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Peter Bowden
University of Sydney
Ethics, Happiness and Justice
This paper explores the relationship between these three aspects of the question on how we might conduct our lives. Aristotle started the enquiry with his Nichomachean Ethics, which examined the relationship between virtue and happiness. Or as he termed it, Eudaimonia. The translation of this term has faced some disagreement, with flourishing, well-being or fulfilment being offered as alternatives to happiness. Some modern writers have even adopted the original Greek word, apparently in an attempt to keep the all-embracing concept behind Aristotle’s work. This paper will use the word happiness, although attempting to maintain Aristotle’s concept of flourishing – a philosophical concept. Aristotle was a philosopher. His early thoughts surfaced many years later in the advocacy of virtue ethics as one of the theories distinguishing right from wrong. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the search for happiness, or Eudaimonia, was lost to philosophy. It was taken over by psychology – in one of its branch activities, positive psychology – a discipline that has received a near exponential increase in academic attention in recent years. This paper will explore how this discipline has adopted a range of ethical practices, a few of them taken from Aristotle, but most of them new. One publication of the American Psychological Association has even put considerable research in developing a twenty first century version of those virtues that lead to a fulfilling life. The paper will then examine how thoroughly this new discipline addresses issues of both ethics and justice.
Hugh Breakey
Griffith University
Supply and Demand in the Development of Professional Norms
How can we explain the development—or equally the non-development—of professional norms in a particular case? In this paper I present a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that motivate the construction or continuance of a professional ethos. These may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective service-users or clients, and the general public as interested third parties (perhaps operating through various mechanisms of government). The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: including traditions and stories, the application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of developing and nourishing a social role-identity, and so on. I show there can be a gap where supply cannot meet demand (as is arguably the case in the current-day ‘professionalization’ of financial advisers), but also that there can be a mismatch between the content of the ethos called for by different demanders, and that capable of being sustained by different supply-side materiel.
Alan Chenoweth (with D McAuliffe)
Griffith University
Inter-professional ethics in environmental practice
Environmental assessment and management requires a team approach to complex issues, drawing upon expertise and opinions from diverse professions, with different ethical frameworks. Multidisciplinary teams, whether in private consultancy or public agencies, analyse technical risks of environmental and social impacts, and weigh these against the likely benefits, taking into consideration economic and political factors. The process of EIA (environmental impact assessment) and the balances sought in ESD (ecologically sustainable development) involve value judgments, with opportunities for team members to contribute different perspectives. These values may be drawn from various sources: professional codes of practice, group socialisation processes within professions and workplaces, environmental ethics and eco-activism, role models and personal morality. A framework for respectful collaboration between different professions, developed by McAuliffe (2014) for the social health and human services, can also be applied to multi-disciplinary environmental teams, based on mutual understanding of the paradigms and values of the professions involved. The authors compare the codes of ethics of science, engineering and planning professions in Australia, with case study examples and implications for multi-disciplinary collaboration, as a guide for team conversations around ethical dilemmas in environmental projects.
Lesley Chenoweth (with P Jervis-Tracey, D McAuliffe, & D Sauvage)
Griffith University
E-professionalism and social media: navigating professional and personal spaces
The use and misuse of online communication and social media by professional’s impacts on the effective delivery of services, and workplace productivity. Compromised integrity among these professions also impacts on the wellbeing of vulnerable service users. Social media use has both positive and negative impacts on productivity, the nature of which remain poorly understood. Risks associated with social media in the workplace include wasted time; reputational harm; increased information security risks, and the risk of blurred and violated boundaries that lead to increased burden of costs associated with complaints about misconduct. A quality reputation in the eyes of the public is especially important for health, protective, education and social care services. Such a reputation drives public confidence, and can influence perceptions of international expertise. Any level of compromise of these perceptions flows into lost productivity and competitiveness in complex ways. This paper explores the key themes and gaps in current research about the use and misuse of social media by professionals. It discusses the ways in which public confidence in the integrity of professionals is being favoured or jeopardised; how different professions define and manage appropriate or inappropriate online conduct; and how this informs the notion of ‘e-professionalism’.
University of Auckland
Preliminary assumptions for an ethics for the era of bi-data and predictive analytics?
I am interested the plausibility of some preliminary assumptions which might frame an attempt to develop an ethics for the use of predictive analytics. Those assumptions include:
Auckland District Health Board
Limiting Access to the Deceased Donor Kidney Transplant Waiting List
In New Zealand there are over 600 patients waiting for a kidney transplant from a deceased donor. Less than 100 kidneys become available for transplant each year. A substantial number of patients will become too unwell to transplant or die while waiting for a kidney transplant. Most patients with kidney failure would benefit from a kidney transplant in terms of length and quality of life. The New Zealand renal transplant subcommittee decided that it would be appropriate to limit access to the deceased donor waiting list to those who were predicted to have a greater than 80% likelihood of surviving for 5 years after transplant. I will argue that this very mechanistic approach to rationing is more appropriate than suggested approaches that look at patients' worth or value to society.
