Aug 29, · Ethics in educational research, therefore, is part of a continuous process of learning and development in research and, therefore, constitutes an issue of pedagogy. The first part of the paper explores the emergence of ethical review boards in social science and educational research and illustrates some of the problematic issues that have arisen of research promote a variety of other important moral and social values, such as social responsibility, human rights, animal welfare, compliance with the law, and Most research has assumed that SMEs are resource-constrained entities, as the existing research in international business is focused on the corporate social responsibility of large multinational
Code of Ethics: English
What justifies our holding one person over another morally responsible for a past action? Why am I justified in having a special prudential concern for one particular future person over all others? Why do many of us think that maximizing the good within a single life is perfectly acceptable, but maximizing the good across lives is wrong? For these and other normative questions, it looks like any answer we come up with will have to make essential reference to personal identity.
So, for instance, it seems we are justified in holding X responsible for some past ethics and social responsibility research papers only if X is identical to the person who performed that action. Further, it seems I am justified in my special concern for some future person only if he will be me.
Finally, many of us think that while maximization within a life affects only one person, a metaphysical unity, maximization across lives affects many different, metaphysically distinct, persons, and so the latter is wrong insofar as it ignores this fundamental separateness of persons.
These are among the many issues relevant to an investigation into the relation between personal identity and ethics.
Among the self-regarding concerns for which personal identity seems relevant are those about the nature and grounds of survival and immortality, rational anticipation, advance directives, and general prudential concern.
Among the other-regarding concerns for which personal identity seems relevant are those about the nature and grounds of moral responsibility, compensation, interpersonal moral relations, abortion and embryonic research, population ethics, and therapeutic treatments for dissociative identity disorders.
A leading approach to exploring the relation between identity and ethics, then, is to start with an investigation into the nature of personal identity and see how conclusions in that metaphysical realm might apply to these sorts of practical concerns. After starting with a brief discussion of notable historical accounts taking this approach, we will do so as well, surveying the main theories of personal identity on offer and then seeing what, if anything, they might imply for several self-regarding and other-regarding ethical concerns.
We will then turn to discuss several new approaches to discovering the relation between personal identity and ethics, alternatives that have breathed fresh life into the debate. For the most part, ethics and social responsibility research papers, the philosophical history of the relation between identity and ethics up until the 17 th Century is about the relation between identity and self-regarding practical concerns. Plato is a prime example. He held in the Phaedo that I and all persons will survive the death and destruction of my body insofar as what I essentially am is a simple, immaterial soul, something whose own essence is being alive.
This yields the direct implication that, insofar as I will survive the death of my body, I am justified in anticipating post-mortem experiences. In other words, I am essentially a union of body and soul, and so even if my soul lives on, and even if it is capable of having experiences, I am not justified in anticipating them given that my body — an essential component of me — will have disintegrated, ethics and social responsibility research papers. For both, however, identity is thought to be what grounds prudential concern: the difference between Lucretius and Plato is only over what identity consists in although for a contrasting interpretation of Lucretius, see Martin and Barresi It was not until John Locke that there was an explicit attempt to connect personal identity with broader ethical concerns.
This means that an account of the identity of persons across time will have forensic — normative — implications. And so it does. Locke's account of personal identity appealed to what seems a crucial condition of moral agency, namely, self-reflective consciousness. This is what we might call a relational account of identity, for it maintains that persons at different times are identical to one another in virtue of some relation s between them, where such relations might be psychological or ethics and social responsibility research papers. Locke thus rejected what we might call a substance-based view of identity, which maintains that persons at different times are identical to one another in virtue of their consisting in one and the same substance.
Now once we have Locke's relational account of identity in hand, we can see what implications it will have for various normative issues. Start with prudential rationality. On Locke's view, I am appropriately concerned, both for the past stage of myself to whom my consciousness extends, but also to some future person — me — to whom my consciousness will extend.
This is the mechanism by which I would be justified, for example, in anticipating the afterlife, just in case at the resurrection there will be someone to whom my present consciousness extends.
This person would be me even though he might have a very different body than I have now Ibid, ethics and social responsibility research papers. It should be unimportant to me, on this view, what substance body or soul I find my consciousness — myself — attached to.
