Sociologists often ask why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do. I argue that sociology’s empirical research on morality relies, implicitly or explicitly, on unsophisticated and even obsolete ethical theories, and thus is based on inadequate conceptions of the ontology, epistemology, and semantics of morality. In this article I address the two main problems in the sociology of morality: (1) the problem of moral truth, and (2) the problem of value freedom. I identify two ideal–typical approaches. (...) While the Weberian paradigm rejects the concept of moral truth, the Durkheimian paradigm accepts it. By contrast, I argue that sociology should be metaphysically agnostic, yet in practice it should proceed as though there were no moral truths. The Weberians claim that the sociology of morality can and should be value free; the Durkheimians claim that it cannot and it should not. My argument is that, while it is true that factual statements presuppose value judgments, it does not follow that sociologists are moral philosophers in disguise. Finally, I contend that in order for sociology to improve its understanding of morality, better conceptual, epistemological, and methodological foundations are needed. (shrink)

The article presents an interpretation of certain aspects of John Dewey’s psychological works. The interpretation aims to show that Dewey’s framework speaks directly to certain problems that the discipline of psychology faces today. In particular the reflexive problem, the fact that psychology as an array of discursive practices has served to constitute forms of human subjectivity in Western cultures. Psychology has served to produce or transform its subject-matter. It is shown first that Dewey was aware of the reflexive problem, and (...) found that it needed to be addressed. Next, three concepts of Dewey’s psychology are drawn in: subjectivity, habit and morality. Dewey is interpreted as articulating what we today would call a practice-orientated approach to psychology, in which moral and practical reasoning is seen as a dimension of all knowledge and action. Subjectivity is understood as a function emerging with complex interaction. Finally, a Deweyan approach to how psychology and other social sciences can cope with, and make positive use of, the reflexive problem, is outlined. By acknowledging their existence in the world they study, i.e. by becoming moral sciences that realize their moral and political implications, the social sciences can become problem-solving instruments that serve to help create a democratic public, a community as an actual social idea. It is pointed out that Dewey had an attractive view both of psychology – the subject-matter and of Psychology – the discipline and its practices – and ventured on the rare attempt at explicating how they are connected in what he called Great Societies, what we today would call post- or late-modernity, and how Psychology can help to constitute Great Communities in which human beings might flourish. (shrink)

The year 2012, in one sense, marks the 40th Anniversary of our Society, for it was in 1972 that John Lachs suggested to some of his colleagues interested in American Philosophy that they consider starting a new organization. The following year, this "American Philosophy" group held a symposium on "Possibilities for American Philosophy" at the Western Philosophy Association meeting. At that time the group's name was changed to "Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy," and in 1974 the first independent (...) annual meeting of the Society was held at Vanderbilt University.1The Society's name has stimulated contention for various reasons, but reflecting on forty years of this group, I want to say "we have come a .. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from (...) the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries. (shrink)

Biologically, pain is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but is a communication mechanism designed to serve organismal ends. Pain for any given person at any given time should be evaluated on the basis of “success” (or not) in serving those purposes. Yet, the physiological, psychological, and cultural complexity of the experience makes moral consideration of pain complicated. This is especially the case with infants in pain. The competence of the infant as a “decision maker” cannot, of course, be assumed. Even (...) if the child “thinks” about pain, an epistemological barrier exists in that the child cannot clearly communicate about the pain experience. Furthermore, any expressions of pain from the child may be necessary for diagnosis. Just coercion criteria provide a means of evaluating when and to what extent pain in infants should be controlled under the authority of surrogate decision makers. (shrink)

A growing sense of the exhaustion of both liberalism and Marxism has fueled a revival of interest in civic republicanism among historians, political theorists, and social commentators. This turn is evaluated via an examination of the normative implications off. G. A. Pocock's account of civic republicanism. Arguing that what is at issue between liberals and republicans has been misunderstood by both sides in the debate, the author shows that the turn to republicanism fails to address the most vexing problems liberalism (...) confronts in the modern world, and that it is and has been compatible with much of what critics of liberalism dislike. He argues, further, that the civic republican view involves an instrumental attitude to outsiders that cannot be justified in today's world and has other unattractive dimensions of which too little account has been taken by defenders and detractors alike. (shrink)

