Withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment in a patient's best interests : Australian judicial deliberations

•Intractable disputes about withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from adults who lack capacity are rare but challenging. Judicial resolution may be needed in some of these cases. •A central concept for judicial (and clinical) decision making in this area is a patient's “best interests”. Yet what this term means is contested. •There is an emerging Supreme Court jurisprudence that sheds light on when life-sustaining treatment will, or will not, be judged to be in a patient's best interests. •Treatment that is either futile or overly burdensome is not in a patient's best interests. Although courts will consider patient and family wishes, they have generally deferred to the views of medical practitioners about treatment decisions.

IT professionals' experience of ethics and its implications for IT education

This study investigates variation in IT professionals' experience of ethics with a view to enhancing their formation and support. This is explored through an examination of the experience of IT, IT professional ethics and IT professional ethics education. The study's principal contribution is the empirical study and description of IT professionals' experience of ethics. The empirical phase is preceded by a review of conceptions of IT and followed by an application of the findings to IT education. The study's empirical findings are based on 30 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals who represent a wide demographic, experience and IT sub-discipline range. Their experience of ethics is depicted as five citizenships: Citizenship of my world, Citizenship of the corporate world, Citizenship of a shared world, Citizenship of the client's world and Citizenship of the wider world. These signify an expanding awareness, which progressively accords rights to others and defines responsibility in terms of others. The empirical findings inform a Model of Ethical IT. This maps an IT professional space increasingly oriented towards others. Such a model provides a conceptual tool, available to prompt discussion and reflection, and which may be employed in pursuing formation aimed at experiential change. Its usefulness for the education of IT professionals with respect to ethics is explored. The research approach employed in this study is phenomenography. This method seeks to elicit and represent variation of experience. It understands experience as a relationship between a subject (IT professionals) and an object (ethics), and describes this relationship in terms of its foci and boundaries. The study's findings culminate in three observations, that change is indicated in the formation and support of IT professionals in: 1. IT professionals' experience of their discipline, moving towards a focus on information users; 2. IT professionals' experience of professional ethics, moving towards the adoption of other-centred attitudes; and 3. IT professionals' experience of professional development, moving towards an emphasis on a change in lived experience. Based on these results, employers, educators and professional bodies may want to evaluate how they approach professional formation and support, if they aim to promote a comprehensive awareness of ethics in IT professionals.

Being ethical : how process drama assists pre-service drama teachers to reflect on professional ethics

This research thesis focuses on the experiences of pre-service drama teachers and considers how process drama may assist them to reflect on key aspects of professional ethics such as mandatory codes or standards, principled moral reasoning, moral character, moral agency, and moral literacy. Research from higher education provides evidence that current pedagogical approaches used to prepare pre –professionals for practice in medicine, engineering, accountancy, business, psychology, counselling, nursing and education, rarely address the more holistic or affective dimensions of professional ethics such as moral character. Process drama, a form of educational drama, is a complex improvisational group experience that invites participants to create and assume roles, and select and manage symbols in order to create a fictional world exploring human experience. Many practitioners claim that process drama offers an aesthetic space to develop a deeper understanding of self and situations, expanding the participant’s consciousness and ways of knowing. However, little research has been conducted into the potential efficacy of process drama in professional ethics education for pre-professionals. This study utilizes practitioner research and case study to explore how process drama may contribute to the development of professional ethics education and pedagogy.

Contemporary issues in Australian family law: Do we need a more unified and interventionist judicial model

Recent decisions of the Family Court of Australian reflect concerns over the adversarial nature of the legal process. The processes and procedures of the judicial system militate against a detailed examination of the issues and rights of the parties in dispute. The limitations of the family law framework are particularly demonstrated in disputes over the custody of children where the Court has tended to neglect the rights and interests of the primary carer. An alternative "unified family court" framework will be examined in which the Court pursues a more active and interventionist approach in the determination of family law disputes.

Encouraging ethics and challenging corruption : reforming governance in public institutions

Encouraging Ethics and Preventing Corruption brings theory and practice together in addressing the question: How are we to be ethical in public life and through public institutions? It is a major contribution to public sector ethics within Australia and internationally because it provides an exhaustive analysis of reform across a decade in one jurisdiction, Queensland, and then proceeds to itemise a best practice integrity system or ethics regime. Drawing on the extensive research of two of Australia's leading practical ethicists, this text is essential reading for all students and practitioners of applied and professional ethics in the public sphere. Part A of the text provides a preferred theoretical and conceptual framework which both justifies and guides the development of a public sector ethics regime. Part B examines the place of the individual within a world of institutional ethics. Part C outlines the Queensland governance reforms introduced since 1989 following the Fitzgerald Inquiry which exposed corruption in the police and ministry. The final chapter, the 'Epilogue', gathers the insights of earlier chapters and suggests a more explicitly ethics-centred approach to governance reform that may take us 'beyond best practice'. Clearly, while it is the Australian context we have in mind, we are confident that this is a text which addresses the quest for integrity and ethics in government wherever society is committed to social and liberal democratic ideals.