Ian Gibson
RE-examining the Model Litigant Guidelines
Despite contemporary mythology, the concept of the government as a model litigant, and the government-made rules relating to that concept, only arose in the mid 1990s as part of the outsourcing of legal services by the Commonwealth Government. The courts have continued to apply general principles of fairness rather than these internal government directives, but remain under pressure to change. In any case, the guidelines themselves are sloppily worded and not fit for a purpose more than well-intentioned guidance to government agencies.
Bligh Grant (with Joseph Drew, Bligh Grant, & Josie Fisher)
University of Technology Sydney
Can the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) be used to escape the interminable ‘economics’ versus ‘community’ argument in council consolidation?
Despite the inherently lowly status of local government, debates surrounding municipal amalgamation programs are often hotly contested. Usually such debates oscillate between arguments in favour of amalgamation grounded in an ethic of welfare maximisation, set against the desire to retain extant communities grounded in rights-based justifications. In this discussion we examine this interminable debate using the Principle of Double Effect (PDE), which squarely confronts the conflict between so-called economic ‘imperatives’ and ethical ‘oughts’. We argue that consistent oversight of PDE is a tenable explanation of undesirable outcomes arising from amalgamations, leading us to suggest current proposals to consolidate almost fifty percent of councils in New South Wales (NSW) Australia as unlikely to succeed. Further, we explore the application of PDE to the public policy domain more generally.
University of Auckland
The (Unpopular) Virtue of Thrift
Currently, thrift is not a popular virtue. Part of the reason why thrift is not favoured much is surely its narrow construal: while the meaning of thrift used to be directly linked to human thriving in the broadest sense, throughout the past five+ centuries its use became more and more restricted. Most contemporaries understand it as sparing use of money or, worse, as miserliness. I intend to turn back time and broaden the meaning of thrift. Abstractly construed as the virtue that concerns the stewardship of assets and resources for the purpose of long-term flourishing, I will consider the end(s) of thrift, its asset/resource scope, its resource priorities, and the concrete forms that our stewardship may take.
Australian National University
Analogical reasoning in ethics
Applied ethicists often appear to argue by analogy. For example, Thomson’s violinist case applied to abortion, Singer’s pond case applied to duties to aid the poor, and Rachels’ Smith and Jones case applied to active euthanasia, are three famous moral arguments that are widely interpreted as arguments by analogy. In this talk I argue that it is a mistake to interpret these arguments as arguments by analogy. They are better understood as ‘moral consistency arguments’, a different species of argument altogether. I then show the payoff for seeing these arguments as moral consistency arguments; we are in a better position to assess their plausibility and produce relevant criticisms.
Howard Harris
University of South Australia
Sustainability, intergenerational justice and love
This paper will canvas the contemporary issue of sustainability from two directions. First to consider the impact of widespread pluralism on the ability to construct a consensus for either the needs of future generations or those which the current generation can maintain without compromising the future. I will examine the relevance of social choice theory, especially as propounded by Amartya Sen (2003), as a means of generating consensus amongst competing values.
Second to explore the relevance of virtue ethics, particularly the virtues of love and justice, as a way of engaging individuals in the action of sustainability. This will build on recent papers in which I have described sustainability as a work of justice, something that each person has to work at, and that if this is done as the development of justice in community, justice as a practice as MacIntyre might have it, then there will be benefits for contemporary society, for individuals and into the future.
The ability of virtue to provide a way forward in a contemporary, pluralist society will be explored in the conclusion, bringing the two parts of the paper together.
Evdokia Kalaitzidis
Flinders University
Residents’ decision-making, choice and control in aged care facilities
In Australia the aged care system is undergoing major government-initiated reforms and is moving towards Consumer Directed Care (CDC). Proposed reforms aim to maximise informed decision-making, choice and control for older Australians. In the light of anticipated changes to the aged care system, we conducted a study of resident decision-making, choice and control in two major aged care facilities across four sites in Adelaide. The aim was to explore residents' views and experiences.
Residents were interviewed. A thematic analysis was conducted of the residents' statements. Two major themes were identified as critical in decision-making, choice and control, the physical environment and the social environment. Crucial to the residents were opportunities for privacy, communal engagement both within and outside the facility, opportunities for productivity in order to increase feelings of value and usefulness, opportunities to negotiate with staff and opportunities to participate and contribute to systems of governance. The residents reported that there were significant barriers to the optimum uptake of opportunities for participation and governance, particularly with regard to negotiations with staff.
Stephen Kemp
University of Queensland
Contemporary Issues in Childcare as a Profession
The paid care of children and assisting with their development is increasingly coming to resemble a professional activity. The commodification of child care has tended to create a profession of carers of children, not only by virtue of more formalized qualifications and role descriptions for carers, but also by establishing a framework within which a profession potentially may be practised. This paper examines how this process of professionalization is creating tension between the traditional nurturing role of child care and the more formal requirements of a “professional” carer. It also shows how paid child caring increasingly conforms in many respects with various criteria commonly associated with a professional activity. This has significant implications not only for the care providers but also for those who are receiving care, the children and their families. It also has important implications for society itself.