How is one to set about the task of comparing capitalism and socialism in a systematic fashion? The contest between capitalism and socialism has many facets. It is both an intellectual debate about the relative merits of models of hypothetical social systems and a real and substantive historical struggle between two groups of states seen as representing capitalism and socialism. Perhaps the intellectual challenge to capitalism thrown down by Marxist thinkers and the “cold war” contest between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. (...) are such diverse phenomena that it is pointless and even misleading to try to treat them as part of a single problem. However, I believe that the dieoretical and historical aspects of the capitalism/socialism issue are directly related. I would argue that a full understanding of, say, the cold war is not possible without understanding the socialist critique of capitalism – and that a purely abstract comparison of capitalist and socialist models would fail to do justice to the historical and empirical essence of these two grand conceptual schemas. In Section I, I expand upon these arguments, seeking to convince Utopian socialists that they should not continue to rely upon invocations of a hypothetical future, but must come up with some empirical examples of what socialism is and how it works. After all, it is more than a hundred years since Marx and Engels railed against Utopian socialists in favor of socialist arguments based on empirical reality. This is not to say that Marx and Engels were crude empiricists, accepting “facts” at face value. (shrink)

In his impressive and wide?ranging new book, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that modern moral philosophy, at least within the Anglo?American tradition, . offers a ?cramped? view of morality. Taylor attributes this problem to three distinctive features of contemporary moral theory ? its commitment to procedural rather than substantive rationality, its preference for basic reasons rather than qualitative distinctions, and its belief in the priority of the right over the good. According to Taylor, the result of these features (...) is that contemporary moral theories cannot explain the nature of a worthwhile life, or the grounds for moral respect. Indeed, they render these questions unintelligible. I argue that Taylor has misunderstood the basic structure of most modern moral theory, which seeks to relocate, rather than suppress, these important questions. In particular, he fails to note the difference between general and specific conceptions of the good, between procedures for assessing the good and specific outcomes of that procedure, and between society's enforcement of morality and an individual's voluntary compliance with morality. Each of these distinctions plays an important role in contemporary moral theory. Once they are made explicit, it is clear that many contemporary theorists operate with a more sophisticated account of moral sources than Taylor attributes to them. (shrink)

In this essay, we demonstrate that the field of computer ethics shares many core similarities with two other areas of applied ethics, Academicians writing and teaching in the area of computer ethics, along with practitioners, must address ethical issues that are qualitatively similar in nature to those raised in medicine and business. In addition, as academic disciplines, these three fields also share some similar concerns. For example, all face the difficult challenge of maintaining a credible dialogue with diverse constituents such (...) as academicians of various disciplines, professionals, policymakers, and the general public, Given these similarities, the fields of bioethics and business ethics can serve as useful models for the development of computer ethics. (shrink)

This article discusses the ordinary, the existentialist, and the virtue‐ethics senses of the word ‘authenticity’. The term ‘authentic’ in ordinary usage suggests the idea of being ‘original’ or ‘faithful to an original’, and its application implies being true to what someone (or something) truly is. It is important to see, however, that the philosopher who put this technical term on the map in existentialism, Martin Heidegger, used the word to refer to the human capacity to be fully human, not to (...) being true to one's unique inner nature. Authenticity might also be thought of as a virtue, and interesting questions arise whether such a virtue should be regarded primarily as a personal or as a social virtue. (shrink)

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than (...) one’s own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference. (shrink)

As levels of trust decrease and the necessity for trust increase in our society, we are increasingly driven toward the untoward, even disastrous, outcomes of the prisoner's dilemma. Yet despite the growing evidence that (re)building conditions of trust is increasingly mandatory in our era, modern moral philosophy (by default) and the social sciences (implicitly) legitimize an instrumental rationality which is the root problem. The greatest danger is that as conditions of trust are rationalized away through the progressive institutionalization of an (...) instrumental rationality, we are driven towards the most virulent form of the prisoner's paradox — ethical relativism and its nihilistic consequences. (shrink)

