Endorsing Negative Intergroup Attitudes to Justify Failure To Confront Prejudice

While most people believe they would speak up against prejudice, many fail to do so. We identify a harmful consequence of such inaction through examining its impact on bystanders’ own prejudice. Across four studies in two countries (N=1003), using a behavioral paradigm and experimental pretest-posttest design, participants witnessed prejudice and discrimination against an outgroup minority (Jewish/Roma in Hungary, Muslim/Latinx in US). Drawing on self-justification theories, we predicted and found across studies 1-3, that those who had an opportunity but did not confront, endorsed more negative intergroup attitudes following the incident both compared to their own prior attitudes and to control groups, i.e., those who witnessed the same prejudice but had no opportunity to confront, and those who did not to confront different (non-intergroup) prejudice. In study 4, the proposed effect occurred only among those who initially valued confronting. We suggest that failure to speak up amplifies prejudice in society.

Methods used to attribute costs avoided from pharmacist interventions in acute care: A scoping review

Purpose Cost-avoidance studies are common in pharmacy practice literature. This scoping review summarizes, critiques, and identifies current limitations of the methods that have been used to determine cost avoidance associated with pharmacists’ interventions in acute care settings. Methods An Embase and MEDLINE search was conducted to identify studies that estimated cost avoidance from pharmacist interventions in acute care settings. We included studies with human participants and articles published in English from July 2010 to January 2021, with the intent of summarizing the evidence most relevant to contemporary practice. Results The database search retrieved 129 articles, of which 39 were included. Among these publications, less than half (18 of 39) mentioned whether the researchers assigned a probability for the occurrence of a harmful consequence in the absence of an intervention; thus, a 100% probability of a harmful consequence was assumed. Eleven of the 39 articles identified the specific harm that would occur in the absence of intervention. No clear methods of estimating cost avoidance could be identified for 7 studies. Among all 39 included articles, only 1 attributed both a probability to the potential harm and identified the cost specific to that harm. Conclusion Cost-avoidance studies of pharmacists’ interventions in acute care settings over the last decade have common flaws and provide estimates that are likely to be inflated. There is a need for guidance on consistent methodology for such investigations for reporting of results and to confirm the validity of their economic implications.

Fundamentals of the Evaluation of Corruption Combating Efficiency

The article considers the essential and instrumental bases for the anti-corruption measures effectiveness evaluating. The analysis shows that the indicators used do not fully reflect the essence of corruption — the harmful consequence which it leads to in the areas of corrupt officials’ activities. As a result, the applied performance indicators can at best characterize the effectiveness of corrupt officials’ network connections temporary disruption, but not the elimination of the causes corruption itself. It is concluded that the analysis of the anti-corruption effectiveness must be based on the fact that it depends on the authorized bodies activity. Public opinion polls do not take into account that the range of their perception of corruption is wider than the set of official reporting indicators. As a result, according to the reported indicators, there is an increase in the anti-corruption effectiveness, while according to public surveys, the effectiveness decreases.

Unexpected Consequences

The grounding assumptions and conceptualizations of bacteria and gendered technology are the focus of chapter 1. The term “biocatalytic technology” provides a way to think through this relationship between bacterium and technology as active co-agents. The tampon, conceptualized as an inert plug to stop up the fluids of a mechanical body, instead served as a catalyst, prompting bacterium that were at best in stasis to begin producing toxins. Individually both the tampon and bacterium were neutral, but due to ecological circumstances they triggered a harmful consequence. Constituent bacteria, menstruating bodies, and a reactive rather than inert technology converged to create the ideal environment for the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium to live and flourish in some women. Opportunistic, the bacterium became the unintended user of the tampon technology.

Criminal redress in cases of environmental victimization: a defence1

In recent years, growing concern has been voiced in the environmental justice literature regarding the ability of criminal justice mechanisms to adequately address environmental harms, especially when such harms are perpetrated by large corporations. Commentators argue that criminal justice processes are often ill-suited to the particular features of environmental cases, where the chain of causation between wrongful actions/omissions and environmentally harmful consequence can be very complex and extend over the course of many years. As an alternative, many such commentators now favour the adoption of more administrative resolutions when corporate bodies breach their environmental obligations (which may or may not amount to ‘crimes’). Others favour the use of civil sanction regimes, which is now the preferred approach of the UK Environment Agency. In this paper I will argue that the debate on how best to respond to environmental harm has so far neglected to factor in the perspective of the victims of those harms and, in particular, their need for redress. I will argue that by incorporating such a perspective, as opposed to focusing largely on questions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the criminal justice route still has much to recommend it, especially in relation to the provision of meaningful redress and/or compensation to the victims of environmental harm. Consequently, this paper will provide a victimological defence of the criminal justice process, and of criminal penalties, in their application to cases of environmental harms.

Practical reasoning and intentional action

In the criminal law it is common to distinguish between motive and intention. One of the main reasons for so doing is that in criminal law we are concerned with the wrongfulness of an action in itself and not the agent's own moral evaluation of that action. For this reason, intention has become central to assessing criminal liability. But a similar problem arises with regard to the term intention. This is because whether or not an agent intends a particular consequence depends upon whether or not it was one of the reasons (that is, explanatory reasons) for which she acted. However, we ought to be interested in the reasons that actually applied to those actions (guiding reasons). Hence, the concept of oblique intention applies where the agent realised that a harmful consequence of her action was virtually certain even though it was not a reason for her action. Some writers suggest that this problem can be solved by including consequences brought about intentionally as well as intended consequences within the concept of intention. And this, they argue, is because the use of the adverb is (either conceptually or causally) related to our moral evaluation of an action. In this essay I show that this is not so. The concept of intention is wholly descriptive. Consequently, we require a suitable supplement or alternative to the concept of intention to reflect the highest degree of moral responsibility for the harmful consequences of our actions.