论公共行政管理的伦理基础——一个公共伦理分析视角

当代中国正处在以城市化为主导的社会转型的关键时期,社会出现了种种不协调,需要相应价值尺度来引导。行政管理本身不是最终目的,它是传达人民的需求与愿望,并保证这些需求和愿望能够通过国家控制反映出来。长期以来,行政管理学界高扬效率、忽视伦理的主题定位,在一定程度上阻碍了行政管理学研究向纵深领域的发展。公共行政管理从产生时起就与某种伦理价值观相联系;公共行政管理的主要伦理规范有公益至上、有害不为、慎用权力、社会责任、平等竞争、增进信任。这些规范为公共行政管理奠定了伦理基础。     

Probing the Time Course of Nonlinear Discriminations during Human Electrodermal Conditioning

Animal-based theories of Pavlovian conditioning propose that patterning discriminations are solved using unique cues or immediate configuring. Recent studies with humans, however, provided evidence that in positive and negative patterning two different rules are utilized. The present experiment was designed to provide further support for this proposal by tracking the time course of the allocation of cognitive resources. One group was trained in a positive patterning schedule (A−, B−, AB+) and a second in a negative patterning schedule (A+, B+, AB−). Electrodermal responses and secondary task probe reaction time were measured. In negative patterning, reaction times were slower during reinforced stimuli than during nonreinforced stimuli at both probe positions while there were no differences in positive patterning. These results support the assumption that negative patterning is solved using a rule that is more complex and requires more resources than does the rule employed to solve positive patterning.     

Professional Autonomy and the Normative Structure of Medical Practice

Professional autonomy is often described as a claim of professionalsthat has to serve primarily their own interests. However, it can also beseen as an element of a professional ideal that can function as astandard for professional, i.e. medical practice. This normativeunderstanding of the medical profession and professional autonomy facesthree threats today. 1) Internal erosion of professional autonomy due toa lack of internal quality control by the medical profession; 2)the increasing upward pressure on health care expenses that calls for ahealth care policy that could imply limitations for the professionalautonomy of physicians; 3) a distorted understanding of theprofession as being based on a formal type of knowledge and relatedtechnology, in which other normative dimensions of medical practice areneglected and which frustrates meaningful communication betweenphysicians and patients. To answer these threats a normative structureanalysis of medical practice is presented, that indicates whichprinciples and norms are constitutive for medical practice. It isconcluded that professional autonomy, normatively understood, should bemaintained to avoid the lure of the technological imperative and toprotect patients against third parties' pressure to undertreatment.However, this professional autonomy can only be maintained if members ofthe profession subject their activities and decisions to a criticalevaluation by other members of the profession and by patients and ifthey continue to critically reflect on the values that regulate today'smedicine.     

The morality of weapons research

I ask whether weapons research is ever justified. Weapons research is identified as the business of the engineer. It is argued that the engineer has responsibility for the uses to which the tools that he designs can be put, and that responsibility extends to the use of weapons. It is maintained that there are no inherently defensive weapons, and hence there is no such thing as ‘defensive’ weapons research. The issue then is what responsibilities as a professional the engineer has in regard to such research. An account is given to ground the injunction not to provide the means to harm as a duty for the engineers. This account is not, however, absolutist, and as such it allows justifiable exceptions. The answer to my question is thus not that weapons research is never justified but there must be a strong assurance that the results will only be used as a just means in a just cause.     

Semantic gender assignment regularities in German

Gender assignment relates to a native speaker's knowledge of the structure of the gender system of his/her language, allowing the speaker to select the appropriate gender for each noun. Whereas categorical assignment rules and exceptional gender assignment are well investigated, assignment regularities, i.e., tendencies in the gender distribution identified within the vocabulary of a language, are still controversial. The present study is an empirical contribution trying to shed light on the gender assignment system native German speakers have at their disposal. Participants presented with a category (e.g., predator) and a pair of gender-marked pseudo-words (e.g., der Trelle vs. die Stisse) preferentially selected the pseudo-word preceded by the gender-marked determiner "associated" with the category (e.g., masculine). This finding suggests that semantic regularities might be part of the gender assignment system of native speakers.     

Morally Relevant Features

This article summarizes the account of morality presented in Morality: Its Nature and Justification (Oxford, 1998), with emphasis on that aspect of morality that deals with justifying violations of the moral rules. Such justification requires a two-step procedure; the first is describing the situation using only morally relevant features. I list these features, noting how diverse they are, and describe their characteristics. The second step is estimating the consequences of publicly allowing a violation with the same morally relevant features, that is, allowing a violation when everyone knows that it is allowed to violate the rule in the same circumstances, and comparing this to the estimated consequences of not publicly allowing that kind of violation. I then explain why fully informed, impartial rational persons can sometimes disagree about whether a violation should be publicly allowed and note that such weakly justified violations are the controversial cases.     

A cautionary note on using internal cross validation to select the number of clusters

A highly popular method for examining the stability of a data clustering is to split the data into two parts, cluster the observations in Part A, assign the objects in Part B to their nearest centroid in Part A, and then independently cluster the Part B objects. One then examines how close the two partitions are (say, by the Rand measure). Another proposal is to split the data into k parts, and see how their centroids cluster. By means of synthetic data analyses, we demonstrate that these approaches fail to identify the appropriate number of clusters, particularly as sample size becomes large and the variables exhibit higher correlations.The authors express their thanks to the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Center, Wharton School, for support of this project.     

Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children

It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Núñez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this “deontic advantage” in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However, neither study has been replicated, and it is not clear from either study that preschoolers were showing the deontic advantage under the same conditions as adults. The current research investigated these issues. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate both Cummins’s and Harris and Núñez’s studies with 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 56), replicating the former with 4-year-olds and the latter with both 3- and 4-year-olds. Experiment 2 modified Cummins’s task to remove the contextual differences between conditions, making it more similar to adult tasks, finding that 4-year-olds (n = 16) show no evidence of the deontic advantage when no authority figure is present in the deontic condition, whereas both 7-year-olds (n = 16) and adults (n = 28) do. Experiment 3 removed the authority figure from the deontic condition in Harris and Núñez’s task, again finding that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28) show no evidence of the deontic advantage under these conditions. These results suggest that for preschoolers, the deontic advantage is reliant on particular contextual cues such as the presence of an authority figure, in the deontic condition. By 7 years of age, however, children are reasoning like adults and show evidence of the advantage when no such contextual cues are present.