What should be taught in courses on social ethics?

The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept and the content of courses on “social ethics”. I will present a dilemma that arises in the design of such courses. On the one hand, they may present versions of “applied ethics”; that is, courses in which moral theories are applied to moral and social problems. On the other hand, they may present generalised forms of “occupational ethics”, usually professional ethics, with some business ethics added to expand the range of the course. Is there, then, not some middle ground that is distinctively designated by the term “social ethics”? I will argue that there is such a ground. I will describe that ground as the ethics of “social practices”. I will then illustrate how this approach to the teaching of ethics may be carried out in five domains of social practice: professional ethics, commercial ethics, corporate ethics, governmental ethics, and ethics in the voluntary sector. My aim is to show that “social ethics” courses can have a clear rationale and systematic content

Who Is a Journalist and Why Does it Matter? Disentangling the Legal and Ethical Arguments

The contemporary debate about who is a journalist is occurring in two distinct domains: law and professional ethics. Although the debate in these domains is focused on separate problems, participants treat the central question as essentially the same. This article suggests that the debates in law and professional ethics have to be resolved independently and that debate within those domains needs to be more nuanced. In law, it must vary depending on whether the context involves constitutional law, statutory law, or the distribution of informal privileges by government officials. In professional ethics, the debate should not be oriented around a single definitional threshold but should identify tiers that take account of different communicators’ unique goals, tactics, and values

The Profession of Law: Columbia Law School’s Use of Experiential Learning Techniques to Teach Professional Responsibility

Columbia Law School\u27s ethics course, The Profession of Law, is an interactive, experiential exploration of legal ethics. The course puts students in a role and asks them to deal, with issues that most of them are likely to encounter, and then the students are asked to reflect on what their role-playing performance has taught them about legal ethics

Turning to Animals Between Love and Law

Publisher has granted permission for the published version of this article to be archived. Publisher's website: http://www.lwbooks.co.ukAs an alternative to Utilitarianism, animal ethics turned to the Continental philosophies of Levinas and Derrida that welcome and revere Otherness. While Utilitarianism relies on a ‘closed’ system of ethical calculations, the Levinasian model remains open-ended. This essay argues for a revised approach to animal ethics that combines Levinasian immeasurability, what Matthew Calarco called ‘ethical agnosticism’, with a closed approach that sees ethics as issuing from particular modes of practice. Highlighting some of the problems inherent in the Levinasian ethics of love as well as Agamben’s biopolitical critique of law, I propose a corrective, ‘between love and law’, that avoids predetermining the limits of moral consideration yet insists on the social and normative dimensions of ethical responsiveness. I take the practice of veganism - broadly conceived beyond the strictly dietary - as the heart of animal ethics and consider some of the philosophical and theological dimensions of veganism as neither naïve nor as utopian but on the contrary, as a worldly mode of engagement that acknowledges the realities of violence

Information Technology and Legal Ethics: Expanding the Teaching and Understanding of Legal Ethics Through the Creation of a New Generation of Electronic Reference Materials

Cramton and Martin present a very brief summary of the inward-looking elements of the Cornell Law School prorgam to improve the basic required course in professional ethics and to encourage the pervasive teaching of the subject throughout the law curriculum. The Cornell program focuses on the preparation and dissemination of electronic material on legal ethics on a state-by-state basis

Ethics systems in the New Zealand psychological society

It is important to remember that the Psychological Society does not exist in isolation. It is part of a wider society and must be accountable to and responsive to the needs of the public, its clients and changes occurring in the community. Ethics largely arise out of the public’s expectations of the profession and implied in that is compliance with the law. Psychologists are obviously answerable to the Courts when their actions transgress the law; no one can legally claim that inclusions or omissions from a code of ethics permit them to act outside of the law. Fortunately, there are seldom conflicts between ethical and legal obligations as certain statutory provisions now reflect some of the more important of our ethical standards. Any consideration of ethics in the Society must take account of the wider societal context within which psychologists operate