Rhetoric,reasonableness and ethics: An essay on Perelman

The article deals with an interpretation of the work of Ch. Perelman. The author tries to determine the meaning of reasonableness in a hermeneutical and anthropological perspective. He then places the work of Perelman in the light of the theory of symbolic interactionism of G.H. Mead.     

"NOT ETHICS, NOT ETHICS ALONE, BUT THE HOLY"

While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kind of antidote to the sacred. The second part examines the various ways that holiness is manifest in ethicality. The key, I suggest, for properly understanding the link between ethical regard and sanctification revolves around an appreciation of Levinas's frequent appeal to the notion of straightforwardness (droiture). For Levinas, the complex relations that bind the self, Other, and God, involve essential conditions of rectitude and uprightness.     

精神卫生领域行使代理同意的伦理风险及其应对

在精神卫生领域,行使代理同意虽然获得了医学伦理的有力辩护,但同时也存在诸多伦理风险。精神卫生领域行使代理同意的伦理风险主要包括家长主义、至上主义和专制主义三大方面。它的形成与代理同意人性预设“扬善蔽恶”始源缺陷导致的“错位性解读”“非理性旁观”“非理性自信”以及“无原则纵容”等问题紧密相关。推广知情同意能力培训、建构代理同意承诺制、建立代理同意定期检查制是防范和抑制精神卫生领域代理同意伦理风险的针对性措施。

     

Students' Ethical Awareness and Conceptions of Research Ethics

The study focused on university students' understanding and conceptions of ethical issues in research. Domain-specific and domain-transcending measures were developed to gauge the students' awareness of ethical issues. Responses were obtained from 269 undergraduate and graduate students at a U.S. regional university. Participant withdrawal, the debriefing of research participants, the dissemination of findings, and giving credit to co-contributors were the most challenging ethical issues for the students. Ethical awareness was predicted by professional and organizational socialization, and perspective taking. Contextualization greatly improved the students' ability to recognize ethical issues. Simulations and role-taking are suggested as the means with which to teach students about the ethical issues perceived as challenging.     

Impact of Ethical Leadership on Organizational Safety Performance: The Mediating Role of Safety Culture and Safety Consciousness

We examined a largely ignored but imperative dimension of safety literature by testing the impact of ethical leadership style on organizational safety performance. We also tested dual mediating paths of safety culture and safety consciousness in the relationship between ethical leadership style and organizational safety consciousness. Data (N = 230) were collected from a large public sector telecom company in Pakistan. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the reliability and validity of the study scales and model fit. Preacher and Hayes’s (2008) macro of mediation was employed to test the direct and indirect paths proposed in the study. The findings suggest that ethical leadership has a positive impact on organizational safety performance. Partial mediating roles of safety culture and safety consciousness were also found between the dependent and independent variables. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Functional Psychopathy in Morally Relevant Business Decisions

Literature addressing organizational ethical behavior has focused intensely on cognitive moral development, and more recently the automatic and natural moral inclinations (i.e., moral intuitions). Research addressing the incapacity for moral reasoning, such as psychopathy, is rarely addressed in organizational behavior (Smith & Lilienfeld, 2013; Stevens, Deuling, & Armenakis, 2011). Our first aim is to develop a construct definition for functional psychopathy that is appropriate for organizational science and theoretically consistent with the extensive previous clinical and criminal research in this field. Second, we apply two versions of a scale not previously used in business research relative to moral judgments. This scale is a self-reported measure of functional psychopathy and is useful for its relationships with ethically relevant business decisions. Further, we examine which factors emerge as having the highest relationship with ethical decision making. Third, we seek to advance the usefulness of this construct by more precisely placing psychopathy within its nomological network. With these goals in mind, a combined sample of business school seniors (N = 418) participated in three studies. Findings indicate a significant influence of psychopathy over a range of ethically relevant business decisions, as well as negative correlations with factors of the Moral Approbation (Ryan & Riordan, 2000) and the Moral Awareness (Reynolds, 2006a) scales. We conclude with directions for future research and considerations for practice.     

The implications of situation and route familiarity for driver-pedestrian interaction at uncontrolled mid-block crosswalks

Most routine daily trips take place along the same route, a fact that previous studies have not investigated together with the repeated situation of conflicting with other road users. Consequently, our study addresses driver behaviour by separating the driving experience into three categories: (i) drivers unfamiliar with the route, (ii) those route-familiar, and (iii) situation-familiar drivers. The specific case of driver-pedestrian interaction at uncontrolled mid-block crosswalks is investigated. A multi-level factorial experiment including (i) crosswalk design (linear sidewalk and curb extension), (ii) driver familiarity, and (iii) pedestrian time gap acceptance (4, 6, and 8 s) was conducted using a driving simulator. Fifty-two participants were divided into four groups and stratified by age, gender, and driving experience. The minimum instantaneous time to collision, post-encroachment time, maximum car deceleration, and maximum car speed were all used as surrogate safety measures (SSM).Route-familiarity led to higher speed, while situation-familiarity positively affected driving behaviour making drivers more inclined to decrease their speed at circa 100 m before a crosswalk. The curb extension layout enhanced pedestrian safety and mitigated any adverse effects due to familiarity, with a particularly relevant impact on SSM at low accepted time gaps for pedestrians. Situation- and route-familiarity treatment protocols lead to different behaviours among drivers, indicating a clear need to account for these two familiarity levels in experiments on safety-related countermeasures.     

Teaching Ethical Decision Making: Helping Students Reconcile Personal and Professional Values

Because conflicts between personal and professional values can interfere with ethical decision making, a goal of counselor education must be helping students reconcile such conflicts. This article describes one counselor educator's experience teaching ethical decision making and the effects on student learning. Growth was observed in increased tolerance for ambiguity, awareness of how values influenced decision making, use of multiple factors in decision making, and emphasis on the welfare of clients. Implications for teaching and future research directions are discussed.     

A stitch in time saves nine: Behavioural decision-making explanations for time management problems

Time management problems such as choosing urgent instead of important tasks are prevalent but so far they lack a theoretical explanation. The authors argue that time management implies a choice about the use of time. Therefore rational choice theory as a normative theory of choice is relevant to time management, and so is behavioural decision-making research focusing on biases and heuristics that make people deviate from the prediction of rational choice theory. The authors show how these biases and heuristics lead to non-efficient time management. In particular, steep and hyperbolic time discounting is explained and its implications for time management as well as for time management training are presented. Several propositions about the importance of individual and situational variables are also put forward.     

What anorexic and bulimic patients have to tell: the analysis of patterns of unconscious conflict expressed in stories about everyday events

The development of European associations for counselling and psychotherapy raises questions about the challenge of producing pan-European statements of professional ethics. This article explores the range of ethical predispositions associated with different cultures to be found in Europe before examining how the European Association for Counselling and European Association for Psychotherapy have responded to this diversity. Recently produced ethical statements are examined in some detail. Both are found to be compatible with some of the culturally endorsed ethical predispositions to the exclusion of others. the article concludes by suggesting some of the issues that need to be considered in constructing a truly European ethic for counselling and psychotherapy.