Susan Dodds

The pursuit of social goals and ethics in business creates challenges. Sustained efforts to address poverty, environmental degradation or health/wellbeing require meaningful and transformative responses that impact across multiple levels—individual, community and the global collective. Shifting predominant paradigms to facilitate change entails a renegotiation of business strategy—between organizations, their purpose(s), individual and collective stakeholders and ultimately with society at large. Hybrid organizations such as social enterprises are positioned to affect such change. However, in balancing divergent goals such organizations encounter tensions and paradox, creating a duality of ethics. Utilizing in-depth interviews to develop a case within the sustainable fashion industry, we identify tensions and paradox within women-oriented hybrid organizations. Significantly, managing these tensions and paradox results in multiple dualities of ethics, often with a wider impact on organizational founders/managers. We find three interrelated ethical dualities: business strategy and personal values; financial sustainability and holistic sustainability; and business, employee, societal wellbeing, and personal wellbeing. This insight is noteworthy when looked at within the broader context of sustainability and highlights the importance of sustainability in women-oriented hybrid organizations.

In Australia, Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) have a vital role to play—as the primary institutional mechanism for ethical review of research—in protecting research participants, and promoting ethical research. Their ability to act effectively in this role is currently threatened by the limited support they receive and their burgeoning workloads. In this discussion paper, I trace some of the factors contributing to what I describe as a resource crisis in human research ethics. I suggest a review of the working of HRECs to canvas a range of alternatives which might serve to redress this crisis, so as to ensure the continued effectiveness of HRECs in protecting participants and promoting ethical research.

ABSTRACT In establishing National Bioethics Organisations (NBOs), liberal democracies seek to acknowledge the diversity of strongly held ethical positions and the imperative to engage in public debate about important bioethical decisions. NBOs are typically given a range of responsibilities, including contributing to and stimulating public debate; providing expert opinion on relevant issues for policy deliberations; and developing public policy. The state is now found to have an interest in areas previously thought to be a matter of individual choice. NBOs can provide one way of opening up public debate to allow the diversity of views to be heard in a manner that is well‐informed, articulate and responsive to both expert and ‘lay’ public views. We draw on debates in political theory about democratic decision‐making and on the policy making roles of some key NBOs. We are particularly interested in examining the capacity of NBOs to meet the democratic ideal of effective participation by the public, or citizenry, especially by those who are directly affected by the policies, in the development of effective public policy. We provide a basic framework for policy development involving NBOs that can begin to meet this ideal, a process of ‘contested deliberation’.

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

This book addresses the problem of how to make democratically-legitimate public policy on issues of contentious bioethical debate. It focuses on ethical contests about research and their legitimate resolution, while addressing questions of political legitimacy. How should states make public policy on issues where there is ethical disagreement, not only about appropriate outcomes, but even what values are at stake? What constitutes justified, democratic policy in such conflicted domains? Case studies from Canada and Australia demonstrate that two countries sharing historical and institutional characteristics can reach different policy responses. This book is of interest to policymakers, bioethicists, and philosophers, and will deepen our understanding of the interactions between large-scale socio-political forces and detailed policy problems in bioethics.