The key for Locke is that what grounds both prudential concern and moral responsibility is the personal identity relation, a relation uniquely unifying temporally distinct person-stages via consciousness. And it was because Locke prized apart personal identity from biological identity, and any other sort of substance-based identity, that later philosophers like Joseph Butler and Thomas Reid objected to it.
In other words, I can remember only my own experiences, but it is not my memory of an experience that makes it mine; rather, ethics and social responsibility research papers, I remember it only because it's already mine. So while memory can reveal my identity with some past experiencer, ethics and social responsibility research papers does not make that experiencer me.
What I am remembering, insists Butler, are the experiences of a substance, namely, the same substance that constitutes me now. Similarly, Reid affirms Butler's objection and then adds a few of his own.
One is that Locke's criterion implies the contradictory position that someone could both be and not be identical to some past stage, an objection illustrated by the Brave Officer Case. Suppose that as he is stealing the enemy's standard, a forty-year-old brave officer remembers stealing apples from a neighbor's orchard when he was ten, and then suppose further that when he is eighty years old, a retired general, he remembers stealing the enemy's standard as a brave officer but no longer remembers stealing the neighbor's apples.
On Locke's account the general would have to be both identical to the apple-stealer because of the transitivity of the identity relation: he's identical to the brave officer, who himself is identical to the apple-stealer and not identical to the apple-stealer given that he has no direct memory of the boy's experiences Reid— Another objection is based precisely on the link between identity and ethics: how can identity — sameness — be based on a relation consciousness that changes from moment to moment?
But such an implication must be absurd. And Butler concurs, expanding the point to include considerations of prudential concern:. Both Reid and Butler, then, wind up rejecting Locke's relational view in favor of a substance-based view of identity.
What Butler and Reid retain in common with Locke, though, is the belief that identity grounds certain of our patterns of concern, both prudential and moral. What they disagree over is just what identity consists in, ethics and social responsibility research papers. Notice, though, the methodological assumption here: a theory of identity's plausibility depends significantly on how well it accounts for our practical concerns.
So if Locke's view were right, say Reid and Butler, it would require a host of radical changes to our practices of responsibility attribution and prudential deliberation.
But, continues the argument, because making such changes would be crazy — we are strongly committed to the correctness of our current ways of doing things — Locke's view cannot be right. And although Locke disagrees that the implications of his view are crazy, he does agree to the basic methodology.
And this is a methodological assumption that has been retained by most theorists on identity and ethics since. Both Butler and Reid believe Locke's view implies that no one exists beyond the present moment, i. But because consciousness changes from moment to moment, X 's consciousness could never be identical to Y 's. Instead, X and Y are, on Locke's actual view, identical just in case X and Y are related via consciousness, i.
But if that is the view, then identity could be just as ethics and social responsibility research papers, fixed, and precise as both Butler and Reid seem to want, for Y could be identical to X only in case that relation obtains, no matter how strongly or weakly. Nevertheless, even if this objection to Locke is thwarted, the others remain in force. For one thing, memory does seem to presuppose personal identity, and so cannot constitute a criterion of it.
For another, identity is a transitive relation, while memory isn't, so the latter can't be a criterion of the former. Finally, there is the obvious worry that identity seems to persist through the loss of memory: it's hard to believe that I would cease to exist ethics and social responsibility research papers I to undergo amnesia. It's for all these reasons that contemporary theorists working in the Lockean tradition have had to make significant changes to the theory to make it viable.
After that, we will discuss the relevance of both souls and a four-dimensionalist ontology to the issues at hand. By far the most popular view of personal identity, until quite recently, ethics and social responsibility research papers, has been a significantly amended version of Locke's relational memory criterion. To make such a view plausible, though, the three objections just detailed need to be addressed.
Start, then, with Butler's complaint that memory presupposes identity, that I can remember only my own experiences, so memory just reveals to me my identity relation to some past experiencer and cannot constitute that relation. Following Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfitone can introduce a more inclusive memory relation, called quasi-memoryor q-memory, defined so that it does not presuppose identity. I have a q-memory of some past experience just in case that experience occurred to someone and my memory of the experience was ethics and social responsibility research papers in the right sort of way by the experience I now remember, ethics and social responsibility research papers.