Scholars theorize the effect of modernization on religious and familial institutions in a parallel way. Some argue that both are irreversibly in decline—as secularization and deinstitutionalization, respectively—while others argue that they have either merely changed or are in fact growing stronger. However, correctly interpreting institutional change depends not only on how one evaluates the empirical starts and endpoints but also on how one defines the domains under change themselves. In this paper, I examine these debates, detail the structural similarities in (...) their arguments, and outline a new analytical approach informed by recent work in institutional logics to better answer the definitional questions. Theorizing both institutions together and their parallel trajectories in modernity reveals unique insights about the scholarly discourse on modernization and is especially important given the unique influence of religion and family on one another as (seemingly) privatized spheres of social life. (shrink)

As founder of modern political economics and prominent theorist of the commercial society, Adam Smith’s importance is universally recognized. Little, however, has been done so far to develop Adam Smith’s virtue ethics in the context of modern business, characterized by digitalization. This article aims to rediscover Adam Smith’s virtue of prudence and its relevance for the “e-commercial society”: It presents a framework that considers the central place of prudence in the relationship between a prosperous e-commercial system and societal flourishing. In (...) Smith’s view of the commercial society, prudence enables people to develop habits of character related to industriousness, genuineness, spirit of sacrifice, and self-command, which help in the conduct of a prosperous business activity. This article translates Smith’s virtue of prudence into a language typical of consumers in the current e-commerce scenario, considering their development as persons and the contribution of their activities to the good of society. (shrink)

Much attention in the meaningful work literature has been devoted to calling as an orientation toward work characterized by a strong sense of purpose and a prosocial motivation beyond self-gain. Nonetheless, debate remains as to whether individuals change or maintain their calling, and especially whether they live their calling differently in different occupational stages. In this article, we respond to this conundrum through an analysis of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) occupation—substantiated by interviews with 57 CSR practitioners from Swedish international (...) companies who are living their calling. We demonstrate that social/commercial tensions affect these CSR practitioners, fueled by a divide between their social aspirations and the commercial goals, and prompt them to respond in a way that impacts how they construct the purpose of their work. Subsequently, we induce three stages of the CSR occupation—_early-, mid- and late-stage_—and conceptualize three types of purpose in each stage—_activistic_, _win–win_ and _corporate purpose_. By uncovering how and why CSR practitioners respond to social/commercial tensions and construct different types of purpose in each stage of the CSR occupation, we show that individuals can live the same calling in multiple ways. Hence, our article advances the meaningful work literature as well as studies of micro-CSR. (shrink)

De moderne filosofie lijdt aan muziekvergetelheid. Opvallend is echter dat filosofen, wanneer ze toch aandacht schenken aan muziek, hun aandacht bij voorkeur op één bepaald genre richten, namelijk de opera. Filosofen zoals Søren Kierkegaard en Friedrich Nietzsche lieten hun gedachten over Don Giovanni, Parsifal en Carmen gaan, terwijl omgekeerd de filosofie van Arthur Schopenhauer de opera heeft beïnvloed via Wagner. Diens werk lijkt zich op het snijpunt van het grensverkeer tussen moderne filosofie en moderne muziek te bevinden. Het was zijn (...) ambitie de menselijke existentie en de menselijke geschiedenis in één panoramisch oeuvre te vatten, vanaf het primordiale begin tot en met de dramatische finale die ophanden leek: een catastrofale apotheose die een geheel nieuwe toekomst mogelijk zou maken. Dat is althans de verhaallijn van zijn meesterwerk Der Ring des Nibelungen. Aan het slot van Götterdämmerung lijkt zich een algehele verwoesting te hebben voltrokken: ‘Everything is destroyed and there is an enigmatic kind of hovering over the scene of destruction’ (Badiou 2010, p. 106), een ambivalente stemming van hoop en destructie zette Wagner op muziek. Voor Wagner is dan ook een hoofdrol in deze studie weggelegd: voor zijn muziektheoretische geschriften (waarin hij over een ‘muziek van de toekomst’ filosofeerde), maar meer nog voor de muzikale totaalkunstwerken die hij daadwerkelijk componeerde. (shrink)