Fred Kroon
University of Auckland
Consent and the ethics of Postmortem Sperm Retrieval
Post-mortem sperm retrieval was first described in 1980 and refers to the collection of sperm from a recently deceased man for the purpose of posthumous reproduction. Since 1980, advances in assisted reproductive technology, in particular, the high success rates attributed to intracytoplasmic sperm injection, have substantially increased the feasibility of this procedure. With the increased feasibility, questions about its ethical justification have become more important than ever. Unsurprisingly, the most popular approaches place heavy emphasis on agent autonomy, insisting on the necessity of consent on the part of the man, whether explicit consent prior to death, or implied consent based on evidence about his beliefs and intentions. This paper examines the case made in a recent paper for a more liberal notion of consent: presumed consent, accompanied by an opt-out provision.
Kenneth MacPherson
University of Auckland
Martial Micrographia: what are the infinitesimally small elements that transform Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick Makers into Good Soldiers?
A combat veteran of the Crimean War observed that "[i]n military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x … That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute." What transforms peaceful civilians hopelessly disinclined to go around murdering one another into Good Soldiers willing to cross entire continents in order to virtuously slaughter the enemy du jour? Is the “greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger” simply courage? My PhD research indicates that such is not the case. Further, Aristotle’s popular explanations for courage / bravery / cowardice are based upon Greek legends and mythology (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), but they do not tally with historical reality and are therefore irrelevant to understanding the “spirit of an army”. As the unknown x is extraordinarily complex, the objective of my presentation is to merely present a ‘Reconnaissance Report’ of many surprising research discoveries uncovered thus far.
Steve McKinlay
Wellington Institute of Technology
The Ethics of Data Convergence and Predictive Modelling
This paper I considers some of the ethical implications regarding the collection of very large data sets, the sharing and convergence of those sets of data and the use of predictive modelling. To date, outside technological communities, this emerging area of convergence has received little attention. However, it is an issue that should give us cause for concern. I will argue that whilst privacy has historically received a great deal of attention within computing and information ethics circles, we are on the verge of a new area of concern, one that will go right to the heart of freewill itself. The use of large scale data sets in conjunction with predictive modelling already exists, and I will argue, this new emerging area of technological convergence deserves significant ethical attention.
The paper begins by briefly exploring the concept of logical data convergence. Predictive risk modelling will also be briefly explained and I will then provide some examples where it is either being used or proposals for use are being considered. I then provide some future scenarios where large government agency administrative data sets might be combined with other data collection methods made possible by interaction with social media, loyalty schemes, and interactions with smart devices and associated apps. I examine some of the ethical concerns and finally try to provide some precautionary measures that might be taken.
Curtin University
How should the concept of a profession be understood, and is the notion of a practice helpful in understanding it?
This work-in-progress paper asks whether it is helpful to consider a profession to be a practice and to what extent this meshes with the idea that ‘profession’ is a moral concept. It first notes a distinction in the literature between practices as regularities in the social world and practices as normative activities. It then examines Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as an activity in pursuit of internal and external goods, finds that MacIntyre’s articulation of the concept is not sufficient to describe what it is to be a profession, and seeks to supplement this with ideas from others, primarily Seumas Miller and Michael Davis. This supplementation, however, still leaves open the question of the origin of a profession’s authority (or licence) to use what can be called the ‘dangerous knowledge’ that is at the heart of what differentiates the work of professions from other occupations. In pursuing this idea of a licence, the paper suggests that Julius Kovesi’s ‘formal element’ and Robert Veatch’s use of a social contract might be useful.
Nicholas Munn
University of Waikato
Evaluating competing behavioural standards in online communities
How we should behave online is an issue that is deceptively complex. The online community, whether in a professional or a personal context, is much broader than the communities in which all but the youngest of us grew up. As such, the standards of propriety in this space can differ, in ways unexpected and dramatic, from those we are used to. In this paper I ask whether and when we are under an obligation to conform to the expectations of the dominant groups within the online communities we participate in, and argue that there are at least some times when it is defensible to conform to one’s own local norms and expectations rather than subordinating these to the broader online community.
Giuseppe (Joseph) Naimo
University of Notre Dame (Australia, Fremantle)
Transformation: an examination of the virtuous character from the perspective of Process Philosophy
The virtuous character and the ethical agent represent mutually inclusive terms, neither of which independently, in the Aristotelian tradition, is considered an innate quality. Virtues, if not innate, are contingent; but what makes each instantiation recognisably general? Normative ethics in this sense is a dynamic process and similarly process philosophy is based on the principle that existence is dynamic and that it should be the primary focus of any philosophical account of reality. I argue that the transformative process is equally as important as the end result of realising the virtuous dispositional traits. An important criticism of virtue ethics is the focus on character and not rules such as industry practices and codes found in the professions. Using process philosophy as a methodological approach to examine virtue ethical agency and the transformative process involved in its realisation, elicits certain insights that enables the conceptual development of a more robust account of virtue ethics. The aim then based on this nuanced rendition is to provide the groundwork, in part already commenced by others, to extend its application into areas of organisational and intergenerational ethics.
