Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Ethicist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethicist. Show all posts

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Disgraced Chapel Hill Ethicist Says Claims Against Her Are Totally False

by Andy Thomason
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 2, 2016

Jan Boxill, the ethicist and former faculty chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose apparent participation in the shocking academic fraud there left observers amazed, says all the allegations against her are false.

In a letter responding to the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Tuesday, Ms. Boxill’s lawyer, Randall M. Roden, said the claims made against her in a report by a former federal prosecutor, Kenneth L. Wainstein, were untrue.

“It did not happen,” the defiant letter reads. “Not one of the allegations against Jan Boxill is true,” Mr. Roden continued, referencing allegations made by the NCAA, which relied on the so-called Wainstein report.

The article is here.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Cheeseburger ethics

By Eric Schwitzgebel
Aeon Magazine
Originally published July 15, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

Ethicists do not appear to behave better. Never once have we found ethicists as a whole behaving better than our comparison groups of other professors, by any of our main planned measures. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse. (There are some mixed results for secondary measures.) For the most part, ethicists behave no differently from professors of any other sort – logicians, chemists, historians, foreign-language instructors.

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‘Furthermore,’ she continues, ‘if we demand that ethicists live according to the norms they espouse, that will put major distortive pressures on the field. An ethicist who feels obligated to live as she teaches will be motivated to avoid highly self-sacrificial conclusions, such as that the wealthy should give most of their money to charity or that we should eat only a restricted subset of foods. Disconnecting professional ethicists’ academic enquiries from their personal choices allows them to consider the arguments in a more even-handed way. If no one expects us to act in accord with our scholarly opinions, we are more likely to arrive at the moral truth.’

The entire article is here.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

On holding ethicists to higher moral standards and the value of moral inconsistency

By Carissa VĂ©liz
Practical Ethics
Originally posted February 27, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Should ethicists be held to higher moral standards? If they commit a wrong about which they know more than others, then it is seems plausible that they do have more responsibility and should be held to higher moral standards. In many cases, however, moral philosophers appear to be on a par with non-ethicists when it comes to ethical knowledge. Most people who cheat on their spouses, for example, have roughly the same knowledge of the wrong they are committing; this includes moral philosophers, since the ethics of faithfulness is not frequently discussed in academic settings; nor is it something most moral philosophers read or write about.

The entire article is here.

A similar paper, The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors, by Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust can be found here.


Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Ethicist Who Crossed the Line

By Brad Wolverton
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published October 24, 2014

She was everywhere, and seemingly everyone’s friend, a compassionate do-gooder who worked long hours with underprepared students while balancing several jobs, including directing a center on ethics.

On Wednesday the world learned something else about Jeanette M. Boxill: Her own ethics were malleable.

Most of the blame fell on Julius E. Nyang’oro, a former department chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his longtime assistant, Deborah Crowder, after they were identified as the chief architects of a widespread academic scandal there.

The entire story is here.