Sociologists of religion have recently focused on the growth of religious individualism in Western societies. Whether seen as a new religious trend or as a cultural correlate to the general weakening of civic organizations in the contemporary era, it is often presented as the growing tendency in religious life. It is also frequently presented in a positive light. This article explores a different alternative. Based on the work of Herbert Marcuse, it asks whether religious individualism heightens or undercuts the possibility (...) of opposition to the status quo. Marcuse’s underlying argument implies that when religion becomes a lifestyle choice, it becomes just another consumer good—one that encourages a one-dimensional “happy consciousness” that lacks the depth to support true social critique. In this view, religious individualism undercuts human emancipation. (shrink)

Cross-cultural dialogue between the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy and the classical pragmatist tradition in American philosophy can help educators to clarify aims for greater ecological responsiveness in moral education. This dialogue can contribute to meeting an urgent practical need to cultivate ecological imagination, and an equally practical need to make theoretical sense of the way in which ecological perception becomes relevant to moral deliberation. The first section of this chapter explores relational thinking in the Kyoto School and American (...) pragmatism to help develop, in the second section, a concept of ecological imagination. A fine-tuned ecological imagination is a capacity we already count on in our best environmental writers, educators, scientists, and policy analysts. Moral deliberation enlists imagination of a specifically ecological sort when the imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals.” The final section draws from the foregoing to clarify some appropriate aims for contemporary moral education. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue about the relational networks in which our finite lives are embedded, a finely aware ecological imagination can make the deliberations of the coming generation more trustworthy. (shrink)

This paper draws a distinction between ‘right MacIntyreans’ who are relatively optimistic that MacIntyre’s vision of ethics can be realised in capitalist society, and ‘left MacIntyreans’ who are sceptical about this possibility, and aims to show that the ‘left MacIntyrean’ position is a promising perspective available to business ethicists. It does so by arguing for a distinction between ‘community-focused’ practices and ‘excellence-focused’ practices. The latter concept fulfils the promise of practices to provide us with an understanding of the best work (...) for humankind and highlights the affinities between MacIntyre’s concept of a practice and Marx’s conception of good work as free, creative activity. The paper concludes with a suggestion that we reflect on the best forms of work so that we can strive to ensure the very best activities, those most consonant with our flourishing, one day become available to all. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration om Joseph T. O’Connell’s work on socio‐cultural integration, this pa‐ per connects the notion of ‘deep equality’ with two broad lessons that can be taken om O’Connell’s approach that pertain to the study of religious diversity in contemporary life. The rst is the recognition of the amorphous nature of religious identity, and the second is the necessity to search for models of socio‐cultural integration in the face of di erence. These lessons are valuable in providing an alternative discourse (...) of diversity that moves away om problematisation to collaboration. Słowa kluczowe: ; ; ; ; ; ; ;;;. (shrink)

Ethics position theory (EPT) maintains that individuals’ personal moral philosophies influence their judgments, actions, and emotions in ethically intense situations. The theory, when describing these moral viewpoints, stresses two dimensions: idealism (concern for benign outcomes) and relativism (skepticism with regards to inviolate moral principles). Variations in idealism and relativism across countries were examined via a meta-analysis of studies that assessed these two aspects of moral thought using the ethics position questionnaire (EPQ; Forsyth, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology39, 175–184, 1980). (...) This review identified 139 samples drawn from 29 different countries, for a total sample of 30,230 respondents, and concluded that (a) levels of idealism and relativism vary across regions of the world in predictable ways; (b) an exceptionist ethic is more common in Western countries, subjectivism and situationism in Eastern countries, and absolutism and situationism in Middle Eastern countries; and (c) a nation’s ethics position predicted that country’s location on previously documented cultural dimensions, such as individualism and avoidance of uncertainty (Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, 1980). Limitations in these methods and concerns about the validity of these cross-cultural conclusions are noted, as are suggestions for further research using the EPQ. (shrink)

