of the trustworthy professional that has real credibility in the practical conditions of their profession. Because of the importance of trust, professional communities also have good reasons to develop conduct standards, such as those regarding conflict of interest, that promote professional trustworthiness in both fact and appearance.

ABSTRACT. Bioethics urges us to question and debate fundamental moral issues that arise in health-related sciences. However, as a result of Western dominance and globalization, bioethical thinking and practice has inevitably been shaped and defined by Western theories. With recent discussions centering on the relationship between culture and bioethics, it is important to consider how and to what extent can bioethics reflect and accommodate non-Western values and beliefs? Debatably, many scholars working in the field of ‘African bioethics’ seek to construct a bioethical practice that is grounded in indigenous African values. Yet, how relevant are ancient African cultural norms to the lives and realities of the 21st century Sub-Saharan-Africans? This edited volume explores bioethics in Africa from pluralistic and inter-cultural perspectives. The selected papers offer diverse theoretical and practical perspectives on the bioethical challenges that are common and specific to the lives of Sub-Sahara Africans. The contributors define bioethics broadly (beyond ethical issues relating to biomedical and biotechnological science) to include applied ethics that concern all aspects of life. Multidisciplinary in approach, the contributions to this book consider bioethics in relation to philosophy, social work, psychiatry, African studies, religious studies, psychology, and medicine. The broad scope of this volume means it will be of interest to those studying and working in bioethics as well as the fields mentioned above.

ABSTRACT. The aviation industry is unique in two major ways: firstly, it has a long history of government involvement dating back to the early days of aviation; and secondly, its primary concern is the safety of its passengers and crew. These features highlight the importance of ethical decision-making at all levels of the industry. However, well-publicized problems such as the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 highlight the need for ethics to take a more prominent role in the field.

Ethical Issues in Aviation focuses on both past and current topics in aviation, providing the reader with an overview of the major themes in aviation ethics that cover a broad range of subjects.

ABSTRACT. Noggin – My Brain on Ethics is an on-line resource for undergrad and graduate courses, business and professional training, and personal development.

Designed for the brain I have rather than the brain I think I have and based on ethical traditions, religions, and contemporary research in philosophy, psychology, and behavioral science, Noggin provides easily remembered ideas and language to understand not only what is right or wrong but also how I make judgments and act and why an action is right or wrong.

Noggin’s core skills can give me confidence in my quick/automatic gut judgments and an understanding of their reliability, provide more reasons for my slow/deliberate judgments, and make me more effective in engaging with ethical exemplars. Mastery level skills can help me better recognize ethics issues, be aware of defensive reactions when judging right or wrong, decide whether I am the kind of person who will do what is right, and choose tactics for acting ethically in the face of organizational and situational pressures. I will know to look back after I have acted to adjust my ethics standards and processes, and will be better at resolving ethics disagreements by identifying and speaking directly to their causes.

Speak fluent ethics? Noggin can help!

ABSTRACT. Even though individual parents face different issues, I believe most parents want their children to be good people who are happy in their adult lives. As such, a central motivating question of this book is how can parents raise a child to be a moral and flourishing person? At first glance, we might think this question is better left to psychologists rather than philosophers. I propose that Aristotle's ethical theory (known as virtue theory) has much to say on this issue. Aristotle asks how do we become a moral person and how does that relate to leading a good life? In other words, his motivating questions are very similar to the goals parents have for their children. In the first part of this book, I consider what the basic components of Aristotle's theory can tell us about the project of parenting. I discuss questions such as: What can Aristotle tell us about the process of moral development? Does parenting require a specific kind of practical wisdom? What does it mean to flourish in an unjust society? In the second part, I shift my focus to consider some issues that present potential moral dilemmas for parents and whether there are specific parental virtues we may want to use to guide parental actions. This part of the book takes up questions such as: What does it mean to be a trustworthy parent when using anonymous "donor" gametes? How should parents make decisions about permanent body modifications for young children? is it wrong to have a child when you know you will not be able to see this child to adulthood? in the end, I hope this project encourages others to think about how virtue ethics can be useful for both bioethics and debates in the ethics of parenthood.

Critics: Judy Andre, Professor Emerita, Michigan State University, andre@msu.edu Allison Wolf, Professor of Philosophy, Simpson College, allison.wolf@simpson.edu

ABSTRACT. The Philosophy of Forgiveness, Volume IV: Christian Perspectives on Forgiveness is a collection of essays that explores different Christian views on forgiveness. Each essay takes up a different topic, such as the nature of divine forgiveness, the basis for forgiving our enemies, and the limits of forgiveness. In some chapters, the views of different philosophers and theologians are explored, figures such as St. John Climacus, Bonaventure, and Nietzsche. In other chapters, the concept of forgiveness is analyzed in light of historical events, such as the Nickel Mines shooting, the Charleston shooting, and the Armenian genocide. The contributors to the volume come from different backgrounds, including philosophy, theology, and psychology. The essays are written for scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and theology, as well as graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students.

ABSTRACT. The Philosophy of Forgiveness, Volume IV: Christian Perspectives on Forgiveness is a collection of essays that explores different Christian views on forgiveness. Each essay takes up a different topic, such as the nature of divine forgiveness, the basis for forgiving our enemies, and the limits of forgiveness. In some chapters, the views of different philosophers and theologians are explored, figures such as St. John Climacus, Bonaventure, and Nietzsche. In other chapters, the concept of forgiveness is analyzed in light of historical events, such as the Nickel Mines shooting, the Charleston shooting, and the Armenian genocide. The contributors to the volume come from different backgrounds, including philosophy, theology, and psychology. The essays are written for scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and theology, as well as graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students.

ABSTRACT. Leadership Ethics & Spirituality: A Christian Perspective

A practical guide for those seeking to be good leaders. Drawing upon philosophical and theological analysis and workplace examples, Leadership Ethics & Spirituality explains why and how a person can be both effective and ethical as a successful leader while walking by faith. From a biblical worldview, it draws upon leadership research and ethics theory to explain what practices and character qualities a person needs to be a good leader and how to develop and apply them successfully to the challenges faced in today's organizations. The revised 2019 edition adds questions to each chapter to encourage personal reflection and facilitate group discussion. Although written primarily to Christian leaders, it offers useful insights for those from other spiritual traditions and perspectives as well.

ABSTRACT. Educators, administrators, and faculty of Christian institutions should, and can, serve their institution's mission according to a God-honoring ethic. But this is not easy. Teaching and research faculty commonly refer to their administration--the president, provost, and deans--as the Dark Side. Faculty members appointed to administrative positions are sometimes considered traitors for going over to the Dark Side.

The twelve cases offered in this book are based on actual situations involving relations and tensions among university presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, and other full-time and adjunct faculty members. Essays and the case questions seek to guide rational discussion of ethical issues involving conflicts of interests, hiring and termination, communication practice, new program development, and relations among students, faculty, and consultants.

ABSTRACT. Despite enactment of the Patient Self-Determination Act in 1990, as well as the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORT), a controlled trial intended to improve care for seriously ill hospitalized patients, advance planning documents are oftentimes not honored at the end of a patient’s life (Connors et al., 1995). Kapp (2016) suggests that achieving progress in the experience of dying in America requires a next generation of planning tools, such as Medical Orders for Sustaining Treatment (MOLST, New York, statutory model)/Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (POST, Virginia, best practice model) (Jesus et al., 2014). The purpose of this presentation is to explore the ethical principles involved in the implementation of MOLST/POST. Though they developed and were implemented differently, both approaches have as their intention to respect the end of life (EOL) medical plan for a previously competent person. Often this person is a frail, older adult patient whose death is anticipated by his or her physician within the next year and, who, through a careful and structured discussion with a care provider, expresses her values and wishes for EOL care. In the early 1990s, efforts began in Oregon to better honor patient preferences for EOL care. Because advance directives were either inadequate or not executed at all, a program, Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST—called similar names in other states) emerged as an important communications approach for documenting the preferences of seriously ill patients for first responders as well as care providers in healthcare facility settings. We present examples of how MOLST/POST paradigms in New York and Virginia have supported and respected the autonomy of older patients at EOL by protecting them from being the recipients of unwanted medical interventions or from not receiving interventions they wish to receive. We argue that governments failing to legislate this paradigm for EOL care and doctors who fail (or fear) to respect such wishes are not respecting the patient’s previously autonomous wishes; moreover, by not doing so, they cause avoidable harm to the patient and his or her family.

ABSTRACT. Each day, hundreds of abstentions of effective treatments desired by patients are being made without the notification (let alone consent) of patients suffering from serious health burdens. We refer here to clinicians’ common practice of refusing organ transplant offers to patients on organ waitlists without notifying patients of either the offer or its refusal. Even though many of these refusals are ethically justified due to clinical reasons, the nondisclosure of offers and refusals to patients is ethically problematic. This nondisclosure violates the United Network for Organ Sharing’s ethical principles such as the requirement to be transparent in organ allocation processes to stakeholders. Unless they explicitly request otherwise, waitlisted potential tranplantees ethically ought to be notified about significant treatment decisions, including donor organ refusals, made on their behalf. Not only would help satisfy the above ethical requirement, it will lead to two further ethically important results.

Firstly, the accountability that such disclosure transparency will engender will predictably decrease procured organ discards. Especially given lengthening waitlists, there is strong public health reason to reduce organ discards when many discards could have been transplanted successfully. Secondly, such disclosure will predictably reduce unfair or otherwise unjustified variability in organ offer acceptance criteria. As an example of such criteria, several studies have showed that organs procured on weekends rather than weekdays were significantly more likely to be discarded than transplanted. This paper draws upon this substantive empirical research to mount three novel ethical arguments in favor of the disclosure of organ transplant offers and their refusals.

ABSTRACT. In an effort to improve the quality of care for those individuals living with dementia there has been an international trend towards adopting a ‘person-centered care’ framework. Originally introduced by Tom Kitwood (1993, 1997), this framework emphasizes the responsibility of caregivers to acknowledge the personhood and moral standing of individuals with dementia. But Kitwood's view has recently been criticized for merely asserting that caregivers should respect the moral standing of individuals with dementia, while offering little direction as to how caregivers should accomplish this (Higgs & Gilleard 2016). Those who have attempted to develop policy recommendations based in person-centered care prioritize continuity between a person’s premorbid and current identity (Harris & Sterin 1999). For example, caregivers should inquire into the person’s history, oftentimes by consulting with family members, in order to develop a clear picture of the person’s values and preferences. Then, caregivers should aim to preserve and maintain the person’s identity, thus mitigating the adverse effects associated with disruption that often follow the patient’s transfer to a health care facility (Porock et al 2015). However, I contend that the person-centered care framework places too much emphasis on a person’s premorbid identity and, as a result, harbors an implicit and pernicious ageism by systematically discounting the possibility of evolving preferences and values of those individuals living with dementia. By drawing a relevantly similar comparison to childrearing, I argue that person-centered care ought to leave room for the morally-permissible shaping of a person’s preferences and values. Children, like individuals with dementia, are normally regarded as having diminished autonomy while still occupying the moral status of persons. But in the context of childrearing, the prospect of parents exerting influence over a child’s preferences and values is regarded as inevitable, and in many cases, permissible (Brighouse & Swift 2014). I contend that such shaping of values should similarly feature in discussions of person-centered care, and I shift the burden of proof to proponents of this framework to explain why the diminished autonomy of individuals with dementia is sufficiently different in kind so as to preclude such shaping of values by caregivers.

ABSTRACT. In its 2017 report on Fostering Integrity in Research, the National Academies concluded that, although we believe that training in ethics and RCR helps foster integrity in research, we still lack evidence about which interventions are most effective. In particular, the report suggests that a precondition for measuring success is a better understanding of what exactly should be assessed. Before we measure, we need to distinguish and specify the skills, dispositions, and learning goals that are relevant for ethical behavior.

This state of affairs presents both theoretical and practical problems, which are linked, for those concerned with ethics education as a means of fostering the responsible research and innovation.

Theoretically, the ethics education community lacks consensus on what is relevant for ethical behavior — which skills and dispositions — and on the best ways to assess their ethics education activities. We do not really know whether our efforts are having the intended effect, and in many cases do not even agree on what the intended effect of our efforts should be. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to say with confidence that we have a robust approach to ethics education.

Practically, this state of affairs also presents severe difficulties not only for ethics educators, but also for funding agencies, such as NSF and NIH, that require training in ethical and responsible conduct of research from institutions that receive funding support.

This panel discusses the results of an NSF-sponsored workshop on Assessing Ethics Education. It includes some of the PIs and participants of the workshop, who will give their own takes on what was accomplished, as well as future directions for assessment of ethics education interventions. Each of the panelists will talk for approximately 10 minutes, with 10 minutes after each presentation for questions and discussion. The remainder of the time will be spent in full group discussion with the audience. Since many of the workshop participants are regular attendees at APPE, we will also endeavor to have them join the session.

ABSTRACT. Much of the debate about autonomous weapon systems is “pre-implementational.” As such, questions like “can AWS be in compliance with the regulations of the Geneva Conventions?” are often the focus. As such, the debate centers on whether the system itself would be able to comply with current or future possible IHL. What this debate does not address is, if AWS can conform to IHL and the JWT, how does this change the duties, rights, and responsibilities inherent on the battlefield? To do this, we must shift the debate from pre-implementation to post-implementation. In support of this, I focus on the claim-rights of innocents against combatants to use AWS in order to reduce instances of unjust killing and collateral damage Leif Wenar, in “The Nature of Claim-Rights,” argues that the most philosophically robust form of the claim-right is the “Kind-Desire” as opposed to will and interest claim-right theories. Wenar defines Kind-Desire claim-rights as, “some systems of norms refers to entities under descriptions that are kinds (“parent,” “journalist,” “human,” etc.). Within such a system, claim-rights correspond to those enforceable strict duties that the members of the relevant kind want to be fulfilled” (Wenar 2013, 219). Using Wenar’s concept, I argue that “If and only if AWS are such that they can better discriminate targets and precisely employ deadly force, then an innocent on the battlefield has a claim-right against the combatants to use such weapon systems.” This claim is a fulfillment of the “strict duties that the members of the relevant kind want fulfilled,” namely to not be killed, injured, nor have their property destroyed unjustly. This application of Wenar’s Kind-Desire Theory of claim rights also accords with Convention IV Article 27, “Protected persons are entitled… to respect for their persons… They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof…” (ICRC 1949). I conclude that with the implementation of sophisticated AWS, innocents will have a claim-right on their use by combatants and combatants have a duty to use AWS in fulfillment of this claim-right

ABSTRACT. In this paper I develop a segment of environmental just war theory by articulating an environmental account of the jus in bello principles of military necessity and humanity.

