The moral relevance of personal characteristics in setting health care priorities

This paper discusses the moral relevance of accounting for various personal characteristics when prioritising between groups of patients. After a review of the results from empirical studies, we discuss the ethical reasons which might explain – and justify – the views expressed in these studies. The paper develops a general framework based upon the causes of ill health and the consequences of treatment. It then turns to the question of the extent to which a personal characteristic – and the eventual underlying ethical justification of its relevance – could have any relationships to these causes and consequences. We attempt to disentangle those characteristics that may reflect a potentially relevant justification from those which violate widely accepted principles of social justice.Health care priorities; Ethics; Personal responsibilities; Consequences

The relationship between different email management strategies and the perceived control of time

Time management research, and the psychological construct of perceived control of time, are drawn on to investigate populist claims of the virtues of regularly filing and organising ones electronic mail. Using a process model of time management, it would seem that filing of email may increase ones time control perceptions and thus their job satisfaction and wellbeing. One hundred and sixty five participants were involved in a questionnaire-based field study. Analyses of variance revealed that for some e-mail users, not having a filing system may result in a high perceived control of time. Furthermore, challenging assumptions regarding optimal e-mail organisation, those that tried to frequently file their incoming messages, but did so somewhat unsuccessfully, had significantly less perceived control of time. These results highlight individual differences in control of time perceptions, and recommendations are made regarding organisational e-mail behaviour and training

Relational Ethics and Partiality: A Critique of Thad Metz’s ‘Towards an African Moral Theory’

In this article, I question the plausibility of Metz’s African moral theory from an oft-neglected moral topic of partiality. Metz defends an Afro-communitarian moral theory that posits that the rightness of actions is entirely definable by relationships of identity and solidarity (or, friendship). I offer two objections to this relational moral theory. First, I argue that justifying partiality strictly by invoking relationships (of friendship) ultimately fails to properly value the individual for her own sake – this is called the ‘focus problem’ in the literature. Second, I argue that a relationship-based theory cannot accommodate the agent-related partiality since it posits some relationship to be morally fundamental. My critique ultimately reveals the inadequacy of a relationship-based moral theory insofar as it overlooks some crucial moral considerations grounded on the individual herself in her own right

The social patterning of values and rationalities: mothers' choices in combining caring and employment

The assumption of individualised rationality runs through the two dominant theorisations of family behaviour – new household economics and individualisation. We demonstrate the inaccuracy of this assumption, using the results of two CAVA projects into mothers' perceptions and choices in combining mothering with paid work, in allocating tasks with partners, and in choosing childcare. Rather, mothers make such decisions within socially negotiated accounts of what is morally adequate, and we go on to show how these decisions and the values informing them are socially patterned by class and ethnicity. Finally, we consider how both theory and policy can make a ‘rationality mistake’ in neglecting the importance of social ties and moral responsibilities in family life

Evaluating strategies for implementing industry 4.0: a hybrid expert oriented approach of B.W.M. and interval valued intuitionistic fuzzy T.O.D.I.M.

open access articleDeveloping and accepting industry 4.0 influences the industry structure and customer willingness. To a successful transition to industry 4.0, implementation strategies should be selected with a systematic and comprehensive view to responding to the changes flexibly. This research aims to identify and prioritise the strategies for implementing industry 4.0. For this purpose, at first, evaluation attributes of strategies and also strategies to put industry 4.0 in practice are recognised. Then, the attributes are weighted to the experts’ opinion by using the Best Worst Method (BWM). Subsequently, the strategies for implementing industry 4.0 in Fara-Sanat Company, as a case study, have been ranked based on the Interval Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy (IVIF) of the TODIM method. The results indicated that the attributes of ‘Technology’, ‘Quality’, and ‘Operation’ have respectively the highest importance. Furthermore, the strategies for “new business models development’, ‘Improving information systems’ and ‘Human resource management’ received a higher rank. Eventually, some research and executive recommendations are provided. Having strategies for implementing industry 4.0 is a very important solution. Accordingly, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are a useful tool for adopting and selecting appropriate strategies. In this research, a novel and hybrid combination of BWM-TODIM is presented under IVIF information

Automating decision making to help establish norm-based regulations

Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose from may not be independent (i.e, they can be related to each other). Second, different preference criteria may be applied when choosing the norms to enact. This paper advances the state of the art by modeling a series of decision-making problems that regulation authorities confront when choosing the policies to establish. In order to do so, we first identify three different norm relationships -namely, generalisation, exclusivity, and substitutability- and we then consider norm representation power, cost, and associated moral values as alternative preference criteria. Thereafter, we show that the decision-making problems faced by policy makers can be encoded as linear programs, and hence solved with the aid of state-of-the-art solvers

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Social Dialogue Articulation in Europe (EESDA) Project No. VS/2017/0434 Comparative policy recommendations on improving social dialogue articulation and effectiveness in Europe

The history of European social dialogue dates back to the mid-1980s with the Val Duchesse social dialogue initiative by the European Commission. The aim then was to involve social partners in the internal market process. This initiative was followed by the Single European Act of 1986, which served as the legal basis of the community-wide social dialogue and established a steering committee, which then became the main bipartite body, known as the European Social Dialogue Committee. Following the Act of 1986, another turning point in the history of social dialogue was the Treaty of Maastricht in 1991, which paved the way for agreements negotiated by social partners to become legally binding by means of a Council decision. Later, the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 included an Agreement on Social Policy representing the single common framework for social dialogue across all Member States, resulting in the implementation of a cross-industry Framework Agreement on Parental Leave (1996)3, Part-time Work (1997)4 and Fixed-term Work (1999)5 as Council directives. The Lisbon Treaty of 2009 further emphasised the need for autonomy and diversity within the social partnership in Europe

Community Participation in Festivals : An Appreciative Inquiry Approach to Research

Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio