In Defense of Affirmative Action

Affirmative action refers to positive steps taken to hire persons from groups previously and presently discriminated against. Considerable evidence indicates that this discrimination is intractable and cannot be eliminated by the enforcement of laws. Numerical goals and quotas are justified if and only if they are necessary to overcome the discriminatory effects that could not otherwise be eliminated with reasonable efficiency. Many past as well as present policies are justified in this way.     

农村健康保障制度与反贫困

从我国农村健康保障现实出发,认为建立农村健康保障制度是反贫困的迫切要求和重要组成部分,并提出了一些政策建议,如树立公共健康投资理念、政府职能转变与市场机制结合等.     

中国大学生对艾滋病知识的了解以及对艾滋病患者的反应

本研究区分艾滋病知识的两个不同侧面: 对艾滋病的误解和对艾滋病的正确认识, 并第一次在中国探讨这两个不同侧面的知识对艾滋病患者的认知、情感、行为反应的不同预测作用。119名(31男, 88女)来自上海、132名(59男, 73女) 来自广州的大学生参加了本调查。结果发现被调查的大学生: 1) 普遍对艾滋病存在误解, 即认为艾滋病可以通过日常的一般接触传染, 并且, 这种误解和对艾滋病的正确认识相互独立; 2) 都表达了对艾滋病患者的厌恶情感、与艾滋病患者接触的不舒服感; 3) 尽管如此, 但都不支持对艾滋病患者采取强制措施, 也不认为艾滋病患者感染艾滋病是他们自己的责任。研究还发现, 和来自广州的大学生相比, 来自上海的大学生对艾滋病有着更多的了解, 对艾滋病患者有着更少的负性情感、更少的消极态度、他们也更少地把感染责任归结到患者本身。特别有趣的是, 本研究发现, 对艾滋病患者的负性反应具有显著预测能力的是对艾滋病患者的误解而不是正确认识, 即误解越多, 负性反应越多。这些发现提示, 中国未来的艾滋病防治工作应该继续大力加强对艾滋病相关知识的宣传教育, 不仅要让人们知道艾滋病是通过什么途径传染的, 还要特别消除他们对艾滋病的许多误解, 从而减少或消除对艾滋病患者的许多歧视性反应, 营造一个良好的艾滋病防治环境; 同时, 中国的艾滋病防治还应该注意地区差异, 不同地区的防治力度和采取的策略应该和各地的实际疫情相适应。     

Effects of norms and norm-violations on inhibition and instigation of aggression

It was hypothesized that in a competitive interaction in which an opponent first used threats and fines a) subjects would use the highest level of coercion that could be justified by the available norms, b) subjects would be inhibited by a norm that justified using only low levels of coercion, but c) when the opponent used a magnitude of coercion which exceeded the norm, subjects would also violate the norm and retaliate with an equally high magnitude of coercion, and d) subjects would use the maximum levels of coercion when engaging in a competitive game without norms. These hypotheses were examined in a 3 × 2 factorial experiment in which the amount of coercion allowable by a norm (Low Norm, High Norm, and No Information) and the level of coercion (Low or High) were manipulated. As predicted, aggressive reactions by subjects were inhibited when the provoker conformed to a low norm by using a low level of coercion. On the other hand, subjects retaliated by using a high level of coercion when the level of coercion used by a provoker violated the norm. Subjects who could justify their behavior by the availability of a high punitive norm tended to use all of the coercive power available to them even when the provoker used a low level of coercion. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

The ethics activities of the World Medical Association

Since its formation in 1947, the World Medical Association (WMA) has been a leading voice in international medical ethics. The WMA’s principal ethics activity over the years has been policy development on a wide variety of issues in medical research, medical practice and health care delivery. With the establishment of a dedicated Ethics Unit in 2003, the WMA’s ethics activities have intensified in the areas of liaison, outreach and product development. Initial priorities for the Ethics Unit have been the review of paragraph 30 of the Declaration of Helsinki, the expansion of the Ethics Unit section of the WMA website and the development of an ethics manual for medical students everywhere. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “The Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 23–24 April, 2004.     

Elliott’s Ethics of Expertise Proposal and Application: A Dangerous Precedent

In a recent paper in Science and Engineering Ethics (SEE) Elliott proposed an ethics of expertise, providing its theoretical foundation along with its application in a case study devoted to the topic of hormesis. The application is based on a commentary in the journal Nature, and it includes assertions of ethical breaches. Elliott concludes that the authors of the commentary failed to promote the informed consent of decision makers by not providing representative information about alternative frequency estimates of hormesis in the literature, thereby hindering the capacity of the scientific community to promote informed consent relating to chemical regulation. This paper argues that Elliott should have incorporated due process into his system of evaluation. His argument is also seriously deficient technically, in that it misinterprets the toxicological issues, misrepresents the scientific literature with respect to the frequency of hormesis, and incorrectly assesses the extent to which the Nature paper revealed opposing/alternative views on hormesis. Given the seriousness of assertions of noncompliance to ethical norms, there must be procedures to protect those whose ethics were called into question, to fairly evaluate the technical justification for an assertion, and to enable corrections in the event of errors. If a journal is willing to publish assertions that individuals acted in an ethically questionable way, it should be guided by a documented code of ethics and meet a standard of responsibility far greater than normal peer-review processes for papers that do not entail such ethical judgments.     

Gender differences in burnout: A meta-analysis

The literature on male-female differences in burnout has produced inconsistent results regarding the strength and direction of this relationship. Lack of clarity on gender differences in organizationally relevant phenomena, such as work burnout, frequently generates ungrounded speculations that may (mis)inform organizational decisions. To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between gender and burnout using 409 effect sizes from 183 studies. Results challenge the commonly help belief that female employees are more likely to experience burnout than male employees, revealing instead that women are slightly more emotionally exhausted than men (δ = .10), while men are somewhat more depersonalized than women (δ = −.19). Although these effects are small, they are practically noteworthy when translated into a percent overlap statistic. Moderator analyses further revealed some intriguing nuances to the general trends, such as larger gender differences in the USA compared to the EU. In contrast, gender differences did not vary significantly in male-typed vs. female-typed occupations. Our analyses also suggest discontinuation of the use of overall burnout measures because they are highly consistent with the emotional exhaustion dimension of burnout only.