Medical school oath-taking: the moral controversy

Professions typically formulate codes of ethics. Medical students are exposed to various codes and often are expected to recite some code or oath at their graduation. This article reports the findings of a study of one large medical class, asked upon entry to medical school and again at the beginning of their fourth term, which of 13 specified professional, religious, and secular codes of ethics they would turn to for moral guidance in their practice of medicine. The study finds great diversity in the students' choices and no clear pattern of change by their fourth term. Very few students chose the oath they would be asked to recite at their graduation. The article probes the problems this creates for school administrators and professors as well as students. It asks the implications for professional oath-taking at graduation and in the practice of the profession.     

What you don’t know won’t hurt me: Costly (but quiet) exit in dictator games

We used simple economic games to examine pro-social behavior and the lengths that people will take to avoid engaging in it. Over two studies, we found that about one-third of participants were willing to “exit” a $10 dictator game and take $9 instead. The exit option left the receiver nothing, but also ensured that the receiver never knew that a dictator game was to be played. Because most social utility models are defined over monetary outcomes, they cannot explain choosing the ($9, $0) exit outcome over the dominating $10 dictator game, since the game includes outcomes of ($10, $0) and ($9, $1). We also studied exiting using a “private” dictator game. In the private game, the receiver never knew about the game or from where any money was received. Gifts in this game were added innocuously to a payment for a separate task. Almost no dictators exited from the private game, indicating that receivers’ beliefs are the key factor in the decision to exit. When, as in the private game, the receivers’ beliefs and expectations cannot be manipulated by exit, exit is seldom taken. We conclude that giving often reflects a desire not to violate others’ expectations rather than a concern for others’ welfare per se. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding ethical decisions and for testing and modeling social preferences. An adequate specification of social preferences should include “psychological” payoffs that directly incorporate beliefs about actions into the utility function.     

Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements (lexical and syntactic) which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference.     

The development of collective remembering

This essay outlines a sociocultural, developmental approach to collective memory. This work is grounded in Halbwachs' (1950/1980) theory of collective memory and in recent prospective studies of collective remembering within families from early childhood through adolescence. The claim is that the basic process of collective remembering is present from the earliest conversations about the past between parents and children, but it is not until adolescence that collective memory is informed by family stories and by history. There are both positive and negative consequences of collective remembering as a function of the nature of the collective. In conclusion, researchers are urged to broaden their view of the collective in their studies of autobiographical and collective memory.     

Trust,social categories,and individuals: The case of gender

While the cooperate vs. defect choice in the prisoner's dilemma is not an appropriate paradigm for the study of trust and trusting behavior, the play vs. not play choiceis. We show that femalesas a category are more trusted to cooperate — by both male and female judges — than males. Yet neither male nor female judges use gender to predict cooperation from particular individuals (trust) or as a criterion for choosing to play (trusting behavior) when they have the option of not playing particular prisoner's dilemma games. Further, in our experimental context, female and male did not differ in their cooperation rates. We speculate (a) that subjects' generalized expectations are a response to gender-based role differences outside the laboratory, (b) that subjects' failure to make individual-by-individual discriminations by gender is a response to the fact that the experimental context made such natural-world roles irrelevant, and (c) that our findings about the irrelevance of genderper se in trusting relationships will be true for other social categoriesper se.The research reported in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation grant SES-9008157 to Orbell and Dawes; any opinions, conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Pamela Ferrara played an important role in administering all stages of the experiments; Jean Stockard gave us a helpful methodological and substantive critique; and Debbie Elvin, Tom Morikawa, Matthew Mulford, and Catherine Shatto each helped at several stages of the paper.     

Cyborg Identities and the Relational Web: Recasting 'Narrative Identity' in Moral and Political Theory

Current debates surrounding liberalism and communitarianism, modernity and postmodernity, ethical theory and narrative ethics fail to account for shifting foundations of personal identity in an increasingly computer-mediated era of human communication. This paper aims to examine some of the conceptual assumptions about identity and community which are being radically undermined by rapidly evolving information networks and are therefore in need of redefinition. Additionally, I argue for an expansion of the literary imagination to include virtual, coauthored fiction sites where exploration of personal identity will bear upon future ethical and political decision-making.     

Case vignette: to share or not to share

For years, the notion that researchers should share data freely with fellow scientists has been discussed widely. Some argue that this is especially true when the data are generated in federally funded projects. A recent provision in the reauthorization bill for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would ensconce this principle in law. NIH grantees would be required, on demand, to furnish their data to other researchers. According to the proposed legislation, research data would have to be preserved and made avilable for 3 years after the completion of a project, and for 5 years following publication of the results in a scientific journal. One objective, according to a congressional aide, would be to make it easier for scientists with dissenting views to obtain and reanalyze data collected with public funds. It would also facilitate publication of alternative analyses. Personal records and patent applications would be exempted, but other data from clinical, behavioral, or epidemiological research focused on the evaluation or efficacy of a drug, medical device, or treatment of any sort would be covered immediately. Is such mandatory sharing of data ethical and appropriate scholarship? Does it raise potential for abuse? Should colleagues be required to provide such access to data, whether or not federal support was used in its collection?