War has always been less than kind to the environment. There has been an outpouring of legal literature about how wartime environmental damage and destruction can be mitigated and prevented using international humanitarian law (IHL). In 2011, the United Nations International Law Commission began a long-term programme of work on “protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts.” IHL’s moral core of treaty law and customary law stems from jus in bello principles from just war theory. However, there has been virtually no crossover work done by environmental philosophers or just war theory philosophers that examines connections between in bello principles and environmental protection. I aim to rectify this in my paper.

Two jus in bello principles that correspond to customary law principles are military necessity and humanity. These principles often are contrasted with or articulated in opposition to each other. Military necessity can be defined in ways that constrain warfare and limit it to unavoidable environmental damage and destruction in the attainment of legitimate military objectives, and in contrary ways that permit or even license environmental damage and destruction in the attainment of necessary military objectives. The principle of humanity expresses a deontological norm of respect for human dignity that stems from the inherent worth of human beings. This principle is sometimes defined in terms of humaneness or humane treatment, and humanity clearly is at the core of international humanitarian law.

For the principle of military necessity, I first argue that it should be interpreted as a principle of constraint rather than permissiveness. Moving beyond an in bello anthropocentric framework, consideration of the nonhuman environment places further constraints on what counts as a necessary military objective. The principle of humanity that restricts the range of military necessity is moving war from national security to human security. There should be a further move to environmental security

ABSTRACT. The principle of right intention in military ethics is generally thought to be a person’s disposition toward a just and lasting peace. Early just war theorists emphasized right intention as essential to the moral warrant for war and to soldiers’ conduct in it. The principle is meant to serve as a correction for statesmen or soldiers who may have a justified cause for war but use that cause merely as a screen for other purposes. As modern thinkers drew brighter lines between jus ad bellum and jus in bello (and eventually jus post bellum), right intention only appeared in the ad bellum category. Presumably, it could still influence in bello considerations by its presence in the deliberations precipitating war. However, right intention received only circumspect attention in the modern discourse on jus ad bellum. Some scholars have suggested that right intention is redundant or impossible to corroborate and should be subsumed under the principle of just cause. This turn corresponds with a greater focus on rule-based approaches to morality instead of traditional character-based approaches. While I acknowledge the benefits of these rule-based approaches, I want to argue for the relevance of the character-based approaches as an important complement. In particular, right intention deserves a place as an explicit principle under jus in bello. It helps to offset three shortcomings that a strictly rule-based framework can foster among soldiers: a checklist technique of moral evaluation, an overly bureaucratic mindset, and most importantly, a neglect of the motivations needed for right action. Reasoning alone does not prompt action; there must also be a corresponding affective commitment to principles or values that lead to right action. The principle of right intention thus emphasizes the character required for the pursuit of justice, not the state of affairs required to realize justice (as does the principle of just cause). Given this difference, we ought to explicitly distinguish right intention as a vital component of jus in bello.

ABSTRACT. The observation that journalists’ exercise of news judgment about what to cover can serve to legitimize fringe ideas, opinions and people is an old one, dating back at least to Lazarsfeld and Merton’s (1948) description of “status conferral” as a function of news. Hallin’s (1986) critique of objectivity identified how journalists’ assumptions about public opinion facilitated their labeling and then ignoring “deviant” topics and ideas. The ethical critique that emerged from these (and others’) observations was that the news media wielded its power over the public agenda somewhat too well, pushing out ideas that deserved space and attention and marginalizing minority groups and voices. In the hyper-polarized and social media-suffused landscape of today, however, this critique seems to have turned 180 degrees, decrying the amplification, not the squelching, of fringe voices.

This apparent normalizing function of news underlies much of the discussion about how journalists do and should cover President Trump, whose tenure in office has been marked by significant deviations from norms governing presidential behavior. The normalizing critique also has focused on hateful speech and bad-faith actors, such as white supremacists, rapists and perpetrators of school shootings. Far beyond the realm of politics, the role sports coverage plays in normalizing violence in hockey has also been noted and critiqued.

This panel will consider whether and what kind of ethical issues normalization presents. Given that news coverage unavoidably confers status on its subjects and that deviance is part of the very definition of news, how can we understand what ethically responsible reporting entails? Panelists will address how long-standing norms of objectivity and neutrality in journalism are implicated in normalization, how increasing political partisanship complicates our understanding of normalization, challenges to the role of opinion journalism in the chaotic marketplace of ideas, and how conceiving of normalization as a process of moral negotiation helps us to understand the news media’s role and responsibilities in identifying and testing all manner of alternate moral realities.

Please see individual panelists' abstracts uploaded under References.

ABSTRACT. Meaningful scientific discovery requires successfully navigating the human dimensions of laboratory environments.The advanced skills necessary to work with diverse, inclusive, and effective groups of are not inherent: they must be identified, taught, practiced,and honed over time. The quality of research depends on the composition and dynamics of research teams–how well they function as a team significantly contributes to their ability to produce research at the highest levels. In this presentation and workshop, we focus on relentlessly practical approaches to facilitating ethical and effective research. We address research integrity issues, based on real-life situations, with solutions that are both achievable by researchers and evidence-based.Leadership and ethical behavior go hand in hand, and strong leadership focused on building a culture of excellence has the potential to improve scientific research and outcomes. Leaders set the stage for the cultural norms and values held by the group as a whole, and effective leaders demonstrate the integrity and ethical behavior necessary for effective outcomes. Giving leaders tools and language to identify and respond to morally problematic situations is an approach that is useful, evidence-based, and welcomed by leaders who often feel at sea for dealing with interpersonal challenges. The workshop will begin with a short presentation of the organizational and leadership based theoretical foundations for improving ethical outcomes in research followed by an overview of evidence-based tools promoting research integrity built on those foundations and their use in current projects. The focus of the workshop will then switch to a hands-on demonstration of these tools with the audience culminating with an extensive Q&A style discussion among the audience and panelists covering the presented approaches to promoting research integrity, the practical benefits of maintaining that integrity, and the relationship between these methods and research excellence. Panelists include experts in leadership and organizational ethics focused on the responsible conduct of research and represent many years of experience in research and practical application.

ABSTRACT. Institutions of higher education are increasingly recognizing the importance of embedding ethics in undergraduate STEM curricula (e.g., Cech, 2014; and Grosz et al., 2019). Moreover, the effectiveness of active learning in instilling real-world social and ethical competencies highlights the need for interactive, non-traditional classroom activities (Doorn and Kroesen, 2013). By requiring the exploration of problem spaces through different lenses, our research team posits that role play can be a particularly useful method for broadening student perspectives and meaningfully integrating ethics into STEM classes (e.g., helping students to empathize with others and consider the social complexity and value-laden process of introducing technology in society). With funding from an external entity that is challenging researchers to develop approaches to embedding ethics in undergraduate computer science education specifically, our research team will design and pilot a role play activity that requires participants (stakeholders at a committee meeting) to decide whether or not to introduce autonomous buses into a community.

In this session, the presenter will share the results from the pilot round of our role play activity. The study population is approximately 300 students in multiple sections of a first-year computer science course, split into two groups. Group A took part in the role play activity and completed a pre- and post-activity survey. Group B, our control group, attended a lecture-style session on ethics and autonomous vehicles and completed the pre- and post-activity survey. The presenter will discuss the activity design and assessment strategy as well as the findings from the quantitative and qualitative survey data. These findings will include (1) how the survey responses of Group A and Group B compare, (2) how responses to identical questions in the pre- and post-activity surveys may have changed in either group, and (3) the major themes that emerged from Group A’s qualitative survey responses. Through our assessment, we aim to demonstrate the usefulness of role play as a means for embedding ethics content into the undergraduate computer science curriculum.

ABSTRACT. Personal values have long been known to be related to individual decision making and problem-solving behavior in the corporate world of work. In that context, this research study distinctively unfolds differences among the various personality types of School of Engineering undergraduate students (N=75) of GD Goenka University. These students have also studied an ethics course titled “Human Values and Professional Ethics”, the final score secured by the students in this course is also considered as one of the variables of the study. Overall, this research work quantifies the influences of students’ personality type on their personal values and their course score when considered all together. To collect data for the study, a questionnaire was prepared by adapting personal value from Akaah and Lund (1994) [1] and Scott (1965)[11], and the Myers- Briggs personality test[9] was used to determine subjects’ personality type, how students communicate with MBTI preferences, and how students relate with MBTI preferences when personal values are factored in the statistical analysis. Also, personal values are analyzed statistically keeping in mind quite a few cells’ research variables in the design matrix domain of this study such as subjects’ personality type, age, gender, religion, and score in the human values and professional ethics course. This study can be replicated with other relevant personal values and personality tests instruments yielding qualitative and quantitative analytics and thus helping researchers to learn subjects’ deeper individual decision making and problem-solving behaviors and prepare them effectively to undertake the advanced engineering corporate world of work.

ABSTRACT. In this session we will share our ethical curriculum design which aims to sensitize students to ethical dilemmas in the use of computers and to the need for the development of personal and corporate codes of practice in information technology. A series of ethical games and strategies will be discussed as a pedagogical tool for teaching ethics and the social implications of unethical behavior. Attention is drawn to the significance for the participation of girls and women in computer based education of the inclusion of ethical and social issues in computing, as well as the identification of a gender related stance in respect of these issues. The theoretical and practical bases of the ethics programs described are supported by reference to the literature.

ABSTRACT. Jun Fudano, Tokyo Institute of Technology

A Country Report on Research Integrity: Japan

Partly in response to the rapid increase of research misconduct cases, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) revised the previous “Guidelines for Responding to Misconduct in Research” (2006) and promulgated the “New Guidelines” in 2014, which require any research institutions receiving the public grants to have educational/training program on responsible conduct of research. In collaboration with the other governmental funding agencies including the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), the MEXT has been promoting research integrity in Japan. Based on the official information provided by the MEXT, the author will give a report on the national research integrity landscape of Japan and the governmental efforts in advancing the responsible conduct of research.  Effects of the MEXT’s “New Guidelines” on universities and research institutions will also be examined.

Sophia Jui-An Pan, Bioethics Research Center, Washington University in St. Louis; Center for Taiwan Academic Research Ethics Education, Taiwan

The first decade of RCR education in Taiwan: Reflections from an early-career scholar

As an early-career scholar who promotes responsible conduct of research (RCR) education in Taiwan, I am fortunate to be engaged in multiple RCR task forces. Our mandate is to formulate the concepts of RCR to be adopted in Taiwan, make RCR-related policies, and develop and implement RCR instruction for both the Taiwanese government and research institutions.

In this presentation, I will share my experiences promoting RCR education in Taiwan, focusing in particular on RCR education in an East Asian culture. I will describe the current state of RCR education in Taiwan, as well as the current issues and difficulties. For example, East Asian workplaces put considerable emphasis on hierarchical social structures and power relations—how does this help or hinder the success of promoting RCR education? Also, I will discuss the role that early-career scholars can play in the promotion of RCR education and how senior scholars can support early-career scholars in the process.

SL Milgram, T Banerjee, K Cogdill, and KM Partin, National Institutes of Health

An Introduction to the NIH Intramural Research Training Program

The mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to seek fundamental knowledge about living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. A primary goal of NIH is to develop scientific human resources. The NIH intramural research program trains a large, diverse pool of scientists including high school, college and graduate students, postbaccalaureate researchers, and postdoctoral clinical and research fellows. We will compare this unique training environment with institutes of higher education. We will then describe the institutional approach to responsible conduct of research (RCR) training and provide a preliminary assessment of the efficacy of the RCR training program. As NIH is responsible for sending the largest single pool of fellows out into the global research community, it bears a unique responsibility for assuring that its trainees are prepared to be leaders in the performance of science with integrity.

ABSTRACT. Ethical, hard-working people in organizations get tarred by the reprehensible acts of others on their campus or in their organization--often people they've never even met. It can become harder to recruit, retain, or list your affiliation with pride. We don’t have to look far for jarring examples. Leaders worry they'll wake up to hear that they're the next catastrophe, finding themselves in the middle of criminal investigations, associated with sexual or financial misconduct by faculty or staff, or being held accountable in any number of other ways for unethical acts far down in their organizations.

Public confidence and trust in universities and colleges, historically high in our society, is lower than ever and falling faster than any other major institution in the United States. Researchers, depending on the poll, seem to be holding their own, yet the drumbeat of misconduct, retraction, and failed replication stories chip away at public confidence in research--and in researchers. Public confidence is often further eroded by institutional lack of transparency and credibility, or when administrators hire law firms to conduct “independent” investigations that conveniently clear the institution.

This session will include an overview of the symptoms we all see, raise some ideas about approaches we can participate in as individuals and organizations, and provide a forum for APPE members to talk with each other about these issues.  We hope to help address the questions ethical lapses have made critically important to our institutions and ourselves: Can our organizations maintain institutional integrity across large, complex, de-centralized institutions?  If so, how and whose responsibility is it?  What is our individual responsibilities and how can we make a real difference as teachers and scholars of ethics and as members of our institutions’ ethics centers?

ABSTRACT. The initial APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (IEB), developed by Bob Ladenson at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the early 1990s, uses unique pedagogical tools to teach ethics across various disciplines. APPE IEB arose from a desire to help students learn to reason through inevitable ethical challenges they will face in their person and professional lives, and help them develop their responsibilities as citizens of a democracy. The pedagogical goals of the APPE IEB include gaining healthy respect and understanding for rational civil discourse through the development of skills in critical thinking, moral reasoning, public speaking, and teamwork.

