Friday, January 22, 2010

Senior Fellow Michael Davis to give lecture, "Why You Have a Duty to Pay Even Higher Income Taxes."

Michael Davis, senior fellow at the Center for Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, will share his thoughts on the topic at a special lecture hosted by California State University, Bakersfield’s Kegley Institute of Ethics on Thursday, Jan. 28, at 7:00 p.m. His talk will present the argument, "Why you have a duty to pay even higher income taxes."

For more information, please visit the article appearing in the Kern Valley Sun from January 19, 2010.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Recent Biomedical Ethics Case

An article in the January 15th edition of the New York Times caught our director's eye recently. It describes a recent lawsuit filed by a former medical device executive who blew the whistle on his company Guidant after the company had for years told him to market stents that had been approved to treat digestive tract cancers to treat blood vessels in other parts of the body. These devices (called biliary stents), which have only approved by the FDA for use in the digestive tract, have not been approved for these other, off-label uses. Studies have shown that injury or death can occur in patients as result of device malfunctions when the stents were used off-label.

Click here to read the fully article, "Lawsuit Challenges Marketing of Stents" by Barry Meier. New York Times. January 14, 2010

"Ethics in the Details" in IIT Magazine

Michael Davis, senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, appears in the winter 2010 issue of the IIT Magazine in an article discussing the "Ethics in the Details" project, a effort that seeks to integrate ethics into the graduate engineering curriculum through low-dose mini lessons by changing existing technical problems to include an ethical element. This project is generously funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Click here to read the full article from IIT Today.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

American Sociological Association - Teaching Ethics Throughout the Curriculum

The American Sociological Association's Task Force on Teaching Ethics has developed a web resource dedicated to help sociology faculty with teaching students about professional ethics from early in their undergraduate careers all the way through graduate school.

Teaching Ethics throughout the Curriculum consists of case studies, discussion questions, bibliographies, and web links that can be quickly downloaded or printed for use in sociology classrooms or by department chairs. It is a very good resource for faculty interested in new cases to use for discussing the American Sociological Association's Code of Ethics, or for students or practitioners interested in the kinds of ethical issues that come up in the daily research and practice of sociologists.