Anna Sawyer
University of Western Australia
Private i: Privacy, Intimacy, and Social Media
This paper explores the implications of social media on the nature of privacy, arguments for the protection of it, and in turn how we conceive of ourselves in relation to others. The boundaries which traditionally delineate relationships according to the level of personal information that is shared, or even aspects of our personality that is revealed to others, has been eroded and blurred. People who are not yet or not intimate are knowing intimate information about each other thus erasing the line between intimate and non-intimate relationships. This erasure has implications for both our social and personal identities. It may be changing how we conceive of ourselves and who we are. This is turn has further implications for intimacy and indeed for relationships of all kinds.
Vanessa Scholes
Open Polytechnic / Kuratini Tuwhera
Risky business – the ethics of judging individuals based on group statistics
Decision-makers representing organisations can be interested in predicting the risk that an applicant will impose a significant cost on the organisation or on other people. For example, parole boards consider information predicting the likelihood that a prisoner will re-offend once released; insurance companies calculate the risk that an insured will make a claim; and education institutions are interesting in predicting which applicants for tertiary study are a higher risk for dropping out or failing. Decision-makers can use evidence we might think of as ‘individualised’ to assess risk, such as personal testimony, past achievements or demonstrations of practices and competencies. Conversely, decision-makers can use ‘naked statistical evidence’ (Schauer, 2003), assessing people according to the statistics for group categories such as age, gender, ethnicity or residence. Philosophers who have examined this choice have presented ethical argument to support judging persons on the basis of ‘naked statistical evidence’. I will explain these arguments and where I think they are lacking, and sketch a model for conceptualising the ethics of organisational judgements of applicants.
Vanessa Schouten
Massey University
When the Presumption of Innocence Does Not Apply
The presumption of innocence (PoI) - according to which we ought to treat alleged wrongdoers as innocent until proven guilty - is usually understood as a principle which applies primarily to the obligations state actors have in legal contexts. According to a narrow reading of the PoI, the principle applies only within the context of the criminal trial itself. A broader reading of the PoI holds that it applies to the entire criminal process (including, for example, pre-trial detention).
But the PoI is frequently invoked in order to make even broader claims - claims about how private citizens (those not acting as agents of the state) ought to treat alleged wrongdoers outside of legal contexts. For example, in May 2014, A.C. Grayling responded to a call for speakers to boycott the Oxford Union while its President was under investigation for rape by declining to participate in any such boycott on the grounds that doing so would violate the PoI.
I argue that contra Grayling, the PoI imposes no special obligations on private citizens acting in non-legal contexts, and so the broadest reading of what the PoI might require of us ought to be rejected.
Alan Tapper
Curtin University
Professional principles and the concept of a profession
There is a strong case for the view that the principles of professional ethics are built into the concept of a profession. But when this thesis is examined more closely, it appears that one principle -- professional beneficence -- is seen as part of the definition of a profession, while other equally basic principles are not so seen. Two principles are especially notable in their absence: the principle of non-maleficence ("Do no harm") and the principle of respect for client autonomy. This presentation will document these claims and discuss some possible explanations.
Ruth Walker & Liezl Van Zyl
Waikato
Altruism and generosity in surrogate motherhood and organ donation
In the UK, Australia and New Zealand, only unpaid or ‘altruistic’ surrogacy and organ donation is permitted. A commonly held view is that the requirement of altruistic motivation allows us to avoid the objection that by paying surrogates and donors we risk exploiting them. But altruistic surrogacy and donation can be exploitative as well. An altruistic act is supposed to be a selfless act – altruism involves a desire to help others, often to a self-sacrificing degree. The requirement of altruism therefore goes hand in hand with a failure to acknowledge the agent’s legitimate needs for self-care and also makes her vulnerable to exploitation. Many surrogates report being abandoned to cope as best they can after the birth, while surrogates who receive gifts from intended parents often have their motives regarded with suspicion. We argue that encouraging the virtue of generosity is preferable to altruism, since generosity is consistent with reciprocation as well as legitimate concern for self.
University of Auckland
Me too, me too: Drawing attention to ethical issues in general practice
Most health care is delivered in primary care settings, in New Zealand mostly in general practice. But in the bioethical literature little attention is paid to ethical concerns in general practice. This paper explores the changing nature of general practice and some of the ethical concerns that are flying under the radar.
Peter Bowden
University of Sydney
Ethics, Happiness and Justice
This paper explores the relationship between these three aspects of the question on how we might conduct our lives. Aristotle started the enquiry with his Nichomachean Ethics, which examined the relationship between virtue and happiness. Or as he termed it, Eudaimonia. The translation of this term has faced some disagreement, with flourishing, well-being or fulfilment being offered as alternatives to happiness. Some modern writers have even adopted the original Greek word, apparently in an attempt to keep the all-embracing concept behind Aristotle’s work. This paper will use the word happiness, although attempting to maintain Aristotle’s concept of flourishing – a philosophical concept. Aristotle was a philosopher. His early thoughts surfaced many years later in the advocacy of virtue ethics as one of the theories distinguishing right from wrong. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the search for happiness, or Eudaimonia, was lost to philosophy. It was taken over by psychology – in one of its branch activities, positive psychology – a discipline that has received a near exponential increase in academic attention in recent years. This paper will explore how this discipline has adopted a range of ethical practices, a few of them taken from Aristotle, but most of them new. One publication of the American Psychological Association has even put considerable research in developing a twenty first century version of those virtues that lead to a fulfilling life. The paper will then examine how thoroughly this new discipline addresses issues of both ethics and justice.
