Conflict Of Duties Research Articles

Nuclear Safety Regulators' Effective Independence: The Case for a New Approach

The thesis of this article is twofold: nuclear safety regulators too often lack effective independence from external influences and the best way to address this is to adopt a new organizational framework whereby nuclear safety regulators are hived off from other regulatory roles and are endowed with essential features of independence and autonomy to fulfill their safety mandates. I argue that a properly organized, well-funded, and fiercely independent safety regulator will mitigate points for potential conflict of duties, minimize the likelihood of agency capture, and, importantly, engender greater public confidence that nuclear safety regulators are properly acting in the public interest and fulfilling their safety mandates. Regulatory failures in the civilian nuclear energy sector are examined and structural and organizational challenges to nuclear safety regulators’ independence highlighted. Finally, an alternative regulatory model is proposed with the aim of creating conditions for nuclear regulators’ greater independence and safety-focus.

Cross-domain authorization management model based on two-tier role mapping

With regard to the singleness of the role establishment method in the traditional cross-domain authorization management models, and the problems such as implicit promotion of privilege and the separation of duties conflict, a new cross-domain authorization management model based on two-tier role mapping was proposed. The two-tier role architecture met the practical needs of role establishment and management. On this basis, unidirectional role mapping can avoid the role mapping rings. By introducing attribute and condition, dynamic adjustment of permissions was realized. The model was formalized by dynamic description logic, including concepts, relations and management actions. In the end, the security of the model was analyzed.

CRELIER: SOBRE KANT Y LOS DILEMAS MORALES

El artículo plantea dudas sobre la interpretación que Crelier hace de la ética kantiana en relación con los conflictos de deberes o dilemas. Argumentamos que, a pesar de las declaraciones de Crelier en sentido contrario, él no logra articular una interpretación de la ética de Kant en la que los dilemas morales sean admisibles. En la interpretación de Crelier, sostenemos, los dilemas que son admisibles son sólo aparentes o epistémicos. Pero no queda cabida para aquellos dilemas en los que ninguno de los deberes es, objetivamente, superior a otro deber en conflicto.

Photojournalist on the Edge: Reactions to Kevin Carter's Sudan Famine Photo

This study explores the ethical dilemma photojournalists face when professional duty conflicts with the normative ethics of the reading public. The study investigates the public's and photojournalists' perceptions of appropriate reactions to the circumstances surrounding Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a collapsed Sudanese girl as a vulture awaits her death. The study used an online survey to measure the perceptions of appropriate reactions. Both readers and journalists respondents perceived Carter's photograph of a Sudanese girl suffering from starvation as an accurate documentation of an important social issue. Furthermore, most agreed that the picture was newsworthy and accepted the professional journalistic ethical rationale for making the photograph. The majority indicated that they would have made the photo themselves under similar circumstances, but the readers said that would have done more to help the girl than Carter did.

Editor's Introduction

James Childress's “Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?” first appeared in Soundings in 1970. The article was one of Childress's first in the area of bioethics. As it turned out, the piece served as a kind of springboard for an outstanding contribution. In subsequent years, Childress produced numerous publications, perhaps the best known his coauthored book with Tom Beauchamp (Principles of Biomedical Ethics). Now in its seventh edition, that work became a standard point of reference for scholars working in the field.One of the reasons for continuing interest in Childress's work in this area, as in other areas, of ethics has to do with his distinct approach. One may speak about this in terms of moral theory, in connection with which his approach—one I have described elsewhere as a kind of “pluralistic deontology”—depicts practical reasoning in terms of deliberating about the fit between norms and particular contexts when the latter indicates that one cannot honor all of the former. One may also speak about a vision of the moral life in which conflicts of duty are not only possible but play an important role in the development of character. In “Who Shall Live?” the problem set by the fact that some forms of medical care are in short supply, or are simply not available in equal measure to all who are in need, is analyzed in relation to various conceptions of justice. The idea is to evaluate various proposals regarding the allocation or regulation of resources, in an attempt to move toward policies that, while imperfect, may nevertheless be deemed responsible.The articles collected here dwell on these and other aspects of Childress's 1970 article, as well as on such questions as the impact of his proposals on medical practice and the relationship of the argument to his ongoing project. With respect to Soundings, one of the more noteworthy features of the work has to do with the way literary references are woven together with philosophical, religious, and policy perspectives. In this, Childress's work was and is truly multidisciplinary, in the spirit of this journal's stated aim “to publish articles that open disciplines to each other, and [to look] for readers who sense in such openings some prospect for greater coherence and amplitude in public discourse.”The authors featured in this volume (as well as the editor) are all students of Childress. Their reflections on his work may serve as an invitation to others to respond to a Soundings article and an ongoing program of scholarship that may justly be described as strong and rich.