Since the first APPE IEB, the ethics bowl format and its pedagogical goals have been adapted to many other academic disciplines and a variety of student populations. The goal of the current project was to quantify the growth of the APPE IEB concept since the early 1990s. We enumerated and described extant Ethics Bowl programs, outlining their sponsors, funding levels, workforce, reach, pedagogical goals, and related characteristics.

To enumerate all existing Ethics Bowl programs, we used respondent driven sampling. We began by listing Ethics Bowl programs about which APPE was aware and conducted an online search for additional programs using the search terms “ethics bowl” and “ethics competition.” We contacted bowl organizers for information about their programs and any other bowls about which they were aware. We continued this method until we reached saturation, the point at which no new bowls were identified. We performed descriptive analysis with an emphasis on pedagogical goals, methods, and outcomes.

We identified 20 Ethics Bowl programs and one additional program pending launch in 2020. Seven programs were discipline-specific, including bioethics, business, global health, archaeology, medicine, and engineering. Thirteen programs considered topics from any field. Of programs with explicit pedagogical goals, most included development of ethical awareness and recognition of pluralistic values, as well as skills in critical thinking, civil discourse, problem solving, and public speaking. About half of the programs were explicitly inspired by the APPE IEB and Bob Ladenson’s pedagogical goals, and all programs had goals similar to those of APPE IEB.

ABSTRACT. I defend a mixed theory of punishment by showing how it avoids the immoral implications that follow from either retributivism or consequentialism on its own. If only consequences matter in determining what to do with the accused, then their actual guilt is irrelevant. Innocents can be framed so long as the consequences are good enough. But if a person's guilt is the only thing that matters in determining a punishment, then guilty people would be harmed even if it serves no social purpose; there would be no necessary relationship between the purpose of the law in promoting the public good and the institution of punishment. Furthermore, if the punishment is supposed to be equivalent to the crime, as strictly prescribed by the lex talionis, then the state would simply repeat the person's criminal actions (e.g., torturing torturers). According to the "two-tiered model of punishment," the legislature is guided by consequentialism, establishing laws and sentencing guidelines that further society's aims. For example, a liberal system whose goal is to protect people's rights would restrict actions that violate rights by deterring potential criminals, restraining them from harming others, and rehabilitating them so that they do not pose further risks. Sentencing guidelines are based on what would accomplish these aims. In applying the laws, however, judges are guided by retributivist considerations. They convict only criminals who deserve to be punished because they have committed crimes, and they assign them punishments, within the sentencing guidelines, that are proportional to their degrees of guilt. The two-tiered model does not allow either the framing of innocents or excessive harm for the guilty. The actions of the legislature restrain the actions of the judge, so that gratuitous suffering and barbaric actions would be ruled out by sentencing guidelines on consequentialist grounds. And the actions of the judge restrain our consequentialist impulses, since only the guilty would be punished, and they would be punished in proportion to their degree of guilt (within the guidelines) rather than being given treatment that is equivalent to their actual crimes. Adopting this approach would have important implications for criminal justice reform.

ABSTRACT. Ethicists have had much to say about law-breaking as a means of expressing dissent and pursuing reform, especially about the use of civil disobedience. Of equally legitimate interest, but less discussed, is the use of uncivil obedience as a mechanism for expressing dissent and pursuing reform. Civil disobedience and uncivil obedience mirror differ in important ways. The civil disobedient engages in principled and deliberate breaches of the law, but does so (usually) publicly, non-evasively, and civilly. The uncivil obedient does not (clearly) breach the law, but follows it albeit in ways that tend to run counter to expectations and frustrate the pursuit or implementation of what the obedient finds unjust. Further, uncivil obedience is usually private (or at least not publicized), evasive, and, as the name suggests, uncivil.

I doubt that all cases of civil disobedience are morally permissible but a number of ethicists have suggested a schema that promises to explain when and why civil disobedience is morally permissible when it is. Thus, most ethicists are comfortable claiming that civil disobedience can be morally justified. I similarly doubt that all cases of uncivil obedience are morally permissible. Still, I submit that a schema can be articulated that promises to explain when and why uncivil obedience is morally permissible when it is. Thus, I contend, uncivil obedience can be morally justified. Roughly, I contend that the same values that can be promoted by civil disobedience can be promoted by uncivil obedience and thus the one is pro tanto justified if the other is. Further, the relevant differences between the two are not necessarily morally substantial diferences. For example, the demand for civility in principled disobedience is not an absolute moral requirement for reasons that require explanation.

I also consider specific and tricky cases of uncivil obedience to develop my proposal. In particular, I consider the NYPD’s use of “extreme discretion” in interpreting legal rules regulating policing and the apparent practice of some officials in the Trump administration to legally comply with orders and agendas in a way that amounts to resistance and the frustration of the administration’s agenda.

ABSTRACT. Journalists assume a role of objectivity and professionalism in order to convey news as accurately as possible, but these standards are being challenged by the ever increasing levels of connectedness and digital intimacy offered by social media. As media outlets and publications continue towards further leveraging the popularity of social media platforms, many journalists are required to maintain a social media presence, often merging their personal and professional online personas. The same is true for freelance professionals, who often rely on social platforms for branding and community-building. Journalists’ social media is often not only an alternative repository for news and community interaction, but also a means for journalists to interpret, publicize and orient aspects of their professional and personal lives with an engaged, equally subjective audience. In this sense, the line between unbiased fact collector and media pundit can be blurred — the medium is focused on conversation, with a keen interest in the opinion of participating individuals, despite ostensibly being labeled as a journalistic platform. Much of the current literature views the industry’s future as more specialized, discursive and opinionated than current norms thanks to adoption of new technology and co-optation of citizen journalism and social media. Research into the presence of opinion in these co-opted blogs shows the normalization of perspective in otherwise objective reporting, supporting the idea that reporting norms are evolving towards the direction of blogs. These structural evolutions beg the question of journalist/citizen distinction, questioning whether an off-the-clock reporter is still held to their professional standards and if “citizen journalists” should be held to a different set of standards. Instead of inflexible, blanket etiquette guides often proposed in the workplace, I advocate for a thematic classification of the differing forms of journalistic social media, allowing for flexible yet firm boundaries to be set between a journalist’s outlets without sacrificing connectivity to audiences or ambient awareness systems.

ABSTRACT. Among the blessings of a free press, its service of providing a forum for dissenting voices – letters to the editor, guest editorials, advocacy journalism, issue-oriented advertising – is widely celebrated. Unfortunately, mass coverage of peaceful protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience may also set a stage for riots, mass shootings, and terrorism. However, John Stuart Mill’s definition of utilitarian security can instead guide more ethical reportage that seeks to inform, not inflame. Mill’s thought has long influenced philosophy generally and media ethics specifically, especially his defense of free speech in On Liberty, and, more recently, his emphasis on justice in Utilitarianism. Though somewhat eclipsed during the past half-century, the 2006 bicentennial of his birth, and 2013 sesquicentennial of Utilitarianism, inspired new scholarship reconsidering his enduring contribution. This paper extends recent research with a new reading of Mill’s conception of security. Perennially, Millian utilitarianism is primarily invoked to defend free speech – and, by extension, a free press – in both libertarian appeals to exercising freedom and deontological appeals to serving the common good. More recently, utilitarian definitions of community and justice have helped to further define ethical expression by minimizing its potential harms. Now, a new Millian Security Principle may begin to actively direct news coverage onto more ethical and useful subjects. Clear direction is sorely needed in today’s news industry, where nearly extinct journalists leveraging shrinking resources address exponentially increasing demands and vanishing deadlines across multiple media, feeding an eager audience’s insatiable appetite for extreme sensationalism. This perfect storm invites bad actors to weaponize coverage for messaging impact: “If it bleeds, it leads” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, blurring distinctions among dissent, protest, civil disobedience, and, ultimately, mass-mediated terrorism. Reporters might instead resist complacent – and complicit – amplification and even encouragement of unethical expression by reconsidering Mill’s definition of security as “the most vital of interests,” which both protects against an existential threat while preserving ongoing safety and stability. The Millian Security Principles seek context, depth and breadth in ethically covering dissenting expression situated in the larger community, directing a more robust and responsible journalism balancing freedom with stewardship.

ABSTRACT. Over the last five years, governments, corporations, and nonprofit organizations have urgently begun developing normative ethics and policy documents to respond to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies (Jobin, Ienca, and Vayena 2019). The documents range from relatively narrow, specific ethics codes and principles to broader frameworks and policy strategies (Zeng, Lu, and Huangfu 2018). These documents articulate various ethical, legal, and social concerns and highlight a variety of policy sectors implicated by new AI innovation.

To better understand the AI ethics and policy landscape, our research team has examined more than 80 AI ethics and policy documents published between 2016 and July 2019. Each document was analyzed for more than 25 ethical concerns associated with AI, such as human rights, transparency, inequality, and labor displacement; as well as more than 15 policy sectors, such as education, finance, transportation, and agriculture. Our team created this taxonomy of ethical concerns and policy sectors through an iterative process. In addition, we evaluated each document along a number of administrative variables, including the type of organization, country of origin, degree of participatory inclusion in the document’s creation, and the depth with which the document grapples with formal regulation and law. This original data set allows us to understand not only what topics rise to the forefront, but also which characteristics may explain similarities and differences among the documents.

During the session, the presenter will share quantitative findings from the study, highlighting both prominent and neglected topics amongst the ethical concepts as well as policy sectors. We will discuss the significance of shared themes as well as what disagreement and the absence of certain categories implies for the state of global AI ethics and governance. This study could offer important insights to governments, corporations, and other stakeholders concerned about autonomous and intelligent technologies, and can help to shape future research on AI governance, and responsible research and innovation.

ABSTRACT. Most international lawyers have long-since left behind international laws existential question (whether international law is ‘law,’ properly so called), to focus on developing the practice of international law and its supporting institutions. Unfortunately, this has led scholars and lawyers, as well as international institutions themselves, to accept consent-based views of international law by default. What makes international law ‘law’ is the consent of States, full stop. In this paper, I argue the received-view of international law not only fails to explain many features of international law (such as international human rights law and jus cogens norms), but it fails to resolve the problem that made such views attractive in the first place: namely, it fails to resolve the paradox of state sovereignty. I begin by providing a clear statement of the received-view of international law, and (following recent work by Samantha Besson (2009, 2016) and Allen Buchanan (2008, 2010, 2019), point out that the received-view would fail to explain paradigmatic features of international law such as human rights and jus cogens norms. Next, I consider a possible rebuttal for someone who wishes to continue to support the received view (call them, the ‘Theory-First Theorist’). The problem with the counter-example strategy, one might imagine, is that the Theory-First Theorist may simply deny these are genuine examples of international law. Human rights may be law-like but given they are not supported by our theory of international law, they are not law properly so-called. This leads me to consider a final problem with the received-view: namely, I argue that insofar as it fails to resolve the paradox of State sovereignty, it fails to provide an adequate theory of even garden-variety examples of international law such as treaty law. While some scholars (such as Goldsmith and Posner (2005)) might consider this to be a happy outcome, I think this is a higher cost than most academics, lawyers and judges are willing to pay. My paper therefore provides us with good reason to abandon the received-view of international law and move toward a theory that makes better sense of the practice.

ABSTRACT. Abstract A Climate of Justice

The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate that United States will not develop adequate policies to save the planet as a human habitat until it repairs broken relationships caused by past violations of humanity. These violations—slavery and genocide—caused a climate of injustice that continues to eviscerate calls for equality and sustainability. Changing the climate to a climate of justice requires that we understand the key elements of American prosperity: its treatment of the earth, our humanity, the social, and the civic; tell the truth about the history of American prosperity and white supremacy; and listen to, respond, and join those civilians who have carried the burden of American prosperity in demanding the protection of their rights. Engaging in such actions will involve the repair of broken relationships so they conform to principles of reciprocity, which in turn, will facilitate the creation of a climate of justice. In such a climate, we can figure out how to block the current path of American prosperity toward planetary destruction and move toward treating the earth as our human habitat. The essay follows the thinking of Ta-Nehisi Coates and others who advocate reparations not only in regard to unpaid labor, but also in regard to white supremacy and arrogance. Just as reparations in Germany after the Holocaust demanded that the German people examine their authoritarianism and racism, reparations for us must entail an examination of the tragedy of American prosperity and the white male arrogance intertwined with it. Just as the Jews were not the “problem” in Germany, neither are the people of color the problem here. The problem is white male arrogance and blindness, and the solution this essay proposes is to move into the civic space with civilians and to work together to ensure civilian rather than military governance. The climate of injustice, after all, is not stable, and requires force to maintain it. Civilian control of the military will make a climate of justice possible, caring for justice will make it likely.

ABSTRACT. People, especially people in affluent nations, are not doing nearly enough (individually or collectively) to prevent and prepare for the worst consequences of the climate crisis. This is partly because we lack the concepts necessary to motivate climate-stabilizing actions. Climate ethicists, environmental philosophers, and others have laid important groundwork for understanding the moral contours of the climate crisis and the strengths and weaknesses of various proposals for dealing with it, but they have not done enough to grapple with the challenge of overcoming inertia and motivating change.

Since we who work in applied ethics must propose solutions to morally significant problems like our failure to motivate climate-stabilizing actions, I defend five desiderata for concepts with significant potential to motivate change, explaining why they should:

a) Direct attention to the climate crisis, b) Reflect its temporal extension, while emphasizing the need for action now, c) Make salient widely shared goals (for example, by associating climate-stabilizing actions with living a meaningful life), d) Be somewhat familiar, not overly technical or abstract, and e) Motivate many people, resonating particularly well with middle-class, wealthy, older, and politically conservative people.

Next, I introduce the concept of a climate legacy, which can be understood as (1) the net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that one is (wholly or partially) casually responsible for over one’s lifetime, (2) the emissions from which one benefitted throughout one’s lifetime, or (3) some aggregation of those. Regardless of which interpretation you endorse, this concept meets all five desiderata, as I show. Then I consider why the concept of a climate legacy is sometimes more apt than the more familiar concepts of climate justice, carbon footprint, and carbon neutrality.

