What does it look like when an organization tentatively steps away from an exclusively rules-based regime and begins to attend to both rules and principles? What insights and guidance can ethicists and ethical theory offer? This paper is a case study of an organization that has initiated such a transition. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has begun a turn toward the promotion of ethical principles and best practices by adding a “conceptual framework” to its existing Code of Professional (...) Conduct. This conceptual framework calls upon its members to intentionally increase their awareness of significant threats to their compliance with its rules of conduct and to establish safeguards to offset or eliminate those threats. To this end, each member is required to regard every questionable situation, circumstance, transaction or relationship by attempting to view it through the eyes of an imagined reasonable third party. This paper examines this protocol theoretically and practically. First, we frame this analysis within the principles and ethical concepts that inform the professional ethics of accountants. Second, we critique the AICPA’s long-standing rules-based approach to its Code. Third, we examine the new conceptual framework with a view toward its potential for the promotion of a more principles-based approach to the professional ethics of the accounting profession. Fourth, we give attention to the notion of the “reasonable and informed third party,” which has been embedded in the new conceptual framework, and consider how two schools of thought—Adam Smith’s modernist “impartial spectator” concept and Emmanuel Lévinas’ postmodern phenomenology in regard to “the Other”—may offer theoretical support and clarity for this epistemic exercise. Finally, we point out several ways in which the AICPA’s commitment to its new conceptual framework could be strengthened and enhanced. (shrink)

This article argues that hope is of value in clinical ethics and that it can be important for clinicians to be sensitive to both the risks of false hope and the importance of retaining hope. However, this sensitivity requires an understanding of the complexity of hope and how it bears on different aspects of a well-functioning doctor-patient relationship. We discuss hopefulness and distinguish it from three different kinds of hope, or ‘hopes for’, and then relate these distinctions back to differing (...) accounts of autonomy. This analysis matters because it shows how an overly narrow view of the ethical obligations of a clinician to their patient, and autonomy, might lead to scenarios where patients regret the choices they make. (shrink)

Hope takes on a particularly important role in end of life situations. Sustaining hope can have considerable benefits for the quality of life and any prospect of a good death for the dying. However, it has proved difficult to adequately account for hope when dying, particularly in some of the more extreme end of life situations. Standard secular accounts of hope struggle to establish how the fostering of hope may be possible in such situations. This leads to a practical ethical (...) dilemma for those caring for the dying, the ‘paradox of hope’, whereby one can either help maintain the welfare of the dying by generating a misleading ‘false hope’ or maintain truthfulness and concede that hope is not possible. These two problems combine to leave individuals the prospect of dying in terrible circumstances facing only despair. To address this, I argue that we should look beyond standard intentional or dispositional accounts of hope in such cases and treat hope as a cluster concept. Rather than appeal to a unitary conception, what we precisely mean by ‘hope’ may therefore vary depending on the context of use. I outline an account of hope based on Marcel’s account of ‘absolute’ hope but offering an alternative, secular foundation based on solidarity that can explain how hope when dying in extreme circumstances is possible. Hence, where the more familiar accounts break-down in these circumstances, ‘hope talk’ may still be possible if it is seen as relying on this conception of hope. (shrink)