Modernism and Secularization: Towards a Reconciliation of Religious Freedom and National Security in the Realization of Peace in Nigeria

This paper examines religious violence in some Northern parts of Nigeria and its effects on national security. It argues that Modern religiously motivated violence has affected the balance between individual religious liberty and national security in this country. The paper attributes this to modernism and its feature of secularization particularly as it displaces some religious values such as love, peace, concern for others, the fear of God and so on. The paper underscores the need for peace in Nigeria and for government to address the conflicting duties of allowing people to exercise their religious freedom and maintaining national security. It draws on W.D Ross’s prima facie and actual duties to argue that when duties conflict, there is need to arrive at a substantive duty after a fully considered deliberation. Unfortunately, one cannot be allowed without it having a negative effect on the other. In order to avoid a situation whereby attempts at resolving conflicting duties on the part of government degenerates into a more intense violent conflict, there is need to reconcile religious freedom and national security. The paper concludes by stressing that since religious freedom and national security are crucial elements in the functioning of the society, there is need for Nigerian government to reconcile both without one necessarily affecting the other in a negative sense; this will give room for peaceful co-existence in this country. Key words: Violence; Peace; Security; Secularization; Modernism; Religion

Lawyers' Business: Conflicts of Duties Arising from Lawyers' Business Models

In the last decade a revolution in legal practice management has seen many jurisdictions allow incorporation of legal practices. Still others are debating it, including the EU (where adoption of incorporation seems likely) and the USA (where there is resistance to the concept). Following an overview of reasons for incorporation and incorporation options, this paper will examine conflicts of interest and other ethical challenges that arise out of incorporation of legal practices, review limited statistical information on incorporated legal practice, and propose some responses to the ethical challenges of incorporation.

Ethical Decision Making in Situations of Self-neglect and Squalor among Older People

Current approaches to professional ethics emphasise the importance of upholding the ethical duties of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice in practice. All are prima facie duties, meaning that they must be respected on their own and, if the duties conflict, it is assumed that the dilemma can be resolved through rational decision making. There are, however, a number of limitations to this approach to professional ethics. This paper explores these limitations through an empirical study that examined the ethical dilemmas facing 24 professionals in their work with older people who were self-neglecting or living in squalor in Sydney, Australia. The research uncovered that two groups of professionals interpreted autonomy in different ways. Furthermore, when faced with difficult ethical dilemmas, participants agreed that the most satisfactory responses involved strategies that closely mirrored elements of alternative approaches to ethics, particularly the ethics of care and virtue ethics. The findings point to the relevance of a pluralistic approach to ethics in professional practice.

Why universal welfare rights are impossible and what it means

Cranston argued that scarcity makes universal welfare rights impossible. After showing that this argument cannot be avoided by denying scarcity, I consider four challenges to the argument which accept the possibility of conflicts between the duties implied by rights. The first denies the agglomeration principle; the second embraces conflicts of duties; the third affirms the violability of all rights-based duties; and the fourth denies that duties to compensate are overriding. I argue that all four challenges to the scarcity argument are unsuccessful. I then discuss Eddy’s recent challenge, which makes welfare rights context dependent, but I argue that this also fails because it makes rights unknowable. I conclude that the scarcity argument, restated in the light of the discussion, shows that universal welfare rights, as ordinarily understood, are impossible and I explain the philosophical and practical significance of this conclusion.

