Ethical Claims Research Articles

Ethical decision making in fair trade companies

This paper reports on a study of ethical decision-making in a fair trade company. This can be seen to be a crucial arena for investigation since fair trade firms not only have a specific ethical mission in terms of helping growers out of poverty, but they tend to be perceived as (and are often marketed on the basis of) having an "ethical" image. Eschewing a straightforward test of extant ethical decision models, we adopt Thompson's proposal for a more contextualist understanding rooted in ethnographic data. Our findings suggest that the fair trade mission of the firm is experienced as an over-riding ethical claim, which is often invoked to justify potentially ethically questionable decisions. Moreover, decision precedents emerge which can mean that the decision process is bypassed or hurried through. Finally we provide evidence that the significance of these precedents, and indeed, even moral intensity itself, could be actively shaped and constructed by organization members to support different, even shifting, conceptions of what is a morally acceptable decision for a fair trade company to make.

Private Land Made (Too) Simple

To an unhealthy degree, law and economics writing about private land ownership has become detached from the natural world, in all its complexity and mystery, and from real people and the way they relate to land and to one another. Intentionally or otherwise, it has largely retreated into a theoretical world that includes only those features and elements about nature and people that scholars find useful. Economic models used to study this world are highly value laden: they display an individualistic if not libertarian political perspective; they largely ignore and hence devalue ecological connections; and they embrace a presentist, anthropocentric moral scheme that rejects, ab initio, the ethical claims of future generations and nonhuman life. Accentuating these political and cultural biases is the profound disconnection between most law-and-economics writing and the vast writing on land by students from other perspectives, including writing in the biological sciences, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. To move from the realm of simple economic models into the world of real land and real people is to see land degradation as a complex cultural phenomenon. The land declines because of the ways people use it, and people use as it they do for many nuanced, intertwined reasons. Some of these reasons are usefully portrayed with economic models, but others have more to do with perceptions, values, social relations, and institutional structures. In its inattentiveness to these considerations economic scholarship often embraces, and thus lends credence to, perceptions and value schemes that historians have catalogued as significant causes of land degradation. Rather than using simple hypotheticals about polluting smokestacks and wandering rabbits, economists should employ more complex conservation examples - such as the dying of the mussels in Illinois waterways, where lands are all privately owned, the market rules, and landowners are free to negotiate. To probe such problems, drawing upon the full range of relevant, noneconomic scholarship, is to see private lands and the challenge of landscape-scale conservation in a far different light.

The Politics of Difference vs the Ethics of Essentializing

Now that the intensity of the Culture Wars has abated, a humanities discourse about human nature that has been practically impossible to conduct in nonpartisan terms for the last 25 years or so can be revisited and reconstructed. In an attempt to revive that discourse, the following argument critiques the extreme postmodern position of ‘constructed humanity’ and offers an argument about the necessity and usefulness of a modest version of essentialism based on the ethical claim that respect for the Other can only be made with authority when it is based on an appeal to common humanity, not when it is based on an appeal to some ad hoc, abstract principle of Difference. Yet postmodern claims about the shaping pressures of language, history, culture, gender, race, ethnicity, and class play important roles in helping us understand how a common human nature gets mediated by cultural contexts. In the end the Humanities need the perspectives of both humanists and postmodernists to keep humanistic discourse about human nature rich and productive.

COMMENTARY ON NIND AND KELLETT 2002

Nind and Kellett have discussed Intensive Interaction in the context of a wider agenda based on valuing individuals with signi?cant intellectual disabilities and their inclusion in society. Specifically, they focus on incidental outcomes of the use of Intensive Interaction with respect to the reduction of stereotyped behaviour. They argue that Intensive Interaction does not set out to devalue the person by intentionally reducing stereotyped behaviour, claiming that such behaviour is the individual's choice. However, when stereotyped behaviour is shown to have been reduced, they argue that this is a desirable outcome. Their overall exposition is seriously marred by: (a) unsubstantiated and gratuitous ethical claims; (b) confusion over the relation between philosophical assumptions underpinning their approach and the evaluation of interventions; (c) a failure to relate the methods of evaluation employed to the overarching claims for Intensive Interaction; and (d) confusion over the evaluative methodology employed. It is suggested that if the authors are to maintain their value base and the technical approach developed, they require a radical shift away from conventional evaluation methodology and a distancing from applied behaviour analysis. Only in this way can they achieve a coherent statement regarding Intensive Interaction.