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Hugh Breakey
Griffith University
Supply and Demand in the Development of Professional Norms
How can we explain the development—or equally the non-development—of professional norms in a particular case? In this paper I present a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that motivate the construction or continuance of a professional ethos. These may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective service-users or clients, and the general public as interested third parties (perhaps operating through various mechanisms of government). The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: including traditions and stories, the application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of developing and nourishing a social role-identity, and so on. I show there can be a gap where supply cannot meet demand (as is arguably the case in the current-day ‘professionalization’ of financial advisers), but also that there can be a mismatch between the content of the ethos called for by different demanders, and that capable of being sustained by different supply-side materiel.
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Alan Chenoweth (with D McAuliffe)
Griffith University
Inter-professional ethics in environmental practice
Environmental assessment and management requires a team approach to complex issues, drawing upon expertise and opinions from diverse professions, with different ethical frameworks. Multidisciplinary teams, whether in private consultancy or public agencies, analyse technical risks of environmental and social impacts, and weigh these against the likely benefits, taking into consideration economic and political factors. The process of EIA (environmental impact assessment) and the balances sought in ESD (ecologically sustainable development) involve value judgments, with opportunities for team members to contribute different perspectives. These values may be drawn from various sources: professional codes of practice, group socialisation processes within professions and workplaces, environmental ethics and eco-activism, role models and personal morality. A framework for respectful collaboration between different professions, developed by McAuliffe (2014) for the social health and human services, can also be applied to multi-disciplinary environmental teams, based on mutual understanding of the paradigms and values of the professions involved. The authors compare the codes of ethics of science, engineering and planning professions in Australia, with case study examples and implications for multi-disciplinary collaboration, as a guide for team conversations around ethical dilemmas in environmental projects.
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Lesley Chenoweth (with P Jervis-Tracey, D McAuliffe, & D Sauvage)
Griffith University
E-professionalism and social media: navigating professional and personal spaces
The use and misuse of online communication and social media by professional’s impacts on the effective delivery of services, and workplace productivity. Compromised integrity among these professions also impacts on the wellbeing of vulnerable service users. Social media use has both positive and negative impacts on productivity, the nature of which remain poorly understood. Risks associated with social media in the workplace include wasted time; reputational harm; increased information security risks, and the risk of blurred and violated boundaries that lead to increased burden of costs associated with complaints about misconduct. A quality reputation in the eyes of the public is especially important for health, protective, education and social care services. Such a reputation drives public confidence, and can influence perceptions of international expertise. Any level of compromise of these perceptions flows into lost productivity and competitiveness in complex ways. This paper explores the key themes and gaps in current research about the use and misuse of social media by professionals. It discusses the ways in which public confidence in the integrity of professionals is being favoured or jeopardised; how different professions define and manage appropriate or inappropriate online conduct; and how this informs the notion of ‘e-professionalism’.
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Tim DareUniversity of Auckland
Preliminary assumptions for an ethics for the era of bi-data and predictive analytics?
I am interested the plausibility of some preliminary assumptions which might frame an attempt to develop an ethics for the use of predictive analytics. Those assumptions include:
- That there will be common ethical problems raised by every predictive tool (all tools generate false positives for instance), ethical problems raised by most tools (such as threats to privacy), and ethical problems that depend upon particular applications (the availability of effective interventions and the risks of stigmatisation in child protection for example). A comprehensive ethic will address problems of all three sorts
- That we need a taxonomy of areas in which big data is and is likely to be applied – perhaps social policy (child protection, criminal justice, health, education, etc.,), medical (personalized medicine), business, and others (including sport), and that those areas will raise different ethical challenges.
- That there are ethically significant distinctions between a) types of data collection (electronic vs. paper collections), b) level of identification (de-identified v identifiable), and c) level of intrusion (meta-data vs. content rich) that require different responses if used in predictive analytics.
- That it is important to distinguish between ethical costs entailed by predictive modeling – those costs which are inevitable if such modeling is introduced – and those which depend upon and might be mitigated or eliminated by implementation decisions.
- That ethical issues can often be addressed or mitigated by perhaps surprising implementation strategies. Ensuring that interventions are beneficial even to the incorrectly classified, for instance, may alter the ethical significance of inevitable false positives.
- In many cases, there is an unavoidable but overlooked comparative aspect to the ethical assessment of predictive analytics. It is important to consider whether predictive risk modeling is being introduced to answer questions that have been addressed by other strategies and if so, how, from an ethical perspective, such modeling compares with those alternatives.
