Catholic Hospital Ethics

This is the final Report of the Commission on Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Hospitals - a study commission established by the Catholic Theological Society of America in June, 1971. Publication of the Report, which is not an official position of the CTSA, was accepted by the CTSA Board of Directors on September 1, 1972. This study is not presented as the final word on codes of ethics for Catholic hospitals, but is proposed as a moral theological rationale for understanding the purposes and functions of a set of ethical directives in Catholic hospitals, and as a basis for dialogue, reresearch, and the revision and interpretation of policies. Reactions to the Report are welcomed. As the list at the end of the Report indicates, it is the work of an eminent group of scholars with special insights into medicine and ethics; they in turn consulted others of equal competence in their fields. Since the directives were approved by the bishops in November, 1971, a number of diocesan meetings have been held to discuss the code. As more meetings are convened, the Linacre hopes to keep its readers up-to-date on the resulting dialogue

Ethical Dilemmas In Management: An African Perspective

The modern workplace is composed of people with diverse backgrounds in terms of nationality, culture, religion, age, education and socioeconomic status. Each of these people enters the work with different values, goals, and perceptions of acceptable behaviours. The diverse background creates ethical challenges for individuals as well as managers. There are issues and decisions that are to be made by workers in the organization that have implications for their job security and salary, and success of the organization. Pressure may be on the workers to protect their own interests, sometimes at the risk of losing personal and corporate integrity. This paper attempts to evaluate ethical dilemmas and conflicts from an Africa perspective, bearing in mind different value systems between western and African nations

Ethical Egoism

Selfishness is often considered a vice and selfish actions are often judged to be wrong. But sometimes we ought to do what’s best for ourselves: in a sense, we sometimes should be selfish. The ethical theory known as ethical egoism states that we are always morally required to do what’s in our own self-interest. The view isn’t that we are selfish—this is psychological egoism—but that we ought to be. This essay explores ethical egoism and the main arguments for and against it. [Note: there are links for two versions below; a 1000 Word Philosophy version and a longer version in "Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource"

Ethical Reductionism

Ethical reductionism is the best version of naturalistic moral realism. Reductionists regard moral properties as identical to properties appearing in successful scientific theories. Nonreductionists, including many of the Cornell Realists, argue that moral properties instead supervene on scientific properties without identity. I respond to two arguments for nonreductionism. First, nonreductionists argue that the multiple realizability of moral properties defeats reductionism. Multiple realizability can be addressed in ethics by identifying moral properties uniquely or disjunctively with properties of the special sciences. Second, nonreductionists argue that irreducible moral properties explain empirical phenomena, just as irreducible special-science properties do. But since irreducible moral properties don't successfully explain additional regularities, they run the risk of being pseudoscientific properties. Reductionism has all the benefits of nonreductionism, while also being more secure against anti-realist objections because of its ontological simplicity

The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

The Intersection of Religiosity, Workplace Spirituality and Ethical Sensitivity in Practicing Accountants

A broad range of ethical decisions cross the desk of practicing accountants everyday. Rest and Narvaez (1994) theorized that ethical sensitivity is influenced by personal factors such as religion. Using Rest’s theory, this study found that workplace spirituality was positively related to ethical sensitivity and extrinsic religiosity was negatively related to ethical sensitivity. In additional analysis significant associations were found between the meaning an accountant ascribes to their job and ethical sensitivity. Significant differences in ethical sensitivity were also observed across the accountant’s role. The results of this study provide evidence that religion and spirituality are associated with ethical sensitivity in practicing accountants. While more research needs to be conducted in this important area, these results provide evidence that the profession should work towards fostering the intuitive links between ethical decision-making and the inner life of the accountant

Ethical decision-making, passivity and pharmacy

Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals' ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making. Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group. Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis. Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists' failure to report healthcare professionals' bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty. Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients' welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists' ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility

A study on the ethical components of nursing practice (moral distress, ethical sensitivity, ethical decision)

This paper is an applied research in terms of objective and a descriptive research in terms of method. Having prepared the research plan, a questionnaire was designed based on goals and hypotheses of the research and was sent to the statistical universe. Also this paper is a field research in terms of data collection. As regards theoretical bases of the research, library data collection method has been applied. So, the required data has been gathered by referring to the related references, books, libraries and so on. To design a questionnaire and gather the opinions of the statistical universe members, field study method and researcher-made questionnaire have been used. The statistical universe comprises nurses and head of ICU and head nurses of Najmieh Hospital in Tehran. The respondents were selected by random sampling method. Also to estimate sample size, Morgan table was applied. The statistical universe consists of 65 members and according to the table, 56 questionnaires were determined for the research. So 60 questionnaires were sent and 58 ones were returned. Face and content validity of the research tool were approved by experts. The test reliability was estimated 0.777 by calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient. In this paper, factor analysis based on partial least squares structural equations method has been applied to analyze more important factors and coefficients, estimate independent variables coefficients and even determine effectiveness of each independent variable on each other and determine appropriateness of the questions and their coefficients in explaining the related index. The main result of this paper presents a proper model for the relation of effective variables on nurse performance by using regression model. © IDOSI Publications, 2014

The ethical infrastructure of legal practice in larger law firms: values, policy and behaviour

The article examines the impact of the cultures and organisational structures of large law firms on individual lawyers' ethics. The paper suggests that large law firms in Australia should consciously design and implement 'ethical infrastructures' to both counteract pressures for misbehaviour and positively promote ethical behaviour and discussion. The paper goes on to explain what implementing ethical infrastructures in law firms could and should mean by reference to what Australian law firms are already doing and US innovations in this area. Finally, the paper warns that the 'ethical infrastructure' of a firm should not be seen merely as the formal ethics policies explicitly enunciated by management. Formal and legalistic ethical infrastructures that fail to support or encourage the development of individual lawyers' awareness oftheir own ethical values and ethical judgment in practice will be useless