Confidence and conflicts of duty in surgery

Confidence and conflicts of duty in surgery

Confidence and conflicts of duty in surgery

This paper offers an exploration of the right to confidentiality, considering the moral importance of private information. It is shown that the legitimate value that individuals derive from confidentiality stems from the public interest. It is re-assuring, therefore, that public interest arguments must be made to justify breaches of confidentiality. The General Medical Council's guidance gives very high importance to duties to maintain confidences, but also rightly acknowledges that, at times, there are more important duties that must be met. Nevertheless, this potential conflict of obligations may place the surgeon in difficult clinical situations, and examples of these are described, together with suggestions for resolution.

A contemporary parable on Good and Evil: James Bond as moral compass

The latest Bond film, ‘Quantum of Solace’, was released in the autumn of 2008 on the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth. He and his literary hero, James Bond, have continued to enjoy an enduring popularity over six decades in our contemporary culture. This paper explores possible reasons for this phenomenon, and argues the hypothesis that Fleming depicted Bond intentionally as a moral compass, embodying a conscious psychological attitude with which to make moral choices and to confront conflicts of duty. Bond, a modern day St. George, slays dragons that expose the contour of modern evil and that are personified by villains who reflect Fleming’s (1962) list of ‘Seven Deadlier Sins’ for the modern era. The paper examines the pivotal sin, accidie, the loss of passion or joy for life through the lens of Fleming’s novel ‘You Only Live Twice’ (1964). James Bond’s personal grief from the loss of his murdered wife precipitates a spiritual and moral dilemma. Should he succumb to his own accidie, despair and suicidal thoughts and become evil (i.e. remain regressed in a primitive state of unconsciousness) like his arch-enemy, Blofeld? Or does he grieve and kill (007 – the right to kill the seven deadlier sins) the despair and accidie personified in his Shadow, Blofeld? The paper also proposes that Bond’s life is a projection of the archetypal image of the hero’s journey. We review the psychological Jungian perspective on moral and ethical conscience in relation to good and evil, and consider Bond’s struggle to own and integrate his shadow self as a reflection of the individual and collective contemporary moral problem facing humanity. Finally, we explore Bond as a cultural expression of shifting perspectives and attitudes to gender image, masculinity and the archetypal male.

On Necessity as a Defence to Crime: Possibilities, Problems and the Limits of Justification and Excuse

The article reviews recent developments in England in the law of necessity as a defence to crime and calls for its further extension. It argues that the defence of necessity presents the criminal law with difficult questions of competing values and the ordering of harms. English law has taken a nuanced position on the respective roles of the courts and the legislature in the ordering of harms, although the development of the law has been pragmatic rather than coherently theorised. The law has granted necessity some scope as an exculpatory principle in the law of general defences, but it has also respected the primacy of the legislature as the legitimate arbiter of many of the competitions of value that necessity throws up. The recognition of necessity has not been in the form of a single unified defence of that name. Rather it has taken the form of a number of defences, based on a principle of necessity, but with different nomenclature and different rationales. This approach to necessity is defended as right in terms of principle and policy. Any further development of necessity as a general defence should be restricted to two contexts, namely those of emergencies, and of conflicts of duty, where a danger of death or serious injury is present.

Deontic logics for prioritized imperatives

When a conflict of duties arises, a resolution is often sought by use of an ordering of priority or importance. This paper examines how such a conflict resolution works, compares mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature, and gives preference to one developed by Brewka and Nebel. I distinguish between two cases - that some conflicts may remain unresolved, and that a priority ordering can be determined that resolves all - and provide semantics and axiomatic systems for accordingly defined dyadic deontic operators.