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Ian DittmerAuckland District Health Board
Limiting Access to the Deceased Donor Kidney Transplant Waiting List
In New Zealand there are over 600 patients waiting for a kidney transplant from a deceased donor. Less than 100 kidneys become available for transplant each year. A substantial number of patients will become too unwell to transplant or die while waiting for a kidney transplant. Most patients with kidney failure would benefit from a kidney transplant in terms of length and quality of life. The New Zealand renal transplant subcommittee decided that it would be appropriate to limit access to the deceased donor waiting list to those who were predicted to have a greater than 80% likelihood of surviving for 5 years after transplant. I will argue that this very mechanistic approach to rationing is more appropriate than suggested approaches that look at patients' worth or value to society.
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Ian Gibson
RE-examining the Model Litigant Guidelines
Despite contemporary mythology, the concept of the government as a model litigant, and the government-made rules relating to that concept, only arose in the mid 1990s as part of the outsourcing of legal services by the Commonwealth Government. The courts have continued to apply general principles of fairness rather than these internal government directives, but remain under pressure to change. In any case, the guidelines themselves are sloppily worded and not fit for a purpose more than well-intentioned guidance to government agencies.
- - -
Bligh Grant (with Joseph Drew, Bligh Grant, & Josie Fisher)
University of Technology Sydney
Can the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) be used to escape the interminable ‘economics’ versus ‘community’ argument in council consolidation?
Despite the inherently lowly status of local government, debates surrounding municipal amalgamation programs are often hotly contested. Usually such debates oscillate between arguments in favour of amalgamation grounded in an ethic of welfare maximisation, set against the desire to retain extant communities grounded in rights-based justifications. In this discussion we examine this interminable debate using the Principle of Double Effect (PDE), which squarely confronts the conflict between so-called economic ‘imperatives’ and ethical ‘oughts’. We argue that consistent oversight of PDE is a tenable explanation of undesirable outcomes arising from amalgamations, leading us to suggest current proposals to consolidate almost fifty percent of councils in New South Wales (NSW) Australia as unlikely to succeed. Further, we explore the application of PDE to the public policy domain more generally.
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Marco GrixUniversity of Auckland
The (Unpopular) Virtue of Thrift
Currently, thrift is not a popular virtue. Part of the reason why thrift is not favoured much is surely its narrow construal: while the meaning of thrift used to be directly linked to human thriving in the broadest sense, throughout the past five+ centuries its use became more and more restricted. Most contemporaries understand it as sparing use of money or, worse, as miserliness. I intend to turn back time and broaden the meaning of thrift. Abstractly construed as the virtue that concerns the stewardship of assets and resources for the purpose of long-term flourishing, I will consider the end(s) of thrift, its asset/resource scope, its resource priorities, and the concrete forms that our stewardship may take.
- - -
Matthew HammertonAustralian National University
Analogical reasoning in ethics
Applied ethicists often appear to argue by analogy. For example, Thomson’s violinist case applied to abortion, Singer’s pond case applied to duties to aid the poor, and Rachels’ Smith and Jones case applied to active euthanasia, are three famous moral arguments that are widely interpreted as arguments by analogy. In this talk I argue that it is a mistake to interpret these arguments as arguments by analogy. They are better understood as ‘moral consistency arguments’, a different species of argument altogether. I then show the payoff for seeing these arguments as moral consistency arguments; we are in a better position to assess their plausibility and produce relevant criticisms.
- - -
Howard Harris
University of South Australia
Sustainability, intergenerational justice and love
This paper will canvas the contemporary issue of sustainability from two directions. First to consider the impact of widespread pluralism on the ability to construct a consensus for either the needs of future generations or those which the current generation can maintain without compromising the future. I will examine the relevance of social choice theory, especially as propounded by Amartya Sen (2003), as a means of generating consensus amongst competing values.
Second to explore the relevance of virtue ethics, particularly the virtues of love and justice, as a way of engaging individuals in the action of sustainability. This will build on recent papers in which I have described sustainability as a work of justice, something that each person has to work at, and that if this is done as the development of justice in community, justice as a practice as MacIntyre might have it, then there will be benefits for contemporary society, for individuals and into the future.
The ability of virtue to provide a way forward in a contemporary, pluralist society will be explored in the conclusion, bringing the two parts of the paper together.
- - -
Evdokia Kalaitzidis
Flinders University
Residents’ decision-making, choice and control in aged care facilities
In Australia the aged care system is undergoing major government-initiated reforms and is moving towards Consumer Directed Care (CDC). Proposed reforms aim to maximise informed decision-making, choice and control for older Australians. In the light of anticipated changes to the aged care system, we conducted a study of resident decision-making, choice and control in two major aged care facilities across four sites in Adelaide. The aim was to explore residents' views and experiences.
Residents were interviewed. A thematic analysis was conducted of the residents' statements. Two major themes were identified as critical in decision-making, choice and control, the physical environment and the social environment. Crucial to the residents were opportunities for privacy, communal engagement both within and outside the facility, opportunities for productivity in order to increase feelings of value and usefulness, opportunities to negotiate with staff and opportunities to participate and contribute to systems of governance. The residents reported that there were significant barriers to the optimum uptake of opportunities for participation and governance, particularly with regard to negotiations with staff.
