Don't we care?: the ethics and emotional labour of early years professionalism

This paper argues that early childhood education and care (ECEC) has a legitimate aspiration to be a 'caring profession' like others such as nursing or social work, defined by a moral purpose. For example, practitioners often draw on an ethic of care as evidence of their professionalism. However, the discourse of professionalism in England completely excludes the ethical vocabulary of care. Nevertheless, it necessarily depends on gendered dispositions towards emotional labour, often promoted by training programmes as 'professional' demeanours. Taking control of the professionalisation agenda therefore requires practitioners to demonstrate a critical understanding of their practice as 'emotion work'. At the same time, reconceptualising practice within a political ethic of care may allow the workforce, and new trainees in particular, to champion 'caring' as a sustainable element of professional work, expressed not only in maternal, dyadic key-working but in advocacy for care as a social principle.

Corruption and individual ethics: insights from a public procurement auction

This article proposes an auction model where two firms compete for obtaining the license for a public project and an auctioneer acting as a public official representing the political power, decides the winner of the contest. Players as firms face a social dilemma in the sense that the higher is the bribe offered, the higher would be the willingness of a pure monetary maximizer public official to give her the license. However, it implies inducing a cost of reducing all players’ payoffs as far as our model includes an endogenous externality, which depends on bribe. All players’ payoffs decrease with the bribe (and increase with higher quality). We find that the presence of bribe aversion in either the officials’ or the firms’ utility function shifts equilibrium towards more pro-social behavior. When the quality and bribe-bid strategy space is discrete, multiple equilibria emerge including more pro-social bids than would be predicted under a continuous strategy space.

Resilience in crisis reconsidered: the need for values against relativist ethics

The need for a reconsideration of resilience from both a positive and a normative point of view can be discussed using some of the lessons and conclusions drawn from individual resilience studied by psychologists in an educational context. The main point made in this article is that unless we want to approach resilience as a feature which is exogenously given in each population and society and whose dynamics, if any, are not subject to deliberate actions and policies, we need a framework for the evaluation of resilience as a social good. Relying on the hope that resilience is necessarily built in our societies as a force guaranteeing convergence to a socially desirable point of social evolution may be too optimistic and even counterproductive, because it may lead us to an inefficient or biased political and regulatory decision making. When the effect of policies and actions at a national or international level take into account the dynamic effect of such actions on resilience itself, one cannot blindly rely on the goodness of the process any more. This is mainly because resilience is not uniformly embodied in all societies and it does not have a globally positive social value by itself. The issue of socially valuing the options available beyond market-price valuations becomes fundamental in this context.

The Art of Aidagara: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Quest for an Ontology of Social Existence in Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara (“betweenness”) in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as “Critical Buddhism.” The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from “topical” or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) “critical” thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of “reason” versus “intuition” in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison of Watsuji’s “ontological quest” with that of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Watsuji’s primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an “ontology of social existence” undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the “return” of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism.

Engineering Ethics: Looking Back, Looking Forward

The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars.

ARISTOTLE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRTUE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE POLITICS AND THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS AND ITS RELATION TO TODAY

While much of Aristotle's works are preserved in various volumes, two of his famous works are the Nichmachean Ethics and the Politics, both of which contain a rich compilation of ethical and political thought. In the Ethics, Aristotle describes a thorough understanding of ethical and intellectual virtue. By pursuing these virtues, Aristotle argues that a person can achieve a life of fulfilling happiness. The ideal polis as described in the Politics serves as a place where the virtuous life is attained in the best manner.Citizens who pursue virtue make the polis better, and the rulers that guide the polis ensure that the citizens have every opportunity to pursue the virtuous life. In this thesis, I see how relevant Aristotle's theory is by laying out the basic principles of the Ethics and the Politics and the connections between the two works. Indoing so, I found that Aristotle's ideal theory points out a significant flaw in our political system: the fact that we do not share a common moral conception such as the one concerned with the virtuous life as Aristotle proposes. This does not suggest thatAristotle's view was actualized during his time period, but that Aristotle conceives of an ideal life and an ideal polis that could be realized. Certainly there are issues with Aristotle's thesis concerning the inferiority of slaves and women. But what is morepoignant is the impracticality of instituting a shared common conception when today's political system permits various ideas about ethics and morality.

Ethics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinas

Despite the influence of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics on the rethinking of community in post-identitarian terms (most prominently in the work of Maurice Blanchot, Alphonso Lingis, and, to a lesser extent, Jean-Luc Nancy), the question of community remains a problematic spot in Levinas’s own philosophy. I would argue that, instead of grounding a new thinking of community, the dyadic relation of Same and Other poses a structural problem when trying to open the ethical relation to the wider realm of others while keeping radical difference in place. As external observer and guarantor of justice, for instance, is the Third excluded a priori from the ethical relation? Is community always only another term for the political? Or, as Levinas himself puts it in Otherwise Than Being: “What meaning can community take on in difference without reducing difference?” Identifying in the notion of impersonality a way to access Levinas’s thought on community, this paper aims at rethinking the scene of address and the ethical relation in terms of displacement, dislocation and interruption.

Strange bedfellows: The ethics and politics of medical futility in Texas

Background: Futile medical treatments are interventions that are not associated with a benefit to the patient. The definition and concept of medical futility are controversial. The Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA) was passed in 1999 to address medically inappropriate interventions by allowing providers to withdraw inappropriate interventions against a surrogate decision maker's wishes following a review, attempt to transfer the patient, and 10-day waiting period. The original legislation was a negotiated compromise by players across the political spectrum. However, in recent years there has been increasing controversy regarding TADA and attempts to alter its applicability in Texas. ^ Purpose: The purpose of this project was to apply Paul Sabatier's advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to gain understanding into the historical, ethical, and political basis of the initial compromise, and determine the sources of conflict that have led to increased opposition to TADA. ^ Methods: Using the ACF model, key actors within the medical futility policy debate in Texas were aggregated into coalitions based on shared beliefs. A narrative summary based analysis identified the core elements of the policy subsystem, as well as the constraints and resources of the subsystem actors. Externalities that promoted adjustments to coalition beliefs and tactics used by coalition participants were analyzed. Data sources included review of the published literature regarding medical futility, as well as analysis of published newspaper accounts and editorials regarding the medical futility issue in Texas, legislative testimony, and review of weblogs and online commentaries dealing with the issue. ^ Results: Primary coalition participants in developing compromise legislation in 1999 were the Providers and Vitalists, with Autonomists gaining a prominent role starting in 2006. Internal factors associated with the breakdown of consensus included changes to the makeup of the governing coalition and changes in individual case information available to the Vitalist coalition. Externalities related to the intertwining of the Sun Hudson case and the Terri Schiavo case generated negative publicity for the TADA from progressive and conservative viewpoints. Dissemination of information in various venues regarding contentious cases was associated with more polarization of viewpoints, and realignment of coalition alliances. ^ Conclusions: The ACF provided an outline for the initial compromise over the creation of the Texas Advance Directives Act as well as the eventual loss of consensus. The debate between the Provider, Vitalist, and Autonomist coalitions has been affected by internal policy evolution, changes in the governing coalition, and important externalities. The debate over medical futility in Texas has had much broader implications in the dispute over Health Care Reform.^

Sociology and sin; a plea for the exclusion of uplift from economics and the political sciences,

"First edition."