Finally, I suggest policy proposals and individual actions relating to climate legacies that merit further consideration. They include (i) adjusting tax laws; (ii) revising educational practices, voluntary carbon offset programs, practices relating to charitable giving, and consumer product labelling schemes; (iii) undertaking empirical research; and (iv) communicating via social media. If nothing else, I hope to spark reflection about how best to motivate climate-stabilizing actions.

ABSTRACT. The debate around vaccine refusal has often been characterized as a conflict between religious liberty or freedom of conscience and the public good. However, the increase in vaccine refusal that has contributed to recent outbreaks of measles in the US and Europe does not seem to have been motivated by religious or moral convictions. Instead, it seems to have been heavily influenced by the anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism characteristic of populist political rhetoric. The science denialism of the anti-vaccination movement has provided a gateway for alt-right political groups to recruit people vulnerable to misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. This process has been facilitated by the manipulation of social media via paid “targeted” advertisements. Right-wing political recruitment has been further supported in the US by the legitimate grievances of people who feel badly treated by their for-profit healthcare providers and the power wielded by pharmaceutical companies in the political process. These factors have combined to normalize the widespread abandonment of established norms of evidence and argument and to undermine the recognition of medical expertise with respect to vaccines. This, in turn, has helped to generate the acceptance of “alternative facts” in the public sphere and support for politicians who make unfounded and patently false claims. As a result, contemporary vaccine refusal should not be understood primarily as a problem of the conflict between individual rights and the common good, but rather as an example of political power being used to provoke distrust and division among groups of citizens in the service of partisan aims.

ABSTRACT. Fear drives the desire to stay quiet and not deal with controversial issues. Fear avoids confrontation. But facing the issues is a matter of integrity. The desire to practice civility before integrity contributes to avoidance of confrontation, conflict, and difficult conversations. But to live a life of wholeness, of integration, of integrity, one must gather the courage to first listen to what might be perceived as uncivil voices. Listening is critical to the discernment process that makes up integrity as are numerous other virtues. Thus, understanding integrity as a meta virtue helps define its pursuit.

The relationship between civility and integrity while interwoven, must exist in hierarchical relationship with integrity serving as a meta virtue. Using the historic example of the German Christians at the rise of the Nazis and the Barmen Declaration, we argue that those who pursued civility ended up compromising their integrity. Those who pursued integrity risked much but held fast to the principles that defined Christianity. This expression of their integrity and our understanding of it as a meta virtue has implications for our cultural divides today.

ABSTRACT. Even though individual parents face different issues, I believe most parents want their children to be good people who are happy in their adult lives. As such, a central motivating question of this book is how can parents raise a child to be a moral and flourishing person? At first glance, we might think this question is better left to psychologists rather than philosophers. I propose that Aristotle's ethical theory (known as virtue theory) has much to say on this issue. Aristotle asks how do we become a moral person and how does that relate to leading a good life? In other words, his motivating questions are very similar to the goals parents have for their children. In the first part of this book, I consider what the basic components of Aristotle's theory can tell us about the project of parenting. I discuss questions such as: What can Aristotle tell us about the process of moral development? Does parenting require a specific kind of practical wisdom? What does it mean to flourish in an unjust society? In the second part, I shift my focus to consider some issues that present potential moral dilemmas for parents and whether there are specific parental virtues we may want to use to guide parental actions. This part of the book takes up questions such as: What does it mean to be a trustworthy parent when using anonymous "donor" gametes? How should parents make decisions about permanent body modifications for young children? is it wrong to have a child when you know you will not be able to see this child to adulthood? in the end, I hope this project encourages others to think about how virtue ethics can be useful for both bioethics and debates in the ethics of parenthood.

ABSTRACT. Between 2008 and 2018, at least 400,000 North Americans died of drug overdoses, an unprecedented epidemic fueled by easy availability of dangerous opioids. This panel will discuss: who is responsible for this crisis, conflicting theories of the causes and best treatment for addiction, and racial biases in portraying people struggling with addiction, as well as ads, marketing, and methods of unscrupulous rehabilitation centers. Throughout, we stress the need for interdisciplinary approaches that use insights from neuroscience, genetics, harm reduction, social justice, Kant, Narcotics Anonymous, and field counselors, to combat a scourge that claims 60,000 lives yearly.

What we suggest is a series of 15-minute talks followed by 15 minutes of Q&A from the audience and other members of the session (with a 4-5 minute break between sessions).

Talk 1: “Contradictory Assumptions in the Approaches to Treating Addiction.” Talk 2: “The Power of Language: Racial Rhetoric and the Opioid Crisis.” Talk 3: “The Role and Responsibility of the Biopharmaceutical Industry in the Opioid Crisis.” Talk 4: “Moral Responsibility and Addiction: The Importance of an Interdisciplinary Approach.”

ABSTRACT. The aviation industry is unique in two major ways: firstly, it has a long history of government involvement dating back to the early days of aviation; and secondly, its primary concern is the safety of its passengers and crew. These features highlight the importance of ethical decision-making at all levels of the industry. However, well-publicized problems such as the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 highlight the need for ethics to take a more prominent role in the field.

Ethical Issues in Aviation focuses on both past and current topics in aviation, providing the reader with an overview of the major themes in aviation ethics that cover a broad range of subjects.

ABSTRACT. The use of medical marijuana, the legalization of recreational marijuana, the opioid epidemic – each raises unique issues for dental practitioners. This panel will be comprised of an ethicist and dental clinicians who will address ethical issues that arise in dental practice with regard to substance use and abuse. Topics to be addressed include: provider and office staff impairment, treating patients under the influence of licit or illicit substances, management of dental pain with and without opioids, and approaches to drug seeking patients. A range of professional and ethical obligations arise when confronted with these issues and the range of stakeholders who may be impacted varies by circumstances. Preserving the dentist/patient relationship, honoring the social contract that allows dentists to be regarded as esteemed professionals, and promoting and protecting the public’s health are all implicated when issues related to substance use and abuse arise. This presentation will discuss an ethical framework for considering these issues including a review of the American Dental Association’s Principle of Ethics & Code of Professional Conduct, professional society guidelines and specific initiatives that have been implemented.

ABSTRACT. To help healthcare leaders navigate the dynamic and evolving health care environment, the faculty of the Aspen Ethical Leadership Program has developed a structured executive leadership retreat that adapts the business ethics methodology of “Giving Voice to Values” to the tasks of cultivating ethical awareness, analysis, and action specifically for healthcare organizations. The program has helped health care executives practice grappling with some of the most contentious ethical issues confronting healthcare today, including, but not limited to, issues related to the flattening of the healthcare team and the adoption of for-profit structures and strategies to non-profit healthcare delivery.

In this presentation, I will review the format of the program and the format’s underlying pedagogical assumptions regarding the teaching of both ethical decision-making for the purpose of creating organizational policies as well as how to implement policies so that they change organizational practices and the organization’s ethos. The presentation will conclude with a presentation of one case study used at a previous retreat to exemplify how the program utilizes case studies in its teaching method.

The presentation hopes to advance the field of practical and professional ethics because the faculty of the retreat believes that it is a concrete example of how to train healthcare leaders to engage in ethical analysis and action in a way that takes into account their limited time to devote to the subject and the complexity of healthcare organizations. It also shows how the academic study of practical and professional ethics can be applied to teaching in non-academic environments.

ABSTRACT. Individual acts of research misconduct are embedded within social situations. Researchers that engage in misconduct are usually affiliated with a department, work group, college and/or university.

Traditional ethics education provides a curriculum that focuses on the individual decision process. Therefore, measurement of effectiveness focuses on a positive change in psychological processes of restraint. However, measurable instructional goals that explicitly address the social and relational processes that limit situational opportunity are unaddressed.

Fortunately, a few simple adjustments to the overall pedagogy of traditional ethics education can result in a dramatic increase in informal social networks that reduce the situational opportunity for misconduct. When opportunity decreases, misconduct decreases as well.

In this presentation, first, I articulate the contributions of the standard model of ethics education. Second, I discuss how to facilitate the emergence of informal social networks in the milieu of research that enhance the deterrence of research misconduct. And Third, I present and demonstrate several simple and effective enhancements to the curriculum of ethics education that leverages processes of informal social control.

ABSTRACT. The civil war in Syria, with its hundreds of thousands of dead, two million wounded and more than five million refugees, and the Arab Spring, which at the beginning of the twenty-first century created a wave of refugees from the countries of North Africa to Europe, have reawakened public debate about refugees and what to do about them. This paper addresses the Jewish ethical approach to the issues. According to Jewish ethics, help must be offered to refugees of a foreign people, and sometimes even to those of an enemy state, because of what is known as “for the sake of peace.” Peace is not just a feature of godly behavior that man should emulate. It has its own intrinsic and characteristic value – both as part of the reciprocal responsibilities among civilized peoples in the world and as a way to stimulate, express, and provide the attribute of mercy inherent in human beings. Reviewing the sources, I conclude that from an ethical point of view preference should be given to those who are near over those from further away. Even though in terms of priorities, preference should be given to helping one’s own people and fellow countrymen over other needy individuals, priority must be given to those in acute distress without the basic items of sustenance. Sometimes there is a special value in finding a way to assist even one’s enemies in the hope that such help will break down the barriers of hatred. Similarly, ethically it is preferable to offer help to blameless children over adults, whose actions might be suspect. This preference is linked to the concern that help will reach the wrong hands, which might use it for nefarious purposes. If there is a real concern that the help will reach untrustworthy hands or will not get to its declared destination, one should avoid donating through that channel.

ABSTRACT. VeriCrypt uses AI to autonomously aggregate and analyze news from 30,000 premium content providers, and then uses blockchain technology to autonomously hash the resulting outputs and record them to a global news ledger on the blockchain. We also follow a user-centered data perspective, in that we don't ever share user data with third parties, and we have a transparent newsfeed filtering system that users set for themselves, privately. We want VeriCrypt to be a trusted source for individuals, businesses, communities and even governments. To ensure this, we need trusted algorithms as well as secure automation, and each of these requirements comes with its own set of ethical concerns. How do we ensure our analysis is fair, without introducing additional human biases? How do we ensure no individual, corporation or government can manipulate our analysis, while still providing transparency? What kind of permission system does our distributed ledger technology require to facilitate the automation we hope to achieve? In this work, there are more questions than answers, but I hope to share how we approach these questions and learn from the group.

ABSTRACT. On October 10, the website RedState published a story alleging that Congressperson Katie Hill had been involved in affairs with a former campaign staffer and a current congressional staff member. On October 18, RedState followed with a story that Hill, her now-estranged husband and the female campaign staffer had been a “throuple.”

Hill denied any relationship with the male congressional staffer, but did admit to an affair with the female campaign staffer. At that point, Hill resisted calls to resign from Congress. RedState then published a story with text messages about the affair and a nude photo of Hill. The Daily Mail followed with a story with more nude photos, and a suggestion they had many more.

Hill announced her resignation on October 26.

Given that the photos may have been turned over to RedState and The Daily Mail by Hill’s estranged husband as revenge porn, should the photos have been published? Even if it wasn’t revenge porn, should the nude photos been published at all, with the threat to publish additional photos? This paper addresses these questions.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the relationship between anger and forgiveness and to explore when anger is a morally appropriate response to wrongdoing. This topic is relevant to practical and professional ethics because of how the rising level of anger in our social and political discourse is tearing at our social fabric. It is at times like these that we need to consult the wisdom of the past. The religious philosopher Bishop Butler (1692-1752) writes about anger and forgiveness in Sermons VIII and IX, but what he means is subject to dispute. For one, he distinguishes between anger and resentment and between resentment and indignation; however, he seems to consider each of these terms as referring to the same emotion, for he says, “Let this [one emotion] be called anger, indignation, resentment, or by whatever name anyone shall choose.” Second, Butler is known for defining forgiveness as overcoming resentment. However, is this the correct understanding of Butler, or does he simply mean the overcoming of excessive resentment? Does he feel that we should overcome anger and indignation, too? David McNaughton suggests that the difference between the various negative emotions named by Butler is one of kind, not degree. Based on this interpretation, McNaughton thinks that Butler is saying that we ought to overcome resentment but not indignation. In this paper, I evaluate these claims and attempt to tie Butler’s notion of forgiveness to his concept of benevolence in earlier sermons. In addition, I consider whether distinguishing between cognitive, affective, and volitional dimensions of forgiveness helps shed light on Butler’s meaning. The initial presentation of this paper will be limited to 15-20 minutes, leaving plenty of time for conversation. The paper will be presented not read.

ABSTRACT. There has been a renewed interest in hope. Disciplines from theology to philosophy, medicine, nursing, and psychology have taken up hope as an area of study; indeed, it is a crowded, complex, and hyper-intellectualized field of study. Yet, even in such a crowded field, there has been little discussion about false hope. False hope is written off as hope for the impossible, treated as something that we ought to avoid falling into, and something that we must not encourage in others. False hope is uncontroversial; it is the irrational form of hope. This author believes that false hope is, in fact, an important topic worth exploring because there is much we can learn about the rationality of hope by better understanding the nature of false hope. The main distinguishing characteristic that separates hope and false hope has to do with possibility. False hope is characterized on the basis of objectively calculable possibilities/probabilities but true hope is often characterized on the basis of what the agent calculates as possible (and independent of objective possibility). But this doesn’t seem quite right. If the rationality of hope is calculated using objective standards of possibility, then someone who hopes in the face of low odds and against the evidence seems irrational. Indeed, the gap between true hope and false hope is not as big as we think; thus, the main thesis of this project is that false hope and true hope are not as easily distinguishable as it appears. This claim has especially valuable implications for healthcare providers who work in the business of hope and are at the front lines when it comes to encountering false hope—and it is in this context that I will center the discussion on hope. It is premature to write off false hope. We can learn a lot about true hope if we understand the complexities surrounding false hope. Thus, my goal is to contribute to and advance an alternative way of appreciating false hope to show that true hope (like false hope) is predicated on understanding and not simply what appears to be.