… power is never uni dimensional; it is exercised not only as a mode of domination, but also as an act of resistance or even as an expression of a creative mode of cultural and social production outside the immediate force of domination.The point is important in that the behavior expressed by subordinate groups cannot be reduced to a study of domination or resistance.Clearly, in the behavior of subordinate groups there are moments of cultural and creative expression that are informed (...) by a different logic, whether it be existential, religious, or otherwise.Our faith is ultimately in individuals and their potentialities.In saying this, I do not mean what is sometimes called individualism as opposed to association.I mean rather an individuality that operates in and through voluntary associations.If our outward scene is one of externally imposed organization, behind and beneath there is working the force of liberated individualities, experimenting in their own ways to find and realize their own ends.The testimony of history is that in the end such a force, however scattered and inchoate, ultimately prevails over all set institutionalized forms, however firmly established the latter may be. (shrink)

Part of the debate on cost containment in healthcare systems may be characterized as applied political philosophy One might say that the current debate between competing theories of justice that started with Rawls'A Theory of Justicein 1971 has acquired a small sister debate in healthcare philosophy Major participants in the debate on social justice have become an important source of inspiration for bioethicists interested in a just distribution of healthcare resources. Thus Rawls'A Theory of Justicehas been remodeled for healthcare philosophy (...) by Norman Daniels. Nozick's libertarian manifestoAnarchy, State, and Utopiahas been used for bioethical purposes by H.T. Engelhardt. The books of Daniel Callahan evidently belong to a family of communitarian theories, though Callahan cannot be said to follow one or another communitarian thinker (be it Christopher Lasch, Alisdair Maclntyre, or Amitai Etzioni) in particular. In the next two sections of this article I will give a very brief sketch of the debate on social justice in political philosophy and then discuss the sister debate on social justice in healthcare. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

In a 2013 article, David Gauthier noted upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Morals by Agreement that his contractarian approach to morality had found a niche among ‘some of those who remain unpersuaded by either Kantianism or utilitarianism’. In this article I will focus on Pareto optimization and I will argue that the Gauthier contract, even in spite of the article’s revisions, is still less useful for consultation purposes than Gauthier is assuming. To highlight the conceptual distance that (...) I think separates the Gauthier contract from real-world circumstances—a separation that is greater than Gauthier supposes—I will focus on the problem of ‘civic defection’. The point is not for us to repudiate as such the deliverances of the Gauthier model, but simply to use caution in our deployment of the model, and, in order to access the full extent of the model’s offerings, to resist the temptation to deploy it in the service of purposes which it is not capable of accomplishing. (shrink)

This paper begins by describing recent controversies over cross-contamination of crops in the United States and European Union. The EU and US are both applying the principle of freedom of cropping to resolve these conflicts, which is based on an individualistic philosophy. However, despite the EU and the US starting with the principle of freedom of cropping they have very dissimilar regulatory regimes for coexistence. These contradictory policies based upon the same principle are creating different sets of winners and losers. (...) In the US the organic industry claims the system of coexistence is unfair and in the EU the biotech industry claims the system is unfair. It seems that states, despites claims to neutrality and freedom of choice, are prejudicing one system of agriculture over another in resolutions to the conflict over cross contamination. In this paper I will argue that if states cannot remain neutral in coexistence policies, there are conditional reasons for favoring the organic industry over the biotech industry in coexistence policies based in communitarian moral philosophy. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In the study of organ and tissue transplantation, the focus tends to be on donation. But where there is “giving,” there is also “getting:” receiving help. Altruism, helping behavior, and the exchange of benefits have received extensive attention from social psychological researchers. The gift exchange described by anthropologist Marcel Mauss provides a framework for reviewing this social psychological research on altruism and exchange and applying it to transplantation. An overall conclusion is that altruistic donation is not so ethically or clinically (...) problematic, while receiving help has a complex psychosocial context that needs to be acknowledged and given more attention. (shrink)