An attempt at sign-mediated communication theory

An attempt at sign-mediated communication theory

The (im)possibility of ethics in the information age

This paper is concerned with the possibility that the ethical claim of the other, that sense of being bound to the other, may becoming more and more difficult to experience as information technology increasingly mediates our social being. The paper will support the supposition of Don Caputo that obligation does not emanate from codes, imperatives or moral arguments. Rather it will argue that obligation takes hold of us from within disaster. Obligation, our being bound-to, finds us when we come face to a face in disaster. The paper will argue that electronic mediation is inducing a sense of hyperreality into our world (Baudrillard). It will argue that this hyperreality is making our ethical sensibility nebulous to the point that we are not coming face to face with our obligations. An analysis of the Baring bank disaster will be used to demonstrate the point. The paper will show that Nick Leeson was in a hyperreal world in which he was not able to come face to face with the victims of the disaster. The electronic hyperreal world of financial markets, where traders deal in abstract numbers, movements on the screen, made it possible for him to look over and past the faces and proper names of the victims; their claim became diffused in the numbers on the screen, not real cash only numbers, not real people with faces and proper names, just numbers. If this supposition seems tenable what are we to do? The paper argues that we do not need more codes, imperatives or moral arguments, as such. Rather we need to keep our lives at the resolution, of faces and proper names—if obligation happens this is where it is likely to be.

Ethical Immunity in Business: A Response to Two Arguments

In this paper I examine the claim that businesspersons have what might be called "ethical immunity" with respect to the duty not to deceive. According to this ethical immunity claim, businesspersons are exempt from the ordinary ethical prohibition against deception; and widespread business deception is therefore ethically permissible. I focus on two arguments for the claim. One of the arguments, which has been presented by Albert Carr, relies upon an analogy between business on the one hand, and games in which deception is permitted, on the other. The second argument is based upon the notion that exceptions to ethical duties may sometimes be justified on prudential grounds. In response to the arguments, I try to show that neither one provides strong support for the ethical immunity claim.

Troubling Ethics: A Rejoinder to Dillabough

my rejoinder to do three things: (1) point out inaccuracies or misunderstandings in her account of disability studies; (2) debate her on several points; and (3) in the end, respond to her key question of me in which she asks, To what end do we engage in this struggle and with what key issues in mind? Implied throughout my rejoinder is a dual position on ethics. Ethics are trouble and ethical debates cause trouble. As I suggested in my article, well-meaning, caring scholars struggle and disagree about ethical dilemmas and values, the foundational knowledge underpinning them, and how we should enact them. We must have ethical positions, but when we stake out an ethical claim, its problems immediately become evident to one's readers and listeners. Dillabough's response to my article is an example of just such a process. Ethics also need to be troubled. Their waters need to be stirred up. Their problems, risks, and inconsistencies need to be revealed, explored, and revised to create more useful and more liberatory consequences for people in schools. In my article, I attempted to trouble the ethics of critical and inclusive pedagogies. Dillabough further troubles pedagogy as well as my account of pedagogy.

