Making the audience a key participant in the science communication process

The public communication of science and technology has become increasingly important over the last several decades. However, understanding the audience that receives this information remains the weak link in the science communication process. This essay provides a brief review of some of the issues involved, discusses results from an audience-based study, and suggests some strategies that both scientists and journalists can use to modify media coverage in ways that can help audiences better understand major public issues that involve science and technology. Carol L. Rogers is editor of the interdisciplinary journal Science Communication.     

Does an Appeal to the Common Good Justify Individual Sacrifices for Genomic Research?

In genomic research the ideal standard of free, informed, prior, and explicit consent is believed to restrict important research studies. For certain types of genomic research other forms of consent are therefore proposed which are ethically justified by an appeal to the common good. This notion is often used in a general sense and this forms a weak basis for the use of weaker forms of consent. Here we examine how the notion of the common good can be related to individual health, health care, and genomic research and we use this analysis to propose more precise criteria to justify forms of consent which diverge from the ideal standard.     

The University and the Moral Imperative of Fair Trade Coffee

This paper examines the relationship between the university and fair trade coffee campaigns in North America. In recent years, fair trade coffee sales internationally have increased substantially but have still not grown large enough to meet the needs of fair trade producers in the South. In consequence, fair trade activists have sought to expand the market by pressuring public institutions to adopt fair trade purchasing policies. In North America, the university has emerged as a central focus of fair trade coffee campaigns. Thus far, university administrators have been reluctant to support fair trade. This paper explores this reluctance and asserts that the university has a moral responsibility to support fair trade. However, it also argues that the potential exists for administrators to employ fair trade as an ethical fig leaf to mask the growing corporatization of the university under the weight of neoliberal reforms. This has become a common strategy of many neoliberal institutions in the North. Contrary to the assumptions of much of the emerging literature, it cannot be assumed that the impact of fair trade will necessarily be beneficial in the North unless activists work to ensure fair trade does not become employed as an ethical fig leaf.     

Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously. Arguing for an Institutional Turn. Introduction

Discussions of the relations between religions, society, politics, and the state in recent political philosophy are characterized, firstly, by a strong US American bias focusing on limitations of religious arguments in public debate. Even if the restriction or radical exclusion of religious reasons from public debate has recently been extensively criticized, secularist interpretations of liberal-democratic constitutions still prevail. Here it is argued that both strong secularism and weak or second order secularism are counterproductive for many reasons. Secondly, separationist interpretations of state-church relations are predominant, even if the severe wall of separation is criticized more often nowadays. Here it is argued that there are more and more interesting options than either separationism or accommodationism, that we should not exclusively focus at the constitutional relations between state and churches but address the full reciprocal relationship between society, culture, politics, nation, state and (organized) religions, and that we need more historical and comparative perspectives for the required institutionalist turn in political theory in order to overcome the obstacles inherent in predominant American political philosophy. The articles included in this volume are first, modest steps in this new direction.     

he Formation of Liberal Education in England and Scotland

The concept of the artes liberales originates in antiquity and was, especially in the Anglo-Saxon area and during the 17th and 18th centuries, remodelled into a socially, educationally, and politically modern educational concept. In this process, the progress within the empirical sciences and the formation of an early civil public are of the utmost importance. In the course of these transformations, the absolute force of church and state is called into question; educational concepts which have to be called modern emerge from it.     

The Space of Argumentation: Urban Design, Civic Discourse, and the Dream of the Good City

In this paper, I explore connections between two disciplines not typically linked: argumentation theory and urban design. I first trace historical ties between the art of reasoned discourse and the idea of civic virtue. I next analyze discourse norms implicit in three theories of urban design: Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), and Peter Katz's The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (1994). I then propose a set of settlement issues of potential interest to both urban designers and argumentation theorists: size, density, heterogeneity, publicity, security, and identity. I conclude by suggesting that the good city be seen as both a spatial and a discursive entity. From such a perspective, good public discourse is dependent, at least in part, on good public space; and good public space is defined, at least in part, as a context conducive to good public discourse.     

Sustainable development, engineering and multinational corporations: Ethical and public policy implications

This paper explores the concept of sustainable development and its ethical and public policy implications for engineering and multinational corporations. Sustainable development involves achieving objectives in three realms: ecological (sustainable scale), economic (efficient allocation) and social (just distribution). While movement toward a sustainable society is dependent upon satisfying all three objectives, questions of just distribution and other questions of equity are often left off the table or downplayed when engineers and corporate leaders consider sustainable development issues. Indeed, almost all the effort of engineers and engineering organizations on the issue of sustainable development has been focused on striking a balance between economic development and environmental protection. Similarly, corporate approaches rely on technological fixes to the challenges posed by sustainable development. While there have been some efforts aimed at incorporating environmental and social equity concepts into engineering codes of ethics, social concerns have been secondary to environmental issues. The incongruity between the ideal of sustainable development and the way in which it is typically characterized by the engineering and business communities has significant implications for engineering and public policy, engineering ethics, and the potential roles of engineers and multinational corporations as facilitators of a transition to a sustainable society. Presented at the Engineering Foundation Conference on “Ethics for Science and Engineering Based International Industries”, Durham, NC, USA, September 1997. An earlier version was presented at and appeared in the proceedings of the “1997 International Symposium on Technology and Society”, IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, June 1997. The author, an Assistant Prolessor of Multidisciplinary Studies, teaches in the Science, Technology and Society Program and is Director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program, a dual-degree program in engineering and humanities/social sciences.     

A durable recording and feedback system

A durable low-cost data-recording and feedback system is described. Data transcribed with a special pen onto a plastic sheet can be removed only with two solvents. These data can be displayed for feedback purposes without fear of destruction.     

Justice,instruction, and the good: The case for public education in Aristotle and Plato's Laws

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws.Part II: Sections IV–VII examine the arguments for the first of the two conclusions which Aristotle advances in VIII. 1, namely that education is important enough to merit the legislator's attention. It is shown, through a development of links between Politics V and the arguments of VIII. 1, that Aristotle's two arguments for this conclusion are calculated to appeal to two distinct subgroups within his intended audience, those who would be moved by a desire to promote the common good, and those who could only be counted on to desire the preservation of their own rule.     

Justice,instruction, and the good: The case for public education in Aristotle and Plato's Laws

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws. Part I: The paper opens with the question of why Aristotle would say that no one will doubt that education should be the concern of the legislator, and Sections I–III identify the nature of his enterprise in the Politics, the audience he wishes to address, the conclusions he seeks to establish in VIII. 1, and what public education would amount to for him. An important conclusion reached is that the first of Aristotle's two conclusions in VIII.1 has been routinely misidentified.