ABSTRACT. In an age of identity politics, it is common to hear individuals, organizations or businesses cite “offensiveness” as their reason for making a decision. One recent example was Nike’s cancellation of a Betsy Ross flag shoe design after Colin Kapernick objected to the flag’s purported ties to white supremacy. The decision generated conservative backlash, and among the complaints was the claim that the offense of just one individual is irrelevant. The objection gets something right: it is reasonable to ignore the offended feelings of particular individuals because individuals vary in their sensitivity and willingness to express offense. However, the case prompts two important questions about the morality of offense: one, as individuals, when is our offense warranted? Second, what (if any) moral obligations do we have regarding the offense of others?

Prior philosophical and legal work on offense has focused on whether it’s acceptable for liberal democracies to criminalize certain forms of offensive activity. This body of literature has generated some interesting conclusions, some in favor of legal regulation of offensive behavior and others opposed. However, the Betsy Ross flag isn’t offensive in a way requiring legal intervention, and so the existing literature that focuses on criminalization of offensive behavior is of little help here.

Rather, in the paper I consider offense in the interpersonal and cultural sphere, not the legal. I argue first of all that offense is properly warranted by ideas or symbols that are an affront or opposed to a democratic public. Thus for instance, in my sense of “offense,” racist ideologies are offensive inasmuch as they degrade the equality of a members of the democratic public, whereas the “immodesty” of, say, a woman’s midriff is not offensive in this sense. However, I nonetheless argue that we have a moral obligation to take the offense of others seriously, even when it appears unwarranted. This obligation rests on norms of interpersonal respect combined with the recognition that individuals have limited and fallible perspectives and so may be unable to see that a given idea or symbol is in fact an affront to a democratic public.

ABSTRACT. Charles L. Griswold’s Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration begins: “Nearly everyone has wronged another. Who among us has not longed to be forgiven? Nearly everyone has suffered the bitter injustice of wrongdoing. Who has not struggled to forgive?” (xiii) These questions press for answers that might enable us to move ahead constructively, rather than be held down by the past.

One approach is to recommend that we “forgive and forget”. This seems to invite rendering one vulnerable to the past simply repeating itself. But not forgiving, while remembering, risks failing to move ahead constructively. Better, it seems, is striving for some sort of reconciliation that makes it possible to work together without hostility, recrimination, or vindictiveness. Through time, this may result in the sort of healing and restoration that, in the end, all parties desire. But being disposed to forgive should not be confused with forgetting the past. One need not forget in trying to move “past the past.” What is required is that one not dwell on the past in ways that block moving ahead constructively.

Given the ease with which resentment can be aroused, it can present a formidable barrier to forgiveness. Sensing the resentment of another might well give rise to anger in response to what one takes to be seemingly unfair and ill-grounded charges. Reconstructing what has (or has not) happened with fairness and candor may be tricky at best. This presentation explores how ethics can be important in meeting such challenges.

Particularly helpful will be 18th century philosophers Joseph Butler (Fifteen Sermons) , Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments), and Thomas Reid (Active Powers of the Mind), all of whom examine the nuances of resentment, with a steady eye on its “poisonous” excesses and the possibility of, nevertheless, subjecting it to reasonable constraints that leave it open to ultimate forgiveness of alleged offenders (including oneself).

ABSTRACT. This presentation addresses some difficult issues that arise when commonly accepted ethical norms in biomedical research are extended to social science research.

The early (though admittedly outdated) view of biomedical research presented a fairly simple picture of a clinician/researcher, a patient/subject, and a fight against disease. This image has evolved and diversified in a number of ways, but one thing that remains relatively straightforward is that the biomedical agents of disease are not people deserving of protection. We do not need to protect bacteria, viruses, and cancers from harm. Indeed, the goal of the research is often to damage their structure, weaken their power, and prevent or mitigate the harmful effects they can have on people.

When this general framework for biomedical research is extended to some fields in social science research, difficulties can arise when considering whether the agents of harm are themselves deserving of protection. For example, political scientists aren’t trying to identify and prevent cancer, they are trying to identify and prevent corruption, abuse of power, and other social, economic, and in some cases physical harms. The germs, viruses, and cancers that cause harm in the biomedical context are people, institutions, and industries in the context of many social science studies.

This presentation will examine the way in which these differences present challenges our positions on non-wrongful harms, outcome-related harms, and deceptive and covert research that presents more than minimal harm to reputations and employability.

ABSTRACT. One of the most important questions for establishing the moral status of animals is: Do animals feel pain? Answering this question is very difficult. For there is not even agreement that this question can be empirically answered. Further complicating matters are disagreements about what pain is and what qualifies as empirical evidence for its existence. Do different types of animals experience pain differently so that different lines of empirical data are required for each animal type? Routinely, experiments are performed on animals looking for evidence of pain. Are such experiments morally permissible? Many such experiments involve subjecting animals to conditions that experimenters think would elicit pain response in animals with pain capacity: removing limbs, pinching, introducing noxious chemicals which may burn, etc. My presentation outlines several such experiments, predominantly on fish and bees. I present an argument for why it is permissible to conduct such experiments on simple-minded creatures by addressing five main objections to the practice.

1. If one finds evidence of pain capacity, one has harmed the subjects 2. The pain criterion is not necessary for establishing moral status, looser standards 3. Precautionary principle 4. Historical expansion down the phylogenetic scale 5. Causes gratuitous suffering in cases of replication experiments

ABSTRACT. Mr. Darcy brings experience in the financial services industry combined with a background in education and applied business ethics. During his plenary address, we asked him to provide insights into the current as well as emerging ethical challenges that are being faced by businesses, an overview of strategies that are being employed to meet these challenges, and suggestions on how conference attendees from multiple sectors may be partners in these solutions.

Biography:

Keith T. Darcy is President of Darcy Partners Inc., a boutique consulting firm that works with boards and top executives on a wide variety of complex governance, ethics, compliance, regulatory and reputation risk challenges. Until year-end 2013 Darcy served nine years as Executive Director of the Ethics & Compliance Officer Association (ECOA), and also served as Chairman of the ECOA Foundation.

Darcy holds a B.S. degree from Fordham University’s College of Business, an M.B.A from the Hagan Graduate School of Business at Iona College, and has done additional post-graduate study at New York Theological Seminary. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from Manhattanville College and St. Thomas Aquinas College.

ABSTRACT. Holly Lawford-Smith (2016) has recently argued that innocent beneficiaries of unjust class advantage (what she calls “class privilege”) have obligations to offset their privilege. Offsetting privilege is about reducing and minimizing one’s privilege and is offered as an alternative to “disgorging” the benefits of injustice. Until Lawford-Smith’s work, the standard view claimed that innocent beneficiaries of injustice ought to disgorge some tangible object associated with the injustice or else disgorge the net monetary benefit of the injustice (see Butt, 2007, and Barry and Goodin, 2014). As Lawford-Smith argues, however, disgorging class privilege misfires as a characterization of the compensatory obligations of those with class privilege. I argue that this claim is mistaken. I consider realistic cases of class privilege (particularly in the work place) where offsetting appears to be an inadequate way for beneficiaries of injustice to discharge their compensatory obligations. Instead, I argue, many of the class privileged have obligations to disgorge some of the monetary value associated with their unjust privilege. Moreover, in the work-related cases I have in mind, disgorging should be to the benefit of one’s co-workers. For two reasons, this marks an improvement over the claim that beneficiaries of injustice merely ought to offset. First, offsetting privilege will often leave beneficiaries of injustice in possession of many of the material and monetary enrichments that arose through their privilege. Second, as Lawford-Smith describes offsetting, S’s obligation to offset need not be to the benefit of those most likely impacted by S’s privilege. Each of these consequences is problematic, I argue. My view (that beneficiaries of class privilege sometimes have obligations to disgorge some quantity of money to the benefit of those most likely wronged by their privilege) avoids these problematic consequences. While offsetting class privilege may constitute part of a privileged person’s compensatory obligations, my arguments aim to show that offsetting cannot be the whole story.

ABSTRACT. Despite our collective negative associations with secrecy (Birchall 2011; Hood 2006; Simmel 1906), this paper argues that organizational secrecy can serve important values. Not only can secrecy be chosen by firms and employees, and thus represent an expression of their autonomy, but it can also promote equality within organizations and markets more generally. As such, I will suggest secrecy can be the proper aim of managers who endeavor to cultivate certain kinds of egalitarian relations within their organizations. I illustrate how we may deploy the ‘secrecy supporting equality’ logic to defend regimes of pay secrecy that are otherwise thought to be ethically pernicious. Whereas secrecy is typically thought of as defining power-laden social barriers between individuals (Bok 1989; Grey and Costas 2016; Jones 2014; Morrison and Milliken 2000; Simmel 1906; O’Connell 1979), I argue that secrecy can be rather instrumental in breaking down ethically problematic social hierarchies.

ABSTRACT. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for assessing the safety and efficacy of new drugs and for comparing therapies. RCTs have been analyzed greatly within the ethics literature. Our project involves the investigation of a related but undertheorized topic: discontinuation trials for drugs treating chronic illness. Discontinuation or withdrawal trials seek to investigate if and when it is safe to take study participants off of a medication that has been used to treat their chronic illness for a number of years.

Many patients question whether they need to continue a given drug (e.g., due to drug costs, side effects, and the potential for drug interactions), if the optimal duration of continued therapy has not been defined. We begin our project by framing a common conflict of values: (a) keep the status quo for a stable patient versus (b) pharmacists’ common recommendations to minimize "polypharmacy” or “pill burden” to prevent drug interactions and side effects. Another ethical question may involve drug manufacturers and their willingness to support further testing: while RCTs may help bring a drug to market, financial considerations may discourage discontinuation trials.

In this presentation, our team--a philosopher, a pharmacy student, and a pharmacist-- articulate the need for better data that increasing discontinuation trials could provide. Considering a range of conditions including acid reflux, osteoporosis, and schizophrenia, we identify a number of the challenges that distinguish discontinuation trials from traditional RCTs. Starting with the ethics of placebo use in contrast with standard drug therapies, we will articulate the ethical and clinical challenges of studying how prescribing might be changed after many years of treatment. The use of placebos, while common in RCTs, raises different ethical challenges for discontinuation trials: whether and when to risk taking patients off an active and safe drug in order to determine if the drug remains necessary for controlling the chronic condition. Other ethical challenges to be discussed involve numerous conflicting values of clinicians, researchers, patients, and drug manufacturers. We conclude by providing suggestions for how researchers might more deeply address the ethical worries raised by discontinuation trials in the future.

ABSTRACT. Designing class projects to provide meaningful, systematic opportunities for students to apply ethical decision making to course topics and engage in ethical discourse is challenging. Student presentations designed specifically to accomplish these goals are pedagogically strong. I teach Legal and Ethical Environment, a required course for undergraduate accounting and management students. The legal aspect has long required student presentation of a legal problem, including describing a law case, solving a legal question, or, occasionally, arguing a side of a legal dispute. As the ethics component of this course has grown in response to accreditation and other curricular demands, the presentation requirement has evolved to incorporate more ethics content. The goal has been to maximize the students’ opportunity to practice legal and ethical critical thinking, to connect legal and ethical issues, and to practice legal and ethical discourse.

Accompanying various assigned legal problems, I’ve developed a significant ethical component, which varies depending on the legal problem. For example, in a breach of contract case, after explaining the lawsuit, the student is asked to consider at what point, prior to the defendant’s illegal action, an earlier unethical decision likely occurred and to determine, applying ethical theories, the action that should have been taken at that earlier juncture. In another variation, the presenter must evaluate the morality and efficacy of the law explained in the presentation’s legal portion. In yet another, the presenter is asked to formulate a better law. Detailed instructions and grading rubrics guide students to improved ethical reasoning. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this presentation format helps students better recognize and seek out both the connections and distinctions between legal and ethical standards and be conditioned to reflect and provide reasons for their ethical decisions. This presentation will feature concrete assignment examples and detail how particular aspects have evolved to nudge recognition of ethical issues in the legal context and improved ethical decision making. Hopefully, this pedagogical tool, based on real world legal problems, will help students connect legal and ethical questions and make a life-long habit of more readily engaging in meaningful ethical discourse in their lives and work.

ABSTRACT. Background: Courses on professional ethics are usually taught within the boundaries of each discipline. At Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia), we have been teaching a general education undergraduate course aimed to foster ethical deliberation across the professions. In recent years we have introduced a pedagogical innovation called “learning project” to promote a more democratic learning environment, student empowerment with respect to the curriculum and student ownership of the learning outcomes of the course. Aim/Purpose of Paper The purpose of this paper is to present our experience using “learning projects” in the context of a general education course on professional ethics for undergraduate students. Description of Philosophical Perspective The proposal is based on notions of collaborative and democratic learning. Students learn best when they are the protagonists in the learning process and when a scenario is built in the classroom where interaction, dialogue, inquiry, empathy, and, above all, learning for all students is the priority. In this sense, the experience has focused on students designing, executing and assessing a group learning project, oriented to the achievement of at least one of the ethical learning goals of the course. Summary of Results, Outcomes and Implications This communication will show primarily the students’ learning outcomes, achieved by the development of their learning projects. Outcomes relate to moral development, analysis of prejudices, mechanisms of moral disengagement, and ethical and unethical behavior in the personal, the professional and the civic realms. What makes these outcomes possible is the investigation of the phenomenon as something not detached from the agent that investigates, but made by students themselves, through self-inquiry and collaborative reflection. Students review how they are involved in the behaviors and attitudes they are investigating and how, from that initial understanding, they can generate changes in relation to their moral attitudes and ethical decisions and conducts.