Agonal Communities of Taste: Law and Community in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Transvaluation

The post-war years have seen the emergence of a broad consensus on Nietzsche as a political thinker. Most commentators are in agreement on his strength as a critic of modernity, as they are on his weakness as a constructive political thinker. While exposing the failure of our most progressive projects and institutions (liberalism, democracy, enlightenment, etc.) to furnish rational justifications for themselves, Nietzsche is unable to offer us viable alternatives or anything positive to build on, capitulating instead to a blind, irrational voluntarism. Nietzsche's "tyrannophilia" (Staten), his "politics of domination" (Warren), his "religion of power" as "totalitarian rule" (Grau): these are the refrains to which we have become accustomed. In what can be called the standard political reading of Nietzsche's thought, 1 three moments stand out: Nietzsche is first and foremost an autarkic individualist (Stern, MacIntyre), philosophically insensitive to the sphere of social relations and deaf to the ethical claims of community. In the wake of a total critique of reason as will to power, Nietzsche (secondly) abandons the claims of reason altogether, turning instead to aesthetic and archaic values such as the "Tragic," the "Dionysian" and the "Noble" (Habermas). Since, on his own terms, modernity is too decadent or depleted to sustain such values, he (thirdly) entrusts our salvation to a mighty act of will on the part of superhuman redeemers (e.g., the Übermensch, Dionysos) who are yet to come. In MacIntyre's words, "let will replace reason and let us make ourselves autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will." 2

Feminist Theory, Justice, and the Lure of the Human

n a series of recent essays, Martha C. Nussbaum (1999) has articulated a distinctive conception of that takes as its foundation a set of human capabilities that, she argues, should be respected and nurtured globally, in all nations and by all cultures. This conception of feminism, clearly the work of a scholar at home in multiple topographies, both disciplinary and geographical, combines, as she says, elements often thought to be in tension: it is internationalist, humanist, liberal, concerned with the social shaping of preferences and desire, and, finally, concerned with sympathetic understanding (Nussbaum 1999, 6). Nussbaum's recent articles thus understand feminism, a commitment to the political and social equality of women, in the context of a more encompassing theory of and commitment to global justice for all persons. In this sense--that is, in linking an analysis of gender inequality to an acknowledgment of other pervasive forms of oppression-racism, homophobia, economic exploitation, physical intimidation or abuse, political repression her liberal philosophical work takes up topics that are the subject of long-standing debates occurring within feminism and at the boundaries between feminism and other oppositional discourses, most notably poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and various forms of Marxism. These debates aim high. Through them, feminist scholars want, first, to acknowledge the complexities of a female subjectivity constituted amid shifting and irreconcilable discourses and practices without as a result denying female agency; second, to interrogate the totalizing work and violent exclusions historically effected by the use of the term woman while still insisting on its inestimable value for feminist critique; and, third, to ground feminist practice in an authentic recognition of the ethical claims

Grounded ethics: the empirical bases of normative judgements

Scientific naturalism--basing beliefs on empirical evidence--has now triumphed in every field of inquiry except moral philosophy. There it is still thought appropriate to cite otherworldly standards known by divine revelation or moral intuition. In Grounded Ethics Max Hocutt argues that, since there is no transcendent reality on which to base the claims of ethics, normative truth must be sought in the desires of individuals and the conventions of societies. Hocutt begins with an empiricist analysis of normative judgments. Following B.F. Skinner, he asserts that we call good what reinforces our desires, and that we call right or just what we desire to reinforce. Consequently, desire is the immediate measure of both goodness and justice. Acknowledging that goodness is relative to individual preferences, and justice is relative to social norms, Hocutt denies that goodness is a matter of personal opinion and that every society's institutions are as good as every other's. Instead, he says, the conduct of individuals and the customs of societies must ultimately be evaluated by how well they serve biologically based needs. These must be discovered empirically, because they cannot be known a priori. In support of this analysis, Hocutt challenges rationalist belief, that normative concepts cannot be defined in empirical terms because they are rooted in divine law or ideals of pure reason. Against this view, Hocutt argues that if the moral law exists only as an ideal, it is not binding in the same sense as the empirically known laws and moralities of actual societies. He also points out that rationalist intuitions are best understood as expressions of animal instinct, socially conditioned prejudice, and personal preference. In addition, he offers extensive critiques of major philosophers, both ancient and modern, who hold contrary views. All of this is meant to show that there is no escaping the empirical: A sensible ethics must be built on observable facts; it cannot be pulled from a vague but pious rationalist sky. Hocutt's demonstration of this thesis will interest philosophers, behavioral biologists, sociologists and ethicists.

