Psychological theory and research in ethical decision making and ethical professional practice are presently hampered by a failure to take appropriate account of an extensive background in moral philosophy. As a result, attempts to develop models of ethical decision making are left vulnerable to a number of criticisms: that they neglect the problems of meta-ethics and the variety of meta-ethical perspectives; that they fail clearly and consistently to differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive accounts; that they leave unexplicated the theoretical assumptions (...) derived from the underlying moral theories; and that they fail to accommodate the complexity and comprehensiveness of the processes involved in the making and implementing of ethical decisions. Many of these problems also have implications for the methodological domain. This paper offers an analysis of the difficulties, and makes a number of recommendations for future theory, research and practical applications, including: the need for training in moral philosophy; clarification of the status of Professional Codes in decisional models; the development of theoretically comprehensive prescriptive models; and the testing of these models in ways that do justice to their dimensional scope and theoretical complexity. (shrink)

There are several challenges associated with traditional business ethics education. While case studies have been used extensively in ethics education, such use can be complemented by using Problem Based Learning (PBL). PBL represents a pedagogy employing more collaborative tools that involve students more extensively in the learning process. A well-designed teaching approach based on PBL can have significant positive impact on students’ learning. This paper supplies a representative teaching interaction based on PBL, and discusses the implications of its structure. Introducing (...) PBL is challenging and comes with significant costs as faculty members have to be trained, roles have to be exchanged, powers have to be relinquished, and learning materials have tobe written. We conclude that PBL is suitable for an ethics course as most ethical situations require introspection, reflection, discovery, and concern for other viewpoints, all of which can be facilitated in a PBL environment. (shrink)

Academic staff owe a duty of fidelity to uphold institutional standards of integrity. They also have their own values and conceptions of integrity as well as personal responsibilities and commitments. The question of how academic practitioners address or reconcile conflicting values and responsibilities has been underexplored in the literature. Before we can examine effectiveness of academic integrity strategies and develop best practices, we need to examine the breadth of integrity decisions. To this end we posited the academic integrity problem as (...) a set of seven dilemmas and presented them to post-secondary education staff (N = 80) located in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Asia. We asked the participants to recommend a solution to each dilemma. This yielded a modest sample of 498 themes across 30 categories. We expected the responses to fall on a binary scale where decisions either support the integrity or ignore it. However, the data suggests that academic integrity decisions are better suited to continuum where participants aim to reconcile personal and institutional obligations. We further argue that academic integrity decisions are predicated on personal experience and therefore pose a challenge for policy standardization and enforcement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for practice. (shrink)

Grady and colleagues (2008) have provided a major contribution to the field of bioethics, and their research should lend a significant hand to the oft-neglected ethics needs of professional nurses....