Good teachers: substainable models

Dr Azer (February 2005, JRSM1) lists the qualities of a good teacher but is less persuasive on how these can be developed and sustained. In the UK, for example, teaching is just one of seven duties of a doctor. Other duties are to provide good clinical care, maintain good working relationships with patients and colleagues and maintain high standards of probity.2 What if one duty conflicts with another—for example, what if you are called to a patient or to a team meeting in the middle of a tutorial? There are no right or wrong answers but there is much to be said for involving patients in the education of medical students. This can reduce the workload for ourselves. In one study, students who had been taught pelvic examination by specially trained laywomen showed better skills than students taught in the conventional way.3 Similarly, patients trained in arthritis education can teach musculoskeletal examination skills.4 Perhaps more importantly, such patient-educators can encourage medical students to realize the impact of chronic arthritis on daily life.4 Colleagues from other disciplines can also be recruited, to increase the resources and support available, though time is needed to surmount the traditional barriers and provide an integrated programme.5

Surgical teaching: how should neurosurgeons handle the conflict of duty to today's patients with the duty to tomorrow's?

The author examines the problem of tension in neurosurgical teaching between the duty to train residents by providing various levels of unsupervised surgery and the duty to patient care. The duty to train the residents also translates into ensuring the provision of good care for patients of tomorrow by producing competent surgeons. The author contends that both duties can be fulfilled simultaneously, but the surgical tension inherent in this situation must not be ignored or taken for granted.

World Justice, Global Politics and Nation States: Three Ethico-Political Problems

This paper identifies three sets of problems of a specific ethico-political type, generated by the interrelationship between ethics and politics in the areas of world justice and global politics. One instance in which this interrelationship is tested is that of the conflict of duties and values as it appears in the particular domain of the relations amongst sovereign nation states as well as between them and other social groups. Following the general Introduction, the main body of the paper contains the following three sections. (1) Without elaborating on the detailed mechanics of Kant's theory of perpetual peace, Section II discusses criticisms against the Kantian version of world peace in the context of which the first problem is encountered. The problem identified here is the ambiguity as to whether the establishment of a federated kind of peaceful co-existence between sovereign nations depends on the moral improvement of mankind or whether it is the other way round--i.e. whether ethical progress is a necessary presupposition or, rather, a consequence of political peace. That is, what is here identified as worrying is that the direction of dependence is not clear in such a proposal. Furthermore, such an approach, when applied to certain cases of inter-state differences, yields a rather alarming result as to the de-politicization of national states (Section II.2). (2) Yet such a type of international federalism requires a certain, peculiar, kind of legal enforcement of order without recourse to a supra state. So a re-examination of the notion of a legal order in general is needed. Given these requirements, Section III moves on to discuss moral conflict from the standpoint of relativism as it appears in the ethical and in the legal spheres. The second of our problems, identified in this section, is that, before discussing world justice we must first acknowledge the special relation and asymmetry between ethical standards and legal rules required by such a world order. (3) Finally, Section IV asks whether, given the above two problems, it is possible to envisage theoretically the logical possibility of moral conflict-resolution by postulating unchanging and encompassing super-norms of conduct. These special norms, if possible, would be able to direct action unequivocally when confronted with ethical or other dilemmas of duties (involving equally valid but conflicting demands among sovereign nations). This is the third problem. The Conclusion offers an evaluation of the whole discussion. These three ethico-political problems are shown to be interrelated. The overall thrust of the discussion is that it points to a number of philosophical difficulties in understanding the changing role of national states in a globalized political, economic and cultural environment. Accordingly, such difficulties have repercussions for any moral criticism of issues of world justice and global politics. I must make clear at the outset, though, that the discussion does not concern international relations theories per se.

Ethics in community psychiatry.

The aim of this paper is to clarify the ethical challenges resulting from new models of community psychiatry and to examine practical approaches aimed at meeting them. Review of the literature and observations both as clinician and medical director of community services. Assertive community treatment presents ethical dilemmas relating to privacy, confidentiality, 'coercion' and conflicts of duty to the patient versus others, including carers and the wider community. Their acuity is influenced by the context in which services are provided, especially community fears of the consequences of care in the community for the severely mentally ill. Approaches to resolving ethical problems include increasing patient involvement in their care, clarifying the grounds for'paternalistic' interventions, and re-examining grounds for acting to reduce the risk of harm to others. The ethical dilemmas are not new, but they present in sufficiently different guises to warrant reconsideration in their new context. There has been a reluctance to face them, but if community psychiatric practice is to survive, it must rest on a sound ethical base.