From Community to Coalition

This article considers how to go beyond the polarities of individualism and communitarianism in the analysis of contemporary political cultures in a global era. It is argued that there is a need to ground analysis in a presumption of social networks and coalitions, rather than in the concept of recognition. Political cultures are always already riddled with complexity and cross-cutting relations with other political cultures, coalitions and alliances. Within the politics of recognition, the conventional operationalization of the concept of the ‘social’ via the concept of ‘community’ misleadingly narrows the analysis of key aspects of social relations. Rather, we should invoke a wider range of sociological concepts to capture the nature of the social including, among many others, coalition, network and reference groups. In particular, the selection of the ‘other’ against whom aspirational comparisons are made is a complex social process, much previously analysed by reference group theory. The contemporary framing of some political claims in reference to a socially constructed conception of the universal is an increasingly common strategy. The politics of recognition is shown to be subordinate to the politics of equality, when sociological analysis of contemporary political cultures, of how people actually do make ethical and political claims, is prioritized.

“A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger”: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid

Under apartheid, discussions of literary function and value in South African literature in English are refracted through an elaborate rhetoric that posits “urgency” as the necessary correlative and consequence of political commitment. My essay examines this “rhetoric of urgency”in the context of the overwhelmingly realist dominant of South African literary culture in English. I suggest that South African literary critics of both liberal and radical orientations have been unwitting partners in a commonly held instrumentalist concept of language. A clear regime of meaning may be discerned in literary studies in English which seeks to effect closure between the word and the world in order to safeguard the ethical claims of South African literary culture.

The Family Covenant and Genetic Testing

The physician-patient relationship has changed over the last several decades, requiring a systematic reevaluation of the competing demands of patients, physicians, and families. In the era of genetic testing, using a model of patient care known as the family covenant may prove effective in accounting for these demands. The family covenant articulates the roles of the physician, patient, and the family prior to genetic testing, as the participants consensually define them. The initial agreement defines the boundaries of autonomy and benefit for all participating family members. The physician may then serve as a facilitator in the relationship, working with all parties in resolving potential conflicts regarding genetic information. The family covenant promotes a fuller discussion of the competing ethical claims that may come to bear after genetic test results are received.

Ethics of Ambiguity and Irony: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty

This paper examines the relation or, more precisely, tension between postmodern deconstruction and ethics by elaborating upon the ethico-political dimensions of deconstructionism. It embarks on a critical assessment of postmodern discourse on ethics in view of its political implications by analyzing Jacques Derrida's and Richard Rorty's arguments with an assumption that their positions represent a certain “logic” in the postmodern discourse on ethics. Postmodern ethics is based on incredulity with regard to traditional metanarratives, and it defines ethics in terms of sensitivity or responsibility to “otherness” and difference. Its proponents believe that the negation of modern “metanarratives” opens a way to the Other which has been marginalized and suppressed both in thought and in social practice. Derrida and Rorty represent this position with their emphasis on the ethical nature of deconstruction and the need to elaborate new languages for ethics. Despite postmodern appeal to ethics of this sort, however, postmodern thinking shows its limits in dealing with most ethical-political matters in the contemporary world. The postmodern approach to ethics, being restricted within the perspective of the individual, does not provide any determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical claims or how to link the unconditional affirmation of emancipatory ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in determinate political terms. In the main, this paper contends that philosophical deconstruction and “responsibility to otherness” undermine each other in the public sphere.