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Stephen Kemp
University of Queensland
Contemporary Issues in Childcare as a Profession
The paid care of children and assisting with their development is increasingly coming to resemble a professional activity. The commodification of child care has tended to create a profession of carers of children, not only by virtue of more formalized qualifications and role descriptions for carers, but also by establishing a framework within which a profession potentially may be practised. This paper examines how this process of professionalization is creating tension between the traditional nurturing role of child care and the more formal requirements of a “professional” carer. It also shows how paid child caring increasingly conforms in many respects with various criteria commonly associated with a professional activity. This has significant implications not only for the care providers but also for those who are receiving care, the children and their families. It also has important implications for society itself.
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Fred Kroon
University of Auckland
Consent and the ethics of Postmortem Sperm Retrieval
Post-mortem sperm retrieval was first described in 1980 and refers to the collection of sperm from a recently deceased man for the purpose of posthumous reproduction. Since 1980, advances in assisted reproductive technology, in particular, the high success rates attributed to intracytoplasmic sperm injection, have substantially increased the feasibility of this procedure. With the increased feasibility, questions about its ethical justification have become more important than ever. Unsurprisingly, the most popular approaches place heavy emphasis on agent autonomy, insisting on the necessity of consent on the part of the man, whether explicit consent prior to death, or implied consent based on evidence about his beliefs and intentions. This paper examines the case made in a recent paper for a more liberal notion of consent: presumed consent, accompanied by an opt-out provision.
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Kenneth MacPherson
University of Auckland
Martial Micrographia: what are the infinitesimally small elements that transform Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick Makers into Good Soldiers?
A combat veteran of the Crimean War observed that "[i]n military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x … That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute." What transforms peaceful civilians hopelessly disinclined to go around murdering one another into Good Soldiers willing to cross entire continents in order to virtuously slaughter the enemy du jour? Is the “greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger” simply courage? My PhD research indicates that such is not the case. Further, Aristotle’s popular explanations for courage / bravery / cowardice are based upon Greek legends and mythology (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), but they do not tally with historical reality and are therefore irrelevant to understanding the “spirit of an army”. As the unknown x is extraordinarily complex, the objective of my presentation is to merely present a ‘Reconnaissance Report’ of many surprising research discoveries uncovered thus far.
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Steve McKinlay
Wellington Institute of Technology
The Ethics of Data Convergence and Predictive Modelling
This paper I considers some of the ethical implications regarding the collection of very large data sets, the sharing and convergence of those sets of data and the use of predictive modelling. To date, outside technological communities, this emerging area of convergence has received little attention. However, it is an issue that should give us cause for concern. I will argue that whilst privacy has historically received a great deal of attention within computing and information ethics circles, we are on the verge of a new area of concern, one that will go right to the heart of freewill itself. The use of large scale data sets in conjunction with predictive modelling already exists, and I will argue, this new emerging area of technological convergence deserves significant ethical attention.
The paper begins by briefly exploring the concept of logical data convergence. Predictive risk modelling will also be briefly explained and I will then provide some examples where it is either being used or proposals for use are being considered. I then provide some future scenarios where large government agency administrative data sets might be combined with other data collection methods made possible by interaction with social media, loyalty schemes, and interactions with smart devices and associated apps. I examine some of the ethical concerns and finally try to provide some precautionary measures that might be taken.
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Stephan MillettCurtin University
How should the concept of a profession be understood, and is the notion of a practice helpful in understanding it?
This work-in-progress paper asks whether it is helpful to consider a profession to be a practice and to what extent this meshes with the idea that ‘profession’ is a moral concept. It first notes a distinction in the literature between practices as regularities in the social world and practices as normative activities. It then examines Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as an activity in pursuit of internal and external goods, finds that MacIntyre’s articulation of the concept is not sufficient to describe what it is to be a profession, and seeks to supplement this with ideas from others, primarily Seumas Miller and Michael Davis. This supplementation, however, still leaves open the question of the origin of a profession’s authority (or licence) to use what can be called the ‘dangerous knowledge’ that is at the heart of what differentiates the work of professions from other occupations. In pursuing this idea of a licence, the paper suggests that Julius Kovesi’s ‘formal element’ and Robert Veatch’s use of a social contract might be useful.
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Nicholas Munn
University of Waikato
Evaluating competing behavioural standards in online communities
How we should behave online is an issue that is deceptively complex. The online community, whether in a professional or a personal context, is much broader than the communities in which all but the youngest of us grew up. As such, the standards of propriety in this space can differ, in ways unexpected and dramatic, from those we are used to. In this paper I ask whether and when we are under an obligation to conform to the expectations of the dominant groups within the online communities we participate in, and argue that there are at least some times when it is defensible to conform to one’s own local norms and expectations rather than subordinating these to the broader online community.