Specification of contractual obligations in formal business communication

Formal business communication is a process-oriented (vs. document-oriented) environment for digital interoorganizational business transactions. They improve efficiency and effectiveness of business communications and often provide strategic advantages. Thanks to the current advances in information and telecommunications technologies, the development of formal business communication systems plays one of the key roles in the establishment of digital commerce, or virtual organizational business transaction platform. This paper proposes a logic of relativized deontic modalities as a component of digital commerce systems. The logic of relativized deontic modalities provides syntactic and semantic treatment for such notions of duty in the context of formal business communications. Also addressed are the practical issue of conflicts of duties and their resolution based on defeasibility reasoning, and the dynamic aspect of contractual obligations including delegation of duties and assignment of rights. Finally, we suggest augmentation of the CASE/Open-EDI system with the proposed logic of contractual obligations.

Teaching ethics: The utility of the CPA code.

Abstract Teaching professional ethics can take two very different forms, reflecting different fundamental assumptions about ethical rules, and leading to different problem-solving strategies in professional life. In this article I outline and contrast the two approaches, which I call the overriding principle approach and the moral dilemma approach. The first reifies ethical principles and underpins them with rationales drawn from moral philosophy. The second sees principles as templates of default options, which may or may not fit the facts of the case and the context in which decision must be made. In the moral dilemma approach, for instance, there is always some circumstance in which following particular moral rule would produce the wrong result. The CPA Code of Ethics has different advantages and disadvantages for teaching professional ethics depending on one's fundamental approach. Although its rhetoric and its ordering of rules seems to reflect the overriding principle approach, I argue that the Code is actually more relevant to the moral dilemma approach.There are two basic approaches to teaching ethics. This article presents these approaches and argues that they are based on fundamentally different ways of thinking about ethical dilemmas. I hope to show that the CPA Code of Ethics, including its associated decision-making model, has different advantages and disadvantages depending on which of the two approaches one adopts.How one teaches ethics depends upon the position one takes in the debate about whether there are any real ethical dilemmas or not. Most moral systems are based on the notion that there are no true ethical dilemmas. This position has been argued by philosophers as divergent as Aristotle (1985a), Aquinas (1954), Mill (1884), and Kant (e.g., a conflict of duties and obligations is inconceivable -- obligationes non colliduntur. (Kant, 1964, p. 24). Whatever their differences, these philosophers share the belief that it is possible to apply priority order to set of rules so that, when the rules are applied correctly, they completely resolve any ethical problem -- they leave no moral residue. In this framework, the mistaken belief that there are genuine dilemmas results from the fact that we have not learned the right principles to apply to case, and/or we have not learned to apply principles in appropriate priority order. I refer to this as the overriding principle approach because of its assumption that any apparent dilemma can be resolved by knowing and applying some principle that overrides other rules.The counter argument is that there are, in fact, genuine dilemmas that arise from the relevance of two or more ethical principles that are incompatible. Although one principle may have to be favoured over the other(s) to resolve the problem at hand, that resolution leaves the decision maker feeling justifiably unsatisfied (Williams, 1965). I refer to this as the moral dilemma approach.If one takes the overriding principle approach to the teaching of ethics, the task is to find fundamental rule, or to establish priorities among rules, that will transform what seem to be ethical dilemmas into technical problems. If one takes the moral dilemma approach, the task is to find the best fit between competing principles and the interests of different parties. Attention is focussed on the context, in the belief that context can always create situation in which following any particular rule is, in some sense, the wrong thing to do.The Cache of ArmsTo contrast these ways of thinking about ethical problems, and the consequences for the teaching of professional ethics, I present an archetypal ethical dilemma from Plato's The Republic (1937a). A man is visited by his neighbour who is going on trip; the neighbour leaves cache of arms for safekeeping, It is understood that the man will return the arms to the neighbour when he returns and asks for them. …