Taking consumers seriously: Two concepts of consumer sovereignty

Governments, producers, and international free tradeorganizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) areincreasingly confronted with consumers who not only buy (or don'tbuy) goods, but also demand that those goods are producedconforming to certain ethical (often diverse) standards. Not onlysafety and health belong to these ethical ideals, but animalwelfare, environmental concerns, labor circumstances, and fairtrade. However, this phantom haunts the dusty world of social andpolitical philosophy as well. The new concept ``consumersovereignty'' bypasses the conceptual dichotomy of consumer andcitizen. According to the narrow liberal response to this newconstellation, with respect to food one should conceptualizeconsumer sovereignty as the right of the individual consumer toget information on food products and to make his or her ownchoice on the market of food products. In this conception, thereis a very strong emphasis on rules and principles with respect tothe autonomy of individuals. I argue that these narrow liberal concepts are not sufficient forappropriate public policy-making in democratic societies, andthat they only enable us to identify problems; they do not helpnon-experts (and experts, if it comes to that, as well) inweighing the different ethical claims. Besides, not onlyprinciples play a role in the outcome, but all kinds of ideals aswell, like roles, values, and norms. My principal argument isthat analysis or justification of norms or principles is notsufficient to get a synthesis or construction of ethicalsolutions: we need some value orientation to guide us inbalancing the different ethical claims by solving an ethicalproblem. Moreover, this balancing is something that requiressocial space and social time, i.e., public debates. With theconcept of public debates a whole new dimension enters ethicalanalysis, because the attention of ethicists shifts toformulating criteria of successful and rational public debates. However, in the broad liberal view these concepts aresupplemented with values, preferences, practices of care, andinvolvement. I argue firstly for a broadened perspective on foodas an integral part of life styles and not only as something thatpresents risks. That is the reason that food gets such intensiveattention from the public, which is summarized in the concept ofconsumer concerns. Secondly, I defend the argument that not only(rational) public debates, but intensive commitments of bothproducers and consumers in every link of the chain in so calledcare practices or consumer councils can enhance confidence in thefood production system and the way we extract our daily intakefrom nature.

The Death of a Child and the Birth of Practical Wisdom

This paper explores the notion of practical wisdom asan alternative to current formulations of criticalthinking. The practical realm is that ofill-structured problems that emerge from life aslived; it is a realm of legitimate uncertainty andambiguity that requires an ethical responsiveness orpractical wisdom. The death of a child is a case inpoint. The author identifies and examines threeaspects of practical wisdom – the ethical claims ofpartiality, a yielding responsiveness and the play ofthought – and juxtaposes them with aspects of criticalthinking. The work of Martha Nussbaum and RichardPaul are interwoven throughout the discussion. Theauthor concludes that the discourse of criticalthinking is in danger of lapsing into a form of moralescapism wherein all we are rationally responsible foris thinking correctly. Practical wisdom, on theother hand, recognizes that thinking is not simply anintellectual cognitive act of an individual but adance between the life of a child and the love of anelder, a conversation between what is and what couldbe, an openness to passionate sorrow and surprise, aplay between understanding and perception. As such,practical wisdom provides a more likely account ofliving in good faith with oneself and others.

New Deal for Young People: Towards an Ethical Employment Policy?

With the current focus on judging policy by its economic efficiency, the ethical basis of employment policy is suffering neglect. The article attempts to redress the balance by analysing the ethical claims of Labour's most important innovation in employment policy, New Deal for Young People. Three criteria for an ethical policy are proposed: that it is rights based; that it prioritizes increased well-being for disadvantaged individuals or groups; and that some cost trade-off is accepted as part of the policy. These criteria distinguish an ethically-based policy from a wholly instrumental efficiency-based policy. Analysis of its elements indicates that New Deal for Young People could be developed as a model for ethically-based employment policy. The implications of further developing such a model in the long term are considered. It is concluded that a crucial task for ethical employment policy will be to develop an institutionalized 'intermediate employment' sector without creating unsupportable economic costs.