This essay critically explores resources and reasons for the study of culture in religious ethics, paying special attention to rhetorics and genres that provide an ethics of ordinary life. I begin by exploring a work in cultural anthropology that poses important questions for comparative and cultural inquiry in an age alert to "otherness," asymmetries of power, the end of value-neutrality in the humanities, and the formation of identity. I deepen my argument by making a foundational case for the importance of (...) culture as a topic of normative analysis through a discussion of the emotions as cultural artifacts. To illustrate how cultural analysis can inform religious ethics, I turn to works by Wayne Meeks, Margaret Trawick, and Charles Taylor. I conclude by sketching some implications of a "cultural turn" for future work in religious ethics. (shrink)

Cultural models of health, illness, and moral reasoning are receiving increasing attention in bioethics scholarship. Drawing upon research tools from medical and cultural anthropology, numerous researchers explore cultural variations in attitudes toward truth telling, informed consent, pain relief, and planning for end-of-life care. However, culture should not simply be equated with ethnicity. Rather, the concept of culture can serve as an heuristic device at various levels of analysis. In addition to considering how participation in particular ethnic groups and religious traditions (...) can shape moral reasoning, bioethicists need to consider processes of socialization into professional cultures, organizational cultures, national civic culture, and transnational culture. From the local world of the community clinic or oncology unit to the transnational workings of human rights agencies, attentiveness to the concept of culture can illuminate how patients, family members, and health care providers interpret illness, healing, and moral obligations. (shrink)

Traditional education draws on a received vision of the good life to guide its educational efforts. But rich traditions have multiple visions of the good life. Educators who aspire to openness as well as rootedness seek canonical stories that raise for discussion these multiple visions. Such discussions negotiate a relationship with outside, majority culture, but also foster rich internal discussion on the meaning of life. They allow for the growth of tradition in the light of changing reality, as well as (...) its preservation. As an illustration, the paper considers an ancient Jewish religious tale as a means of ‘pulling students up short’ and thereby making actual and vivid within the curriculum issues concerning the good life and the nature of tolerance. The discussion raises questions concerning communitarianism, liberalism and religious education, as well as considering possibilities of autonomy in conditions of pluralism. (shrink)

Ethical behavior — the conscious attempt to act in accordance with an individually-owned morality — is the product of an advanced stage of the maturing process. Three models of ethical growth derived from research in human development are applied to issues of business ethics.

An examination of leading textbooks suggests the predominance of a principle-based model in the teaching of business ethics. The model assumes that by teaching students the rudiments of ethical reasoning and ethical theory, we can hope to create rational, independent, autonomous managers who will apply such theory to the many quandary situations of the corporate world. This paper challenges these assumptions by asking the following questions: 1. Is the acquisition of principle-based ethical theory unproblematic? 2. What is the transferability of (...) classroom learning to the business context? 3. Is it appropriate to consider complementary models in the teaching of business ethics? The last question is approached from the perspective of virtues-based ethics, from the insights of feminist ethics, and from a culturally grounded orientation to moral values and norms. (shrink)

This article is a chronological narrative analysis of two local newspapers' coverage of a controwsial community issue over a 4 year period. The analysis places the newspapers' coverage in the context of social responsibility theory and argues that even the smallest local newspapers have an ethical responsibility not only to uphold basic precepts of good journalism, such as balance, fairness, and accuracy, but to make an extra effort to provide socially responsible coverage that gives voice to multiple perspectives in their (...) communities. (shrink)

Service-learning has received a great deal of attention in the management education literature over the past decade, as a method by which students can acquire moral and civic values as well as gain academic knowledge and practice real-world skills. Scholars focus on student and community impact, curricular design, and rationale. However, the educational environment (“context”) in which service-learning occurs has been given less attention, although experienced educators know that the classroom is hardly a vacuum and that students learn a great (...) deal from the non-curricular aspects of their educational experience. Moral values in particular are conveyed by what is not said. Given this, I argue that the contexts in which service-learning takes place are as important as the activity itself. Three perspectives on context will be described and assessed: the “hidden” curriculum, the educational atmosphere, and the university’s orientation towards social responsibility. (shrink)