Regular memory, then, would just be a subset of q-memory applying to ordinary instances when I was the person to whom the remembered experience occurredand q-memory could be the relevant relation incorporated into the theory of identity in a way that avoids Butler's objection. The second ethics and social responsibility research papers was Reid's, about transitivity of identity in the Brave Officer case. What gets Locke in trouble is that memories fade, ethics and social responsibility research papers, so someone may no longer be capable of having direct memories of what is clearly his earlier life.
But one may certainly have direct ethics and social responsibility research papers of some past stage that itself had direct memories of an earlier stage, and so on, until every stage in the life is linked by a chain of overlapping direct memories. What one can then insert into the criterion of identity across time is a continuity of direct q- memories, ethics and social responsibility research papers, so that the retired general is the same person as the apple-stealer insofar as he directly remembers the experiences of the brave officer, who himself directly remembers the experiences of the apple-stealer.
Of course, one direct memory of some past experience won't be sufficient to establish identity, it seems. Suppose I volunteered to have your memory trace of walking in Antarctica implanted in me and I myself had never been thereethics and social responsibility research papers, and I woke up having that q-memory of walking in the bitter cold and deep snow. Surely this would not make me you, even though there is a direct memory connection between us, so theorists taking this route will talk about the need for strong memory connections, where this just consists in a significant number of such connections Parfit—, — The third objection was that someone could persist through a loss of memory, a claim Locke's view denies.
What can be done to render the Lockean view more plausible, then, is to incorporate more psychological features than just memory into the identity-preserving relation. So not only are there present-past relations of memory that are relevant to my identity, but there may also be present-future relations such as ethics and social responsibility research papers fulfilled in action, relations that persist across time such as beliefs, goals, and desires, and resemblance relations such as similarity of character.
This criterion of identity and its variants has been taken to fit particularly well with our practical concerns, both self-regarding and other-regarding. For instance, what seems to matter for self-concern and rational anticipation is that my psychological life continue.
Anticipation and self-concern are psychological states, as are their objects future experiencesso a theory of identity that ties those states together by virtue of tying distinct stages of me together seems initially quite plausible.
In addition, concerns having to do with moral responsibility are also about the relations between various psychological states — including intentions to perform actions, memories of past doings, desires and beliefs explaining actions, and so forth — and so if personal identity is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, the Psychological Criterion provides a plausible and satisfying account of that condition: I cannot be responsible for the actions of some person if I'm not the inheritor of that person's psychology.
What could motivate alternative approaches to our identity, then, given the seeming successes of the Psychological Criterion? One important problem stems from worries about our essence.
For instance, I am many things, including an adult, a professor, a driver, a voter, and so forth. None of these is my essence, however, for I either did or could exist without being them. If we could identify my essence, however and generally the essence of individuals like mewe would be able to identify the conditions for my persistence across time as well.
Now the Psychological Criterion seems to imply that personhood is my essence, that I couldn't exist without being a person, and given that personhood is a psychological matter, psychological continuity is what preserves my identity.
But as Eric Olson and others have pointed out, this seems quite wrong Olson a, b, DeGrazia a, b, CarterSnowdonWiggins After all, just as I was once a teenager, and before that an adolescent and a child, wasn't I also an infant, and ultimately a fetus?
Furthermore, suppose I were ethics and social responsibility research papers a horrible accident and went into a permanent vegetative state PVS.
Wouldn't I then be in a PVS? If so, then if personhood necessarily involves having a certain sort of developed psychology e. If personhood isn't my essence, then what is? The most plausible answer seems to be that I am a biological organism, a human animal. And if this is my essence, it will also provide the conditions of my persistence across time. Note that Y may or may not be a person, which allows that X might be one and the same as a fetus or someone in a PVS.
This view is also sometimes called animalism e. Consider, then, this criterion of our identity. While it obviously does well with the essence question, it seems to do less well when we consider its relation to ethics.
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, time: 58:03Personal Identity and Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
of research promote a variety of other important moral and social values, such as social responsibility, human rights, animal welfare, compliance with the law, and Dec 20, · Among the other-regarding concerns for which personal identity seems relevant are those about the nature and grounds of moral responsibility, compensation, interpersonal moral relations, abortion and embryonic research, population ethics, and therapeutic treatments for Mar 21, · Social responsibility, as it applies to business, is known as corporate social responsibility (CSR), and is becoming a more prominent area
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