S. Miller

This article’s primary concern is with characterizing and distinguishing institutional corruption and institutional corrosion. While the concept of institutional corruption entails some degree of culpability on the part of institutional role occupants, this does not seem to be the case with institutional corrosion. The article outlines and motivates a prior definition of institutional corruption developed elsewhere to develop an account of the contrasting notion of institutional corrosion. Since both institutional corruption and institutional corrosion are typically the product of some form of collective action or omission on the part of multiple institutional role occupants, there is also a need to provide a serviceable notion of collective responsibility.

Conventions play a large part in our lives. Our mode of dress, manner of eating, and linguistic performances, for example, are all governed by conventions. In Parts A and B of the thesis, a theory of convention is provided. In Part C the primary concern is with the question of the conventionality of speech acts. ;Part C includes a discussion of the convention to truth-tell, and an attempt to develop a theory of assertion taking H. P. Grice's account of speaker-meaning as a starting point. ;The theory of convention put forward in Parts A and B arises out of a detailed treatment of David Lewis' book entitled, Convention. Lewis' theory analyses conventions in terms of preferences and expectations. For example, I drive on the left because I prefer to do so, given others do so,and I expect others to do so. In Parts A and B it is argued that: Lewis' preference structures need replacement. The notion of a collective end needs to be introduced. Convention followers' expectations depend on their having acquired "standing procedures" to conform. An important characteristic of such procedures is that if an agent A, has a standing procedure to X, then there is a presumption in favour of A's X-ing

In this paper I, firstly (section 1), distinguish between human rights, natural rights and institutional rights and argue that some so-called human rights, such as the right to life, are natural rights and others, such as the right to vote, are institutional rights. Secondly (section 2), I sketch my account of joint rights (developed in more detail elsewhere1) and apply it to two kinds of entities that are importantly different from one another and from individual human beings, namely, business corporations (section 3) and non-human animals (section 4). I do so to test the scope of joint rights in the context of the ascription of joint rights to human beings being uncontroversial (although the analysis of joint rights is far from being a settled matter). I argue that neither corporations nor animals have joint moral rights, since in neither case do they have moral rights, but that they do have, or at least they ought to have, legal rights, and some of these legal rights arguably ought to be joint legal rights. In doing so, I introduce a significant theoretical innovation to the literature on joint rights, namely, that of a layered structure of joint rights.

We wanted to develop an informed consent document and process that would be culturally acceptable and comprehensible to women with little or no formal schooling in Lhasa, Tibet, where the illiteracy rate is high. To do this, we conducted initial, in-depth interviews to elicit Tibetan women’s notions of research. We incorporated the information gleaned from this qualitative research into a first draft of the informed consent document and pilot tested it, then made major modifications to the document based on the results. A second round of pilot testing followed, which included recall testing for participants at the end of the review of the informed consent document. Finally, using the same document, we modified the process to ask questions after each major section of the document. Asking comprehension questions after each section resulted in statistically significant improvements in comprehension. This pilot study should be replicated with a larger, random sample of Tibetan women to see if such a simple, quick, low-cost approach will have equivalent results

In this article we critique the collectivist approach to collective moral responsibility. According to philosophers of a collectivist persuasion, a central notion of collective moral responsibility is moral responsibility assigned to a collective as a single entity. In our critique, we proceed by way of discussing the accounts and arguments of three prominent representatives of the collectivist approach with respect to collective responsibility: Margaret Gilbert, Russell Hardin, and Philip Pettit. Our aims are mainly critical; however, this should not be taken to imply that we do not ourselves support an alternative account of collective responsibility. We advocate an individualist account of collective responsibility. On this view of collective responsibility as joint responsibility, collective responsibility is ascribed to individuals. Each member of the group is individually morally responsible for the outcome of the joint action, but each is individually responsible jointly with the others.