ABSTRACT. Sexual misconduct and the Me-Too movement have generated literally millions of tweets and Facebook posts. Many of those accused of sexual misconduct have apologized or expressed regret. Is apologizing enough? When should sexual misconduct be absolved or forgiven? The extensive literature on forgiveness shows little agreement about what forgiveness and absolution are, much less about whether and when forgiveness is ever earned (as opposed to simply given).* Views about meriting forgiveness should be rooted in an account of moral responsibility. This paper uses an attributionist account of moral responsibility to argue that absolution is appropriate when the offense no longer reflects the offender’s worldview. This is a stringent criterion: a former Nazi might reform his conduct and repent believing Jews are inferior, but he is not absolved if he would still kill others he thought inferior, since his former misdeeds still express a moral defect of his. This example shows that repentance and reformation are not always sufficient for absolution and that absolution requires an extensive examination of an agent’s attitudes/worldview. Meriting forgiveness requires 1) owning, 2) repenting, and 3) atoning for (being relevantly rough on themselves for) the infraction, 4) soul-searching (extensive examination and modification of those elements of one’s worldview expressed by the misdeed), and 5) making amends, that is, action (typically taken toward the victim) to redress the wrongs and harms, for example by compensation, across three dimensions of forgiving: perpetrator-directed, victim-directed, and a vertical dimension directed toward something higher (e.g., an ideal, profession, or institution). Most accounts of meriting forgiveness fail to give proper weight to at least one of the three dimensions. (It is important to note that meriting forgiveness entails neither that victims are required to forgive nor that punishment or revenge are inappropriate.) These criteria for absolution and earned forgiveness are applied to recent cases of sexual misbehavior. Al Franken and Harvey Weinstein, in particular, are sharply contrasting examples. *See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2016), Charles Griswold’s Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (2007), and Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton’s Forgiveness and Mercy. (1988).

ABSTRACT. In the literature, the two most obvious types of explanations of ethical failures in leadership are volitional accounts and cognitive accounts. According to volitional accounts, ethical failure is a matter of will or desire. Leaders know that what they are doing is wrong but do it anyway. According to cognitive accounts, leaders fail to appreciate the wrongness of their behavior. They may fail to do so either because they do not understand the moral rules or fail to see how the rules apply in the situation in which they find themselves (citation suppressed for review).

One might think that the nature of the response to unethical leadership depends on the nature of its explanation. So, if ethical failures in leadership are the result of self-interested behavior on the part of leaders, then we should arrange incentives so that ethical, not unethical behavior, ultimately pays off. Similarly, if unethical leadership is the result of a lack of understanding on the part of leaders about what ethics requires, then it would seem that an appropriate response would be to improve how leaders think about the ethics of their own behavior.

In this paper, I argue that both volitional and cognitive explanations of ethical failures in leadership call for a cognitive response. The basic argument is this: even if the source of unethical behavior is ultimately volitional, leaders are unlikely to think of what they are doing in terms of self-interest and much more likely to rationalize their exception-making behavior by appeal to the common good or some other purported justification. The best response to ethical failures in leadership is therefore a cognitive one, though not in the sense of teaching leaders what ethics requires. Rather, we must get leaders to understand their own propensity to justify what they do—indeed, sometimes using ethics itself as a tool in their justifications.

ABSTRACT. A panel created by Lee Anne Peck, Colorado State University; Kate Roberts Edenborg, University of Wisconsin, Stout; with TBD. Because the 45th president of the United States has such disdain for the news media, it is hard not to discuss what his actions toward the press have been. Many current events revolve around what he has said or done. But how does one address this in a media ethics stand-alone course or in any journalism course for that matter? For instance, one of the panelists recently received these comments in her media ethics course evaluations: “I enjoyed the class; however, sometimes I felt that it was more politically based on certain days, and sometimes I felt the instructor spoke about her opinion on politics with a little too much detail for a classroom setting.” And another: “I understand we are debating media ethics and problems, but it was basically a soapbox for her to complain about the president and spew her hatred toward anything conservative.” What to do? Many of us may try to stay objective in our courses—and we even say we are not for one side or another—but some students may perceive our comments as one-sided. This panel will discuss solutions to avoiding these perceived conflicts. Feedback from the audience will be welcome. The panelists hope that everyone in attendance comes away with suggestions to use in their classrooms in the future.

ABSTRACT. In the Western philosophical tradition a substantial literature on virtue ethical professional ethics has arisen in the past decade. This indicates, the welcome, move to use virtue ethics as a foundation in practical disciplines and decision processes. Within this literature however there has been an almost exclusive focus on Aristotelian virtue ethics and in particular on Aristotle’s concept eudaimonia. This Aristotelian bias ignores the fact that there is a separate virtue theoretical tradition that holds much promise as a foundation for professional ethics – Confucian virtue ethics.

This promise lies in the Confucian ethics, and in particular in the notion that there should exist a harmonious relation between the levels in human societies (and between human societies and the wider natural environment, and between the natural environment and heaven). Such a harmonious relation and the concepts that contribute to it provide the means to extrapolate a harmonious relation between professionals, their clients and the societies in which the professionals practice. As in other relations the relation between professionals, their clients and the wider culture requires the professional to inculcate certain virtues. These virtues include zhong (loyalty), ren (benevolence), xin (trustworthiness), yi (righteousness), he (harmony), li (propriety), zhi (wisdom) and lian (integrity).

Drawing on these virtues in this paper I will attempt to formulate a Confucian framework for a professional ethics. In particular the focus will be on the professional – client relationship. The purpose here is to demonstrate the Confucian tradition’s richness and power to contribute solutions to the ongoing problems in modern professionalism. These problems demand a response that Confucian virtue ethics is in a unique position to provide.

ABSTRACT. Conventional sacrificial moral dilemmas propose directly causing some harm to prevent greater harm. Theory suggests that accepting such actions (consistent with utilitarian philosophy) involves more reflective reasoning than rejecting such actions (consistent with deontological philosophy). However, past findings do not always replicate, confound different kinds of reflection, and employ conventional sacrificial dilemmas that treat utilitarian and deontological considerations as opposite. In two studies, we examined whether past findings would replicate when employing process dissociation to assess deontological and utilitarian inclinations independently. Findings suggested two categorically different impacts of reflection: measures of arithmetic reflection, such as the Cognitive Reflection Test, predicted only utilitarian, not deontological, response tendencies. However, measures of logical reflection, such as performance on logical syllogisms, positively predicted both utilitarian and deontological tendencies. These studies replicate some findings, clarify others, and reveal opportunity for additional nuance in dual process theorist’s claims about the link between reflection and dilemma judgments.

ABSTRACT. Federal-level support for the study of both cultivating STEM ethics cultures and for innovations in graduate education continues to yield important results. But one persistent gap is at the intersection of these two concerns; namely, graduate student ethics education. At the graduate level, ethics in STEM disciplines is regularly aligned with compliance training. Little work has been done to date to assess the ways that graduate students understand and value ethics in their disciplines. This paper explores the cultivation of an institutional ethics culture through a study of graduate students’ perception of ethics and ethical culture at a large high-research-intensive university.

Our IRB-approved survey study reveals implications for how ethics is balanced against compliance at academic research institutions and how interdisciplinary approaches to ethics can be built and made compatible. We posed a series of questions related to ethics and ethics culture to graduate students participating in required ethics workshops to develop understanding of how they perceive ethics and the ethical culture in their fields of study. Our participant group consisted of random disciplinary foci and mixed residency-status workshop participants, who utilized a Likert-based ranking system in answering a total of 29 questions.

Supported by three years of survey data, we argue that disciplinary differences, previous experience with diversely-defined versions of “ethics,” and nationality are significant variables in the extent to which graduate students value ethics. Yet, despite these challenges to cultivating an ethics culture, we find that graduate students (a) have a strong sense of their ownership about creating an ethical culture and (b) think ethics is important to their work, across all disciplines, even as they offer disparate definitions of the term. This suggests that to foster an institution-wide culture of ethics grounded in common shared values, ethics should be engaged not only in disciplinary settings that rely on the intersection of domain-specific knowledge and shared frameworks of ethical through, but also in multi-disciplinary settings with opportunities for sustained discussion with colleagues. In our discussion of these findings we address the relationship between ethics and compliance as well as questions about consistent framing of ethics at complex institutions.

ABSTRACT. The decision-making process that led up to the explosion of NASA's Challenger Space Shuttle has long puzzled members of both the scientific and non-scientific communities, despite a large body of literature exploring various aspects. Yet recent work in the epistemology of disagreement and consensus can be utilized to develop a new insight regarding the events and resulting disaster and develop better guidelines for engineers and managers. In a recent paper, John Beatty highlights the ways in which apparent consensus proceedings can result in decisions that mask disagreement. Beatty's work provides us with an understanding of what might be lost in the process as groups or collectives work to reach agreement.

While the disagreement in question can be relatively minor, at times the disagreement in question is quite substantial. In the case of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the engineers who worked on the O-ring project for NASA contractor Morton Thoikol voiced significant concerns in advance of the disaster. Yet the Challenger was cleared to launch by NASA. In hindsight, many of these engineers wondered whether they had really done all that they could have done to stop the launch. Some lived with a profound sense of guilt for the rest of their lives.

Here I apply Beatty's work to the Challenger disaster and show how the use of apparent consensus proceedings changed the social norms in play during the decision-making process. I demonstrate how this process ultimately hid the significant disagreement prior to the launch of the Challenger and I propose an initial set of guidelines designed to aid in determining whether apparent consensus is an appropriate tool. While subtle and easy to miss, this illustration shows the undeniable impact that apparent consensus proceedings can have. An awareness of the social norms in play during apparent consensus proceedings allows us to finally gain a more complete understanding of what led up to the decision to launch the Challenger. But the identification of the potential abuses of apparent consensus proceedings is crucial, not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but also in order to prevent future disasters.

ABSTRACT. This paper compares and synthesizes the ideas of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt on morality, moral education, and moral development, with Durkheim as a common thread. Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt were all influenced by Durkheim’s perspective, either accepting or rejecting it. Durkheim and Kohlberg discussed the nature of moral principles and the process by which individuals develop into moral beings. Hoffman addressed the interaction of cognition and affect and emphasized the importance of affect in one’s morality. Haidt addressed individual differences, including the moral foundations on which individuals stand.

Based on the synthesis of these four thinkers, this paper constructs a new conceptual framework for professional ethics education. During the professional socialization process, newcomers to a profession experience the moral internalization of the values of the profession. This internalization process is influenced and promoted by social discipline, which includes both cognitive and affective aspects. This paper argues that desirable social discipline can be achieved when both aspects are well-balanced, under the consideration of individual differences.

This paper shows how the conceptual framework can be applied to professional education, with the specific example of engineering ethics education. This paper argues that appropriate social discipline can start from attention to individual students and careful consideration of the personal values of these newcomers to the engineering profession. This paper connects the framework with two motivation theories: the self-determination theory of Deci et al. and the attribution theory of Weiner. In light of self-determination theory, this paper suggests that educators consider how to shape educational environments to promote students’ moral internalization process as they integrate their personal values with the values of the engineering profession. In light of attribution theory, this paper suggests that educators encourage students to construct their own moral narrative in the way that strengthens their moral motivation.

This paper represents a small portion of a chapter of the author’s doctoral dissertation.

ABSTRACT. A submission for this category: "proposals that explore ethical concerns related specifically to Georgia’s anti-abortion law."

In June, 2019 a co-author and I published an introductory, open-access book on abortion, "Thinking Critically About Abortion: Why Most Abortions Aren’t Wrong & Why All Abortions Should Be Legal" (available at www.AbortionArguments.com), as well as some follow-up "popular" articles on the issues.

While the book and writings have been received well by other philosophers and have gotten quite a bit of notice for pieces of "public philosophy," it, unfortunately, seems they have made little difference beyond that.

This may just be due to poor "marketing" on our parts, or the fact that it's just very big and hard to address issue. But it might be, and this seems more likely, that there hasn't been as much interest as we hoped there would be because there simply is a general unwillingess to attempt to engage these issues in systematic ways, *except by people who are opposed to abortion and, we argue, have generally poor arguments for their views.* Pro-choice organizations, however, seem to have little interest in public education on this issue, for reasons that are unclear and perhaps unwise. Perhaps, however, this observation is mistaken and there is interest in educational outreach that I just have not been able to find, despite many efforts.

In this presentation, I share my observations about attempting to be a "public philosopher" on the topic of, why so little positive seems to comes from this and what, if anything can be done about it.

ABSTRACT. Emerging technologies have the potential to dissolve previously challenging ethical problems, such as addressing issues of scarcity or access. Safe and wide-spread availability of artificial wombs and the practice of partial ectogenesis may appear to be a solution to the seemingly intractable issue of the moral permissibility of abortion. After all, if a human embryo could be swiftly and safely removed from the pregnant individual for full-term gestation in an external, artificial womb, what need could there be for purposeful termination of the pregnancy? Especially considering if there is a high probability of adoption should the would-be biological parent(s) elect to exercise that kind of option. Far from being a panacea to the abortion debate, we argue availability (or merely the possibility) of ectogenesis-related technologies will compound already existing ethical disagreement, further polarizing the respective pro-life and pro-choice positions.

Prima facie, the promise of ectogenesis as providing the final word in the abortion debate is understandable, even when ultimately concluding, as we do, that it provides no such solution. Ectogenesis appears to resolve the two core issues pro-life and pro-choice advocates take as non-negotiable. A successful transplantation of a fetus to an artificial womb would both end the pregnancy for the woman and preserve the life of the fetus. To wit, ectogenesis has been described as the foundation for “abortion reconciliation." Much of the discussion regarding the ethics of ectogenesis presupposes the resolution of these issues, and either asserts a narrower set of permissible circumstances for abortion or argues for other justifications for abortion even when ectogenesis is available. Other potential justifications for abortion include the Right Not to Become a Biological Parent and a Right to Genetic Privacy. Rather than discuss the aforementioned rights and their relevance to abortion in a world with ectogenesis, our focus will be on more traditional issues of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, despite the fetus being a rights-bearing individual. Even in a world where ectogenesis crosses over from science fiction to available technology, there should be little change to a woman’s right to an abortion.

ABSTRACT. This will be an interactive discussion with NSF representatives and the research integrity community, focusing primarily on NSF's new webpage Responsible and Ethical Conduct of Research, and the related  America COMPETES Act RECR Training Requirements webpage and list of resources. In addition to seeking feedback on these new web resources, presenters will engage the audience in a discussion about whether and how the research integrity community can work with the NSF (and other federal agencies) to develop and communicate resources and policies, and whether and how the research integrity community should evaluate or comment on resources and policies.