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Giuseppe (Joseph) Naimo
University of Notre Dame (Australia, Fremantle)
Transformation: an examination of the virtuous character from the perspective of Process Philosophy
The virtuous character and the ethical agent represent mutually inclusive terms, neither of which independently, in the Aristotelian tradition, is considered an innate quality. Virtues, if not innate, are contingent; but what makes each instantiation recognisably general? Normative ethics in this sense is a dynamic process and similarly process philosophy is based on the principle that existence is dynamic and that it should be the primary focus of any philosophical account of reality. I argue that the transformative process is equally as important as the end result of realising the virtuous dispositional traits. An important criticism of virtue ethics is the focus on character and not rules such as industry practices and codes found in the professions. Using process philosophy as a methodological approach to examine virtue ethical agency and the transformative process involved in its realisation, elicits certain insights that enables the conceptual development of a more robust account of virtue ethics. The aim then based on this nuanced rendition is to provide the groundwork, in part already commenced by others, to extend its application into areas of organisational and intergenerational ethics.
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Anna Sawyer
University of Western Australia
Private i: Privacy, Intimacy, and Social Media
This paper explores the implications of social media on the nature of privacy, arguments for the protection of it, and in turn how we conceive of ourselves in relation to others. The boundaries which traditionally delineate relationships according to the level of personal information that is shared, or even aspects of our personality that is revealed to others, has been eroded and blurred. People who are not yet or not intimate are knowing intimate information about each other thus erasing the line between intimate and non-intimate relationships. This erasure has implications for both our social and personal identities. It may be changing how we conceive of ourselves and who we are. This is turn has further implications for intimacy and indeed for relationships of all kinds.
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Vanessa Scholes
Open Polytechnic / Kuratini Tuwhera
Risky business – the ethics of judging individuals based on group statistics
Decision-makers representing organisations can be interested in predicting the risk that an applicant will impose a significant cost on the organisation or on other people. For example, parole boards consider information predicting the likelihood that a prisoner will re-offend once released; insurance companies calculate the risk that an insured will make a claim; and education institutions are interesting in predicting which applicants for tertiary study are a higher risk for dropping out or failing. Decision-makers can use evidence we might think of as ‘individualised’ to assess risk, such as personal testimony, past achievements or demonstrations of practices and competencies. Conversely, decision-makers can use ‘naked statistical evidence’ (Schauer, 2003), assessing people according to the statistics for group categories such as age, gender, ethnicity or residence. Philosophers who have examined this choice have presented ethical argument to support judging persons on the basis of ‘naked statistical evidence’. I will explain these arguments and where I think they are lacking, and sketch a model for conceptualising the ethics of organisational judgements of applicants.
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Vanessa Schouten
Massey University
When the Presumption of Innocence Does Not Apply
The presumption of innocence (PoI) - according to which we ought to treat alleged wrongdoers as innocent until proven guilty - is usually understood as a principle which applies primarily to the obligations state actors have in legal contexts. According to a narrow reading of the PoI, the principle applies only within the context of the criminal trial itself. A broader reading of the PoI holds that it applies to the entire criminal process (including, for example, pre-trial detention).
But the PoI is frequently invoked in order to make even broader claims - claims about how private citizens (those not acting as agents of the state) ought to treat alleged wrongdoers outside of legal contexts. For example, in May 2014, A.C. Grayling responded to a call for speakers to boycott the Oxford Union while its President was under investigation for rape by declining to participate in any such boycott on the grounds that doing so would violate the PoI.
I argue that contra Grayling, the PoI imposes no special obligations on private citizens acting in non-legal contexts, and so the broadest reading of what the PoI might require of us ought to be rejected.
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Professional principles and the concept of a profession
There is a strong case for the view that the principles of professional ethics are built into the concept of a profession. But when this thesis is examined more closely, it appears that one principle -- professional beneficence -- is seen as part of the definition of a profession, while other equally basic principles are not so seen. Two principles are especially notable in their absence: the principle of non-maleficence ("Do no harm") and the principle of respect for client autonomy. This presentation will document these claims and discuss some possible explanations.
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Waikato
Altruism and generosity in surrogate motherhood and organ donation
In the UK, Australia and New Zealand, only unpaid or ‘altruistic’ surrogacy and organ donation is permitted. A commonly held view is that the requirement of altruistic motivation allows us to avoid the objection that by paying surrogates and donors we risk exploiting them. But altruistic surrogacy and donation can be exploitative as well. An altruistic act is supposed to be a selfless act – altruism involves a desire to help others, often to a self-sacrificing degree. The requirement of altruism therefore goes hand in hand with a failure to acknowledge the agent’s legitimate needs for self-care and also makes her vulnerable to exploitation. Many surrogates report being abandoned to cope as best they can after the birth, while surrogates who receive gifts from intended parents often have their motives regarded with suspicion. We argue that encouraging the virtue of generosity is preferable to altruism, since generosity is consistent with reciprocation as well as legitimate concern for self.
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Katharine WallisUniversity of Auckland
Me too, me too: Drawing attention to ethical issues in general practice
Most health care is delivered in primary care settings, in New Zealand mostly in general practice. But in the bioethical literature little attention is paid to ethical concerns in general practice. This paper explores the changing nature of general practice and some of the ethical concerns that are flying under the radar.
