How Ethics in Public Health Administration Leadership Leverages Connectedness in the age of COVID 19

Ethics is critical in emergency response to public health and patient care in ways that create a variety of challenging dilemmas and decisions. Understanding ethical codes around medical care, especially during the emergence of COVID 19, has made leadership's role in perpetuating ethical organizational cultures in healthcare vital. Ethical leadership and ethical organizational cultures transform and unite social systems around everyday purposes of ethical decision-making, leveraging organizational connectedness. Leadership value systems mitigate subjectivity constituting ethical themes of moral character and virtues to advance organizational trust. Leadership value systems reduce subjectivity, forming ethical issues of moral character and virtues to promote organizational confidence and moral organizational decision-making. This paper employs the use of content analysis from the literature to take disjointed approaches and combine them into a cohesive understanding of leadership dynamics on organizational ethics in healthcare.

Physical Attractiveness Biases Judgments Pertaining to the Moral Domain of Purity

Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies ( N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity.

Nebuchadnezzar’s Mind and Memory in the Old English “Daniel”

As Mary Carruthers observes in her seminal Book of Memory, the cultivation of memory was considered a mark of superior ethics in the Middle Ages. She claims, for example, that “the choice to train one’s memory or not, for the ancients and medievals, was not a choice dictated by convenience: it was a matter of ethics. A person without a memory, if such a thing could be, is a person without moral character and, in a basic sense, without humanity” (Carruthers 14). In the present article, which aims to discuss the Old English biblical paraphrase Daniel, I argue that memory plays an important, if not essential, role in Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion. The poet expands on the biblical source, the Old Testament Book of Daniel, to depict the Babylonian king as commencing a process of rectification of the self by incorporating and internalizing the word of God, mediated in the poem by Daniel the prophet, as part of his self.

Ìwà l’ẹwà: Towards a Yorùbá Feminist Ethics

This paper explores a narrative path towards foregrounding what it calls a gender-relative morality as a core dimension of female subordination. It takes a feminist approach to ethics, which stresses specifically the political enterprise of eradicating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. The theoretical implications of Feminist narrative ethics is then applied to the philosophical imports of Yorùbá proverbs about women as a way to tease out how female subordination is grounded in Yorùbá ontology and ethics. Spe[1]cifically, the essay interrogates the ethical and aesthetical trajectory that leads from ìwà l’ẹwà (character is beauty), a Yoruba moral dictum, to ìwà l’ẹwà obìnrin ([good moral] character is a woman’s beauty). Within this transition, there is the possibility that the woman is excluded from the category of those properly referred to as ọmọlúwàbí.

Evidence against the “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype in Hadza hunter gatherers

People have an “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype whereby they make negative inferences about the moral character of people with craniofacial anomalies like scars. This stereotype is hypothesized to be a byproduct of adaptations for avoiding pathogens. However, evidence for the anomalous-is-bad stereotype comes from studies of European and North American populations; the byproduct hypothesis would predict universality of the stereotype. We presented 123 Hadza across ten camps pairs of morphed Hadza faces—each with one face altered to include a scar—and asked who they expected to be more moral and a better forager. Hadza with minimal exposure to other cultures chose at chance for both questions. Hadza with greater exposure to other cultures, however, expected the scarred face to be less moral and a better forager. These results suggest the anomalous-is-bad stereotype is culturally shared, providing evidence against a universal pathogen avoidance byproduct hypothesis.

Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

Honesty among lawyers: Moral character, game framing, and honest disclosures in negotiations

Lawyers have broad discretion in deciding how honestly to behave when negotiating. We propose that lawyers’ choices about whether to disclose information to correct misimpressions by opposing counsel are guided by their moral character and their cognitive framing of negotiation. To investigate this possibility, we surveyed 215 lawyers from across the United States, examining the degree to which honest disclosure is associated with lawyers’ moral character and their tendency to frame negotiation in game-like terms—a construal of negotiation that we label game framing. We hypothesize that the more that lawyers view negotiation through a game frame—that is, the more they view negotiation as an adversarial context with arbitrary and artificial rules—the less honest they will be in situations in which honest disclosure is not mandated by professional rules of conduct. We further hypothesize that lawyers with higher levels of moral character will apply a game frame to negotiation to a lesser degree than will lawyers with lower levels of moral character, and that honesty when negotiating will be higher when lawyers have higher versus lower levels of moral character. Our study results support these hypotheses. This work suggests that focusing on game-like aspects of negotiation can induce a less moral and ethical mindset. To the extent that teaching law students to “think like a lawyer” encourages them to adopt a game frame of negotiation, we can expect such training to reduce the likelihood of honest disclosure.