ABSTRACT. This analysis utilizes the Action Research into Business Conduct (ARBC) instrument presented at the 2019 APPE Conference to analyze more than 400 accounting and business law student perceptions of business conduct at two regional universities. Using a pre-test/post-test design, the analysis evaluates the effectiveness of ethical instruction during Fall semester 2019, and highlights potential areas for improvement. Instructors incorporating ethical elements into their class presentations receive feedback on whether the instruction achieved the desired result. The inclusion of business law students into this administration of the ARBC instrument permits assessment of instruction in topics such as tone at the top, bid rigging and anti-competitive actions, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, conflict of interest, and intellectual property rights.

Potential extensions of this research include assurance of learning benchmarking for accreditation, and application of the ARBC instrument outside the business school.

ABSTRACT. This talk will describe the particular pedagogical experience of desgining and teaching a series of workshops on ethical deliberation for business in Colombia and other countries of Latin America. The workshops were designed and taught by the Center of Applied Ethics and the Department of Philosophy of Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia, and directed to the executive directors and managers of the companies that compose the Latin American consortium, Grupo Argos.Their aim was to offer philosophical tools to enrich moral deliberation in business, particularly, through a number of excerses involving reflection on moral sentiments, application of general principles and analysis of consequences. They involved the pedagogical challenge of turning philosphical concepts into real tools for deliberation in business, so that the usual gap between the two areas of knowledge became no longer an issue, and both could gain a more complex understanding of their common moral preocuppations.

ABSTRACT. The clinical professions enjoy the ongoing benefits of technology innovations and scientific discovery as they are directly applied within medical contexts. However, the clinical professions continue to experience challenges with exactly how to communicate within their organizations, to other health practitioners, and essentially, to their own patients who trust them with their care. Healthcare practitioners face far more institutional pressures, time constraints, and medical responsibilities than previous generations of clinical practitioners. Within these challenges remains the nexus of the patient-provider encounter, where patients and clinicians must communicate in order to foster the process of healing, manage chronic conditions, and address individual patient concerns. As this encounter receives additional external institutional pressures, we must consider to what degree it needs to be preserved, strengthened, and enhanced in order to protect that relationship as an opportunity for improved communication, and subsequently, better person-oriented patient care. This paper aims to assess the experience of patient-provider communication as it relates to the quality of patient health literacy and associated behaviors influenced by that literacy.

By conceptualizing health literacy as a general capacity, we may advance a framework in which a patient’s agency is acknowledged, genuinely respected, and concretely empowered. This paper assesses potential models for enhancing the collaborative nature of patient-provider communication by reviewing what is classified as “behavior” of individual patients (and their providers) and what is the result of the healthcare system at large. In order to illustrate the importance of this communicative relationship given the increasingly complex nature of healthcare systems, the introduction of new actors within the system, and the respective burdens on healthcare professionals, the paper illustrates chronic disease management as one opportunity for improving health literacy. Health literacy may be fostered and enhanced via the vehicles of shared decision-making and motivational interviewing. Assessing the evolving nature of patient-provider communication may provide resolutions to current challenges within the clinical encounter, and it may provide potential answers to challenges in the future as the relationship continues to evolve.

ABSTRACT. This presentation is a description and demonstration of ethical reasoning process using the Eight Key Questions (8KQ) approach. The presentation will involve working through ethical considerations of parental decision-making in a growth attenuation scenario called "Little Ricky." The scenario, while fictional, is realistic and places participants imaginatively in the position of decision-makers using the 8KQ to inform and guide the decision. The 8KQ are: fairness, outcomes, responsibilities, character, liberty, empathy, authority, and rights. At the end of the presentation, robust assessment data showing increase in ethical reasoning among participants as a result of learning about and using the 8KQ is presented.

ABSTRACT. Often called “self-plagiarism,” text recycling is likely a common practice in scientific writing as well as in other academic fields. As more publishers adopt plagiarism detection applications, cases of text recycling are increasingly being identified to editors--leading organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to develop guidelines. Nevertheless, little empirical research has been conducted and there is a wide range of opinions on what constitutes ethically acceptable practice, with no authoritative source of guidance for authors or students. Text recycling is thus becoming an increasingly visible and controversial ethical issue in scholarly communication. Supported by a five-year National Science Foundation CCE-STEM grant, the Text Recycling Research Project is the first large-scale investigation of the topic. The aims of the project are better understanding the various dimensions of text recycling, building consensus among stakeholders, and promoting ethical and appropriate practice. The proposed panel, comprised of members of this multi-institution, multidisciplinary project, will present on key findings from the first two years of research.///

*Moderator/Speaker 1: Introduction: definitions and terminology, and overview of ethical issues *Speaker 2: Gatekeeper beliefs and attitudes. Findings from a survey of journal editors and journal board members and follow-up, in-depth interviews with journal editors regarding their views on the ethics and practical aspects of text recycling. *Speaker 3: Expert and Novice researchers’ beliefs and attitudes. Findings from survey of experts (faculty) and novices (graduate student and post doc) on a set of scenarios involving text recycling, the appropriateness of recycling text from different source types and in different amounts, and questions about appropriate practice. *Speaker 4: Frequency and patterns of text recycling in STEM research writing. Findings from a computational analysis of a corpus of 400 NSF-funded research papers produced in 80 research groups across the spectrum of science, engineering and quantitative social science disciplines. *Speaker 1: Ethical and practical challenges of text recycling in the development of policy and guidelines for journals and educational institutions.

///Total presentation time will be limited to 60 minutes to allow for questions after presentation of each set of findings and at the end of the presentation.

ABSTRACT. In 2016, the government of Colombia signed a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), officially ending a civil war that had lasted over fifty years. During that half century of violence, Colombia became a country of emigration. In fact, according to the Administrative Department of National Statistics of Colombia (DANE), roughly 557, 000 Colombians migrated to Venezuela, the United States, Ecuador, Panama, Canada, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia between 1963 and 1973. Since then, the Migration Policy Institute reports that as of 2014, an estimated 1.2 million residents claiming Colombian heritage resided in the United States. And, Colombian immigrants, who numbered 699,000 in 2015, represented the largest group of South Americans in the United States, accounting for roughly 25 percent of all South Americans. Most important for this essay, though, is the fact that during the decades of violence, over one million Colombians emigrated to Venezuela, most of whom have since returned.

While traditionally Colombia has been seen as the country of emigration, with recent turmoil in Venezuela, the tables have turned. Shortages of medicine and food, an economy in free fall, and political wranglings have led to an outflow of Venezuelan migrants fleeing throughout, primarily, Latin America seeking refuge. According to the Migration Policy Institute and the Organization of American States, as of January 2019 over 3 million Venezuelans had left their country, most over the last three years. And, there is no end in sight. Given their historical and geographical ties, it is not surprising that the top destination for these migrants is Colombia, with over 1.1. million recent Venezuelan immigrants now residing there.

This essay will put a normative lens on this situation. In particular, it will explore questions of immigration justice arising from the specific circumstances between Colombia and Venezuela as they relate to the current refugee crisis in the region. The principal focus of the analysis will be to apply a feminist approximation of immigration justice to interrogate the question: What should be the relationship between history of emigration and immigration policy?

ABSTRACT. The rise in urbanization in the United States beginning in the 1950s, with a significant movement away from family farms, has resulted in the extensive creation of industrialized farms based on the factory model popularized by Henry Ford for the automobile. While vestiges of the family farm remain, a majority of farm animals, numbering in the billions, live out their lives in miserable conditions, which often end in premature and gruesome deaths. Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, raised awareness of the animal industrial complex, though most people came away concerned about the quality of their food more than the human or animal suffering involved. There has been a recent movement in the United States in the creation of “ag gag laws,” which are meant to silence and punish whistleblowers in the industry who bring to light abusive conditions on these farms. Six states now have these laws, but as many as twenty-three have tried to create them. These laws have been lauded by many in the animal industry as necessary to protect business interests, and criticized by many others who consider it a violation of free speech and a direct attack on the concept of whistleblowing. Whistleblowing has a long history in the United States, and is meant to protect those who have the moral courage to speak up against their employers who are engaging in unethical practices. What the ag-gag laws have the potential to do is to silence the most morally courageous of our citizenry, and thus perpetuate abuses in the animal industry. There is also concern that this challenge to whistle-blowing may impact other industries as well. This presentation will describe the current factory farm conditions, provide an overview on the concept of whistleblower laws, examine the specific features of ag-gag laws, address the pros and cons of such legislation, and consider how silencing the whistleblower might have a detrimental effect on the consciences of individuals as well as on the society in which we live.

ABSTRACT. Statement of Purpose: This presentation will provide a brief background and definition of artificial intelligence for the purpose of applying the Ethics of Caring framework to AI technology in nursing practice.

Artificial intelligence is expanding in health care at a rapid pace. Health care organizations are using machines, algorithms and robots to facilitate data management and the delivery of health care. As with any advancement in technology, intended and unintended consequences arise that must be considered in an appropriate ethical framework. This presentation will apply the Ethics of Caring framework to suggest that AI technology will not replace the care that is delivered, but will be adjunct to the delivery of health care for time and efficiency purposes. The Ethics of Care or Caring framework describes the relational aspects, intent, and definition of care. This presentation will walk through machine learning, virtual care, and robotics using an applied ethics approach for nurses and other health care professionals to understand the ethical considerations of AI technology.

The author will use case studies to demonstrate application in practice. For example, machine learning algorithms will be described using current data analysis used to predict health outcomes and with implications of justice, bias, privacy, and autonomy. Case studies of AI customer service and companion robots will be described to demonstrate practical ethical considerations of compassion, justice, beneficence, and care. Lastly, a case study involving virtual care and the ethical considerations for care, autonomy, and justice will be analyzed.

ABSTRACT. As robots advance in terms of the sophistication of their decision-making and behaviors, it is increasingly important that ethical considerations are taken into account not only by roboticists but by the robots themselves. Encoding at least some types of robots with the capacity to make ethical decisions is becoming essential, especially when they interact with human beings. With that in mind, the focus of our National Science Foundation funded research study is to determine whether humanoid robots could be programmed to behave ethically. In this presentation, we will describe the methodological and philosophical approach our research team is using to address the issue.

Of course, defining what behaving “ethically” means is contentious. For the purposes of our project, we refer two senses of the term. First is what folk morality would say is an appropriate action in a given situation. The pathway for determining folk morality, in the case of our study, is to survey American adults. Then the task would be to determine whether a robot could mimic folk behavior in a set of circumstances. Second is what ethics experts would label as the proper course of action in the same circumstances. A robot would be tasked with following the guidance of experts, and if conflict emerges among the expert opinions, the moral emotions of the user would help inform the robot’s decision.

In the presentation, we will discuss the justification for the aforementioned approach and its potential limitations. We will also describe how we determine what folk and expert morality would dictate. We will rely on two sets of subject populations (typical adults and ethics experts) responding to two hypothetical scenarios. The first scenario involves a description of a child playing a board game with an adult; subjects will be asked under which circumstances it would be permissible for the adult to throw the game or let the child cheat. The second scenario describes a pill sorting task where a clinician is helping an older adult learn how to distribute pills in a weekly pill container.

ABSTRACT. Abstract: Abortion is currently one of the most highly debated topics in the realm of ethics. One can find a broad range of literature on the issue. Georgia’s recent anti-abortion law has brought the issue of abortion back into the face of politics. Many individuals have charged this law as a “religious” one and therefore does not need to be in the public sphere. Even though the scope of the law is contentious, this essay may provide a secular justification for the bill. Essentialism, which is rooted in the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysic of hylemorphism, is the idea that everything has an essence that classifies it as a certain kind of thing. To distinguish the essence of something, one needs to determine the genus and specific difference of that thing. For example, animal is the genus under which “human” falls; with its specific difference being marked by rationality. Humans are essentially rational animals, and if so, this may have negative implications for the abortion debate. This essay defends the conditional: If essentialism is true, then abortion is wrong. If humans are essentially rational animals, then they have a right to life very early on in their development. This right to life springs from them being essentially rational animals with specific properties that have a right to be fulfilled. The first part of this essay, following David Oderberg and Edward Feser, lays out what essentialism is and answers objections to the idea of essentialism. The objections I try to answer (also in the style of Oderberg) are put forth by W.V. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper. I then go onto explain the essence of the human being and sketch an argument for why the essence of a human being has normative implications for our behavior in regard to the abortion debate. The concluding part of this essay attempts to answer objections to the implication that essentialism has for the abortion debate. The objections I try to answer against the implications for abortion are put forth by Nathan Nobis, Dean Stretton, and Jeff McMahan.

ABSTRACT. According to Kantian ethics, persons have a special worth or dignity: a status that demands respect. For Kantians, personhood is not coextensive with human life; for example, individuals can go on living after losing the set of capacities constitutive of personhood, including the capacity to conform their actions to moral commands. Some philosophers, including Dennis Cooley and David Velleman, have suggested that individuals’ continuing to live after the loss of their personhood might be an affront to Kantian dignity. Indeed, Velleman says that “one is sometimes permitted, even obligated, to destroy objects of dignity if they would otherwise deteriorate in ways that would offend against that value.” Dennis Cooley has argued that it is morally required on Kantian grounds for those who will lose their personhood as a result of dementia (e.g., caused by Alzheimer’s) to hasten their deaths (e.g., commit suicide) so as not to demean their dignity. This paper attempts first to investigate how post-personhood existence might offend against the person who once was. Philosophers, including Cooley’s critics, invoke the idea of such existence being an affront to dignity, construed broadly, but they offer little by way of explanation of how or when it is. Second, the paper assesses under what conditions (if any) existence as a severely demented individual would be an affront to the dignity of persons, as Kant in particular conceives of it. Finally, the paper argues that while post-personhood living might sometimes constitute an affront to dignity, Kant’s account of dignity implies that it is neither morally required, nor even morally permissible for someone in an early stage of Alzheimer’s to hasten their death to avoid such an affront, even if they have autonomously chosen to do so. The paper adds an ethical perspective to debate on physician-assisted dying, in particular debate on the moral permissibility of the soon-to-be-demented ending their lives. This debate has obvious practical importance, given that over 14% of Americans 71 and older have some form of dementia.