The ethics of drug trials in less-developed countries

Tessa Tan Tones Edejer is a medical officer with the Global Programme on Eviderice at WHO Geneva, swlizerland Before this, she was based at the University of the Philiopines, Manila. She was trained though the international Clinical Epidemilogy Network. New types of drugs are continuously developed and marketed to meet the needs and expectations of patients, and for pharmaceutical firms to recoup investment costs and make profits. Before marketing of a new drug, many countries require registration with a central authority; requirements for registration vary greatly between developing countries. Some regulatory agencies require evidence of effectiveness; this ranges from proof of registration of the drug in the country of origin to randomised controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in the local population. There are many ethical concerns about the extent to which trials in the less developed world preserve the integrity of science, protect patients' welfare, and respect the authority of national regulatory agencies. RCTs done locally are usually organised by the branch offices of multinational pharmaceutical companies who contact principal investigators and provide administrative support. Depending on the expertise of the principal investigators, either they or the drug company will electronically enter data and undertake analysis and reporting. A report is then filed with the regulatory agency, and local authorities decide whether the drug can be marketed. RCTs provide the best evidence for effectiveness of treatment. But not all RCTs are well planned or well done. If the new drug is a product of a large multinational pharmaceutical firm, the protocol is sent by the mother office, together with forms for data collection and informed consent. The protocol may be the same as used for trials in large western markets with stringent requirements. All too often, however, there is substantial adaptation of the protocol with regard to sample size and, at times, even the informed consent form. The sample size gets trimmed down to the lowest number deemed feasible by local companies and acceptable by local regulatory authorities. This compromise sample-size is usually underpowered to detect a modest difference between the new drug and the one it is being compared with, and the locally obtained results need to be buttressed by evidence from other studies. In some cultures, informed consent is thought of as a formality, and explanations about the trial may be dispensed with entirely. Sometimes the consent form is shortened if it is felt that some of its contents might deter patients from agreeing to participate. Problems with both sample size and refusals to participate can potentially slow down recruitment and cause the company to miss deadlines for approval for registration and launching of the new drug. Because these types of studies are not initiated by researchers, principal investigators have to be invited to run the trials. They often are given an honorarium, based on the number of patients recruited. Investigators' trips to conferences are paid for, and after the trial, the principal investigators have the opportunity to present their results, both locally and internationally. Local “opinion leaders” are much sought after by pharmaceutical firms, and it is not unusual to find a few prominent practitioners running several trials simultaneously. Quality controls of trial conduct are done from two perspectives: the company, who usually employs its own clinical research associate, and the regulatory agency. A regulatory agency can exercise control over the quality of the process at different points: during approval of the protocol, monitoring of the trial, and approval of the completed study. A sufficient number of well-trained staff in regulatory agencies is needed to independently assure control. Such personnel is often not present in less developed countries. Currently, the requirement of regulatory agencies in less-developed countries for small stand-alone drug trials can be viewed as well-intentioned and consistent 'with their mandate of protecting the welfare of their population. However, by imposing this requirement, regulatory agencies may be naively serving the interests of pharmaceutical firms, by providing legitimate opportunities for premarketing promotion. The drive for international harmonisation of good clinical practice in clinical trials is laudable, more so if it can be reliably implemented in less-developed countries. But, intensive training of investigators, trial monitors, and regulatory-agency staff is needed. With trained individuals on-site, a subsequent effort to involve more developing countries in multicentre international phase III or IV trials can be legitimately advocated. These large trials would be more generalisable and would make valid and ethical claims for effectiveness of drugs in different populations and settings. And ultimately, it would be possible to use the same data for registration procedures in different countries. This article represents the personal views of the author and does not reflect those of her organisation.

Mortimer Adler, Paulo Freire, and Teaching Theology in a Democracy

In view of the current attention being given to “practices,” this paper argues that Mortimer Adler and Paulo Freire have developed pedagogical practices that are relevant for the task of teaching theology in a democracy. Emphasizing the connection between education and democratic life, both reject a facile relativism or pragmatism, on the one hand, and an uncritical adherence to either a traditionalist or revolutionary agenda, on the other. Indeed, both present their pedagogies not simply as a means for advocating certain types of religious and ethical practice (whether traditional or revolutionary) but as a means for critically examining those practices in light of the truth and justice – and for believers, the reality of God – they presuppose. This essay examines precisely how they do this and what their relevance might be for the teaching of theology in a democracy where the co‐existence of competing religious and ethical claims is a given.