ABSTRACT. Following catastrophic events, some landscapes are left uninhabitable. In these extreme cases, the risk to future exposure is best mitigated through property acquisition and relocation, also known as buyouts. Buyouts can result from environmental disasters like severe floods or technological disasters such as the release of toxic chemicals. Whichever the cause, buyouts permanently remove people from hazardous landscapes. The literature identifies that participants of forced relocation experience a sense of nostalgia for their former neighborhoods. Commemoration varies from officially commissioned to spontaneously developed and includes informal remembrances embedded in daily activities. The geographic scholarship on commemoration is extensive and examines the role of place and politics in how we remember and forget tragic events.

Our project strives to fill a particular lacuna within the literature, namely who ought to play a role in commemoration. After considering whose narratives are included in commemoration and comparatively, whose do not belong , we utilize elements from both Ecofeminist Philosophy and Land Ethics to explore the human-landscape connection.

Our project emphasizes the fact that land devastation is frequently the result of group values, which inherently devalue and damage the displaced group as well as the landscape. We argue that minority voices and perspectives, such as women, indigenous populations, and racial minorities, are systematically denied belonging, a voice/story, a role in the creation of their landscape, and a history through land practices. That is, in cases of displacement due to land devastation, group values have restricted the displaced population’s ability to create community and a sense of place. Utilizing both Ecofemist Ethics and Land Ethics, we encourage moving away from fragmented understandings of humans and land, where we traditionally devalue the minority class and idealize the landscape reinforced by majority values.

ABSTRACT. “I am a man with Down Syndrome and my life is worth living…seriously, I have a great life.” Frank Stevens proclaimed these words to a congressional committee on Capitol Hill. His claim to have a life worth living challenges the underlying assumptions made by those who would seek to prevent certain lives from being born, or those who would modify lives to prevent disease or impairment. The assumption is that some lives are worth more than others. But what makes a life worth living? Which lives have value and why? This paper explores these questions within the framework of well-being. Accounts of well-being articulate what makes life good for someone; that is, what is in their interest, benefits them, or makes them well-off. It is not unreasonable to think that having a disability makes one worse off in life. While Elizabeth Barnes (2016) has argued that disability does not necessarily make one worse off with respect to well-being but is a “mere difference” maker, I argue that disability offers us a view of what is truly good for all of us and what makes life beautiful for us, namely, relationships. Drawing upon the testimonies of people with disabilities and those who are close to them, I argue that it is the capacity for and participation in second-person relationships that make life worth living and infuse it with value. Second-person relationships are reciprocal relations characterized by attention to the other as someone with whom connection and communication is possible. These relationships provide the foundation for strong communal networks to form in solidarity with those who are differently abled. A good example of this idea is the L’Arche communities for persons with intellectual disabilities. Under the leadership of Jean Vanier, the L’Arche communities have blossomed into places of light and hope for individuals and families with disabled loved ones. Each person is seen as having a gift to bring to the community and no one is less valuable than another. There is truth, goodness, and beauty evident in the L’Arche communities that can inform an adequate theory of well-being.

ABSTRACT. In our project, “Building a Culture of Responsible Research and Practice in STEM, ” we are engaging graduate students in the active development of context-specific codes-of-ethics based guidelines. During the 2017-2018 academic year, the project included four groups of graduate students from Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical and Biological Engineering and Physics departments in a series of workshops that culminated with the students writing a first draft of guidelines designed to help members of their research groups address ethical questions that arise in the lab environment and over the course of research. The draft then went through an iterative revision process involving students, faculty and other stakeholders. The final goal is to determine if research groups (i.e., labs) or departments would adopt these guidelines, or if changes were made in response to discussions that took place. A third option would be that the guidelines would be rejected for various reasons.

In 2018-2019, the project team has engaged faculty members from the active departments in discussions about the student-developed guidelines through one-on-one and group discussions as a way to continue the iterative development process. Results have varied substantially, with some departments being supportive of the effort and others being highly cautious. Some touchpoints that have ignited active debate and consideration include negotiating power differences between students and faculty, concern about how binding ethics guidelines are, and confusion about how ethics recommendations and guidelines would be positioned in relation to existing policies and regulations. While some faculty are enthusiastic about the educational merits of this approach, many have expressed some unease about its goal of empowering graduate students to actively discuss these issues. Faculty engagement and collaboration are crucial elements in the success of ethics education approaches (Mitcham 2016, NAEM 2017). By sharing some of our successes and challenges in engaging faculty in discussions around research ethics and the ethical cultures of the labs we hope to develop strategies to overcome faculty concerns and resistance to acknowledging the ethical issues identified by the students who work in their labs.

ABSTRACT. This poster will address the moral issues that have arisen from the rise in migration of “unaccompanied” children (those without a parent or legal guardian) at the southern border crossings while utilizing the format of graphic novel "pictures and words" to convey the plight of these children who have been separated from their families and kept in detention centers. The southern border of the U.S. has been characterized in the media as an area "in crisis" because of the unprecedented number of children entering and attempting to enter the U.S., risking significant harm for a chance to come into the country. Many of the children, and families with children, are from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador and are fleeing gang violence or crushing poverty, among other reasons. The need for consistent and humane treatment of immigrants is a pressing issue, especially considering the political rhetoric and thinly-veiled racism currently pervasive in discussions of immigration on the national level. The poster attempts to demonstrate how the “pictures and words” format can be used to illustrate this humanitarian border crisis.

ABSTRACT. Advances in psychology reveal that we typically make decisions in virtue of the way options are presented, what is referred to as ‘choice architecture’. Choice architecture strongly influences our decisions because we tend to react to a particular option differently depending on how it is presented. This claim is supported by studies which suggest that we often make irrational choices due to the interplay between choice architecture and systematic errors in reasoning—cognitive biases. Based on this data, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein came up with the idea of a nudge. In their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2009), they define a nudge as a small change in the choice architecture that steers people towards certain choices without coercion. Nudges have been widely used to influence people’s behavior in both the public and private sector. Central to the debate on nudging is the question of whether it is morally permissible to intentionally nudge other people. Thaler and Sunstein argue that this can be the case. They offer a libertarian paternalistic criteria for the permissibility of nudges. That is, in order for a nudge to be morally permissible, it must be (i) liberty-preserving, (ii) easily avoidable, and (iii) aimed towards welfare. This criteria, however, does not morally differentiates between different types of nudges. Instead, it treats all nudges as morally equivalent. In this paper, I differentiate between type-1 nudges and type-2 nudges according to the thinking processes each involves. Having done this, I motivate an objection to type-1 nudges that has as its main worry that manipulation is typically seen as morally problematic, and that type-1 nudges do not appear to be relevantly different than standard manipulation cases. After evaluating the objection, I conclude that it is unsuccessful. Even though the objection fails, its evaluation raises a challenge for Libertarian Paternalism. That is, that the libertarian paternalistic criteria is insufficient for a nudge to be morally permissible. Thus, something needs to change. At the end of the paper, I suggest a possible revision of the criteria that advances the literature on the permissibility of nudges.

ABSTRACT. Human history is littered with dark chapters in which entire demographics have been denigrated by the ruling class. Over time, many injustices have been acknowledged and attempts to rectify these situations have been made. However, we have yet to rectify our treatment of non-human animals. This is incongruent with our desire to view ourselves as a species that values justice and ethical behavior. Thus, it is obvious that changes ought to be made. The first of many steps will be to elevate non-human animals to the moral status of human beings.

In this essay, I will explore some of the justifications that have been used to maintain an anthropocentric worldview. I will also look into possible objections to the idea that non-human animals should share in the same moral status as human beings. By opening with a thought experiment, I take away the veil of preconceived notions surrounding humans and their non-human counterparts, opting instead for a simpler examination of what has historically been an exploitative alpha-beta dynamic.

ABSTRACT. Worldwide, menstruation (“having a period”) affects 52% of the female population and 26% of the total population (House et al. 2013). Most research on menstrual hygiene focuses on women’s lack of access to clean water and basic sanitary supplies in developing countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Based on internet discussions however, it is apparent that menstrual hygiene is also a pressing issue in the United States.

Because of economic or social factors, menstruation significantly contributes to school absences among girls and young women, and access to menstrual products can improve school attendance (Tjon-A-Ten et al. 2011). This observation extends to female college students, who may suffer academically when the unpredictable arrival of their period leads to their missing class, bodily discomfort, or the necessity to leave campus to acquire menstrual products.

At a four-year private university, one might expect all menstruators to be capable of buying and carrying necessary pads and tampons. In preparation for expanding the availability of period products campus-wide, The Period Project sought to assess whether lack of access to menstrual products on is a problem on our campus, and if so, the extent of the issue.

In Fall 2019, we distributed paper and online questionnaires at various health-related events on campus. Women students were the primary target group, but all members of the university community were welcome to participate. The survey included questions such as: “Has your period caused you to miss school or work while at SMU?” and “If caught without period products at SMU, what would you do?”. As of September 25th 2019, over 380 members of the university had completed the survey. Preliminary analysis of the responses indicates that over 70% of respondents have unexpectedly started their period on campus and over 30% of respondents have missed school or work due to their period.

This presentation will discuss the origins, motivation, and goals of The Period Project, the results of the Fall 2019 survey, and how plans to improve access to menstrual products on campus is an issue of justice, sexual equality, and access to academic success.

ABSTRACT. Thought experiments are tools used by philosophers to consider the nature and implications of a set of beliefs or circumstances. In ethics, thought experiments are useful in determining what kinds of actions ought to be considered in difficult situations that require response, such as choosing whose lives should be prioritized when many are placed in danger. Despite their necessary role in determining ethical stances, thought experiments that remain purely hypothetical can impose some severe limitations. For example, an individual engaging in such a thought experiment could adopt a false sense of certainty in which they fail to consider that their actual actions in a presented scenario may not match the actions they anticipate taking. The interactive nature of video games allow for players to interact with them intellectually in more tangible ways than the mere supposition that underpins hypothetical thought experiments. Stefano Gualeni’s publication Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer makes the case for video games as an excellent space for players to begin to think philosophically about the implications of their actions during play. To expand upon the concepts explored by Gualeni, I created a video game with the explicit purpose to engage the player in a virtual thought experiment and lead them to consider an ethical framework. Veil Quest is an educational game that I created to introduce its players to the “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment as it is conceived by philosopher John Rawls. Through interacting with the mechanics of the game, players face consequences of either adopting or rejecting Rawls’ notion of fairness, and have the opportunity to complete the game with different philosophical approaches. Veil Quest demonstrates that videogames are practical and relevant tools for teaching philosophical and ethical ideas. The tendency for video game players to occupy the perspectives of their avatars provides an excellent method by which to combat the false sense of certainty that could impede the effectiveness of thought experiments that are presented in a purely hypothetical manner.

ABSTRACT. A week-long summer day camp emphasizes character building, attitude, morals, and perspective. It uses a curriculum centered on philosophy through lessons from well-known children’s storybooks. Participants in the camp are children in grades 2-5. Piaget (1981) proposed that moral reasoning does not emerge until around the time a child enters the Concrete Operational stage (7-11 years) of cognitive development. At that time, concepts of rules, accidents and clumsiness develop along with concepts of lying and punishment and justice. It’s not until this time of development do children develop autonomous thoughts that lead them to an understanding of the difference between a lie and “kidding”, and how the consequences of behavior are not arbitrary, but, rather, related to the behavior itself, and that intention must be considered when evaluating a behavior as “good” or “bad”. Piaget postulates that there are mental structures that determine how data and new information are perceived. If the new data make sense to the existing mental structure, then the new information is incorporated into the structure (accommodation in Piaget’s terms). The process of accommodation allows for minor changes in the thought process. How does one make use of new information to leap from heterononomous moral thinking to autonomous moral thinking, even within a cognitive developmental stage? When information is received from the outside world which is too far away from the mental structure to be accommodated but makes enough sense that rejecting it is difficult, then the person is in a state of disequilibrium. In this model, the students are given firsthand experience, a moral story, with an attempt to cause some disequilibration. The teacher then leads discussions either with individuals or in groups to introduce terms and to help accommodate the data and thus aid equilibration. The present study in based on Piagetian theory of moral development. It is not well defined as to what type of curriculum may be suited for such instruction. Can a curriculum consisting of moral dilemmas and discussion in a day-camp setting be effective in doing so? This is a follow-up study evaluating such a curriculum in this setting.

ABSTRACT. Is the claim that “God’s existence is unknowable” a valid premise for a religious belief? This paper seeks to argue that “determined agnostheism”, a specific version of agnosticism that claims the existence of God unknowable, is an inadequate assertion. “Determined agnostheism” is a logically conceivable proposition that many individuals assert as a religious belief, yet, due to its claim that knowledge on God’s existence is ultimately unfathomable, its originating premise eliminates it from religious discussions. While questions in social philosophy such as gender and race theory are on the rise in contemporary society, questions concerning the transcendent have yet to be revived. Previous philosophers of religion such as Richard Dawkins have expressed dissatisfaction with the “wishy-washy” tendencies of agnosticism, but none have gone as far as to prove its argument as incoherent. In order to accomplish this goal, an analytic approach that focuses on an explicit use of definitions, premises, and conclusion is implemented. The paper defines basic terms such as belief, doubt, and religion. These definitions are fundamentally rooted in action. A belief entails an action, a doubt implies no action, and a religious belief requires an action towards transcendence. These complex definitions are made more simple with relatable analogies, using beliefs we have about bananas. Next, agnosticism is explicitly defined. After exploring the etymology of agnosticism, a new term is introduced to refer specifically to the lack of knowledge on God, coined “determined agnostheism”. This version of agnosticism is evaluated as a religious belief using the process of logical deduction, implementing modus tollens. Lastly, the use of the label of “agnostic” as a cogent religious belief is debunked. To provide relevance for claiming the “agnostic” belief invalid when it comes to questions on God, harmful effects to those holding the “determined agnostheistic” position are reviewed. Invalidating the premise for “determined agnostheism” will allow individuals and philosophers to hold dialogue regarding the religious belief on God’s existence without relying upon the agnostic position.