Legitimacy

About: Legitimacy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 26153 publications have been published within this topic receiving 565921 citations.

The enforcement of morals: nontherapeutic research on children.

Abstract: In the fall of 1974, Richard McCormick proposed a novel interpretation of the meaning of valid proxy consent in the case of children. Addressed as it was to a perplexing problem in medical ethics, the legitimacy of nontherapeutic experimentation on children, McCormick's article, "Proxy Consent in the Experimental Situation,"' has had a wide influence. It is my contention, however, that McCormick's ethical analysis is incorrect, that it suffers from a moralistic quality, and that it is bound to weaken the protection of children in this age of research medicine. Indeed, it may have already done so. One can surely describe McCormick's position as novel. By insisting on a voluntary consent of the human subject for all experimentation, the Nuremberg Code seemed to rule out altogether nontherapeutic experimentation on children or the incompetent. Other medical codes adopted since then have allowed parents and guardians to enter children and incompetent persons into nontherapeutic research, but this right was ascribed simply by stipulation. No attempt was made to argue that the validity of the proxy consent could be grounded in the subject's presumable consent. That is what McCormick does, with far-reaching consequences. McCormick begins his argument with a review of the medical codes and the views of professional ethicians. Not surprisingly, he finds "profoundly diverging views" in this literature. Nonetheless, "the ethician who has discussed this problem at greatest length," writes McCormick, is "Princeton's Paul Ramsey"; and it is against my views that McCormick develops several of his arguments. "Ramsey," he writes, "denies the validity of proxy consent in nonbeneficial (to the child) experiments simply and without qualification" (p. 8). As evidence he submits the following passage from my book The Patient as Person: "To attempt to consent for a child to be made an experimental subject is to treat a child as not a child. It is to treat him as if he were an adult person who has consented to become a joint adventurer in the common cause of medical research. If the grounds for this are alleged to be the presumptive or implied consent of the child, that must simply be characterized as a violent and a false presumption."2 This, in fact, remains my view of the matter; I have read nothing that persuades me that this, my original position, is incorrect. Nonetheless, in view of the necessity sometimes claimed for nontherapeutic research with uncomprehending subjects, several years ago I did explore, by way of a "thought experiment," an alternative position. If today we mean to give such weight to the research imperative, I argued, then we should not seek to give a principled justification of what we are doing with children. It is better to leave the research imperative in incorrigible conflict with the principle that protects the individual human person from being used for research purposes without either his expressed or correctly construed consent. Some sorts of human experimentation should, in this alternative, be acknowledged to be "borderline situations" in which moral agents are under the necessity of doing wrong for the sake of the public good. Either way they do wrong. It is immoral not to do the research. It is also immoral to use children who cannot

Rhetoric and argument in social and environmental reporting: the Dirty Laundry case

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the interactive element in social and environmental reporting during a controversy between business organisations and a stakeholder over environmental performance. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts Aristotle's triangular framework of the rhetorical situation to examine how the writer, the audience, and the purpose of communication interact in the choice of rhetorical strategies used to persuade others of the validity and legitimacy of a claim during a public controversy. The analysis focuses on the strategies (i.e. moves and their rhetorical realisations) in the form of logos (appealing to logic), ethos (appealing to authority), and pathos (appealing to emotion), with a particular emphasis on metaphor, used to achieve social and political goals. The authors base the analysis on a case study involving a conflict between Greenpeace and six organisations in the sportswear/fashion industry over wastewater discharge of hazardous chemicals. The conf...

Kazakhstan: Power and the Elite

Abstract: This volume provides a political study of Kazakhstan, a major Central Asian state rich in natural resources, occupying a key geopolitical position, sandwiched between China and Russia. It is an "accidental country", one that emerged from a Soviet Republic and was not expected to be an independent state, ruled by an insecure elite and with no monoethnic base as a source for legitimacy. This study places new developments within an historical framework. It is based not only on original official and academic material but also on over 150 interviews with leaders of the national and regional elite.

The Relationship Between Children's Legitimacy Judgments and Their Moral Reasoning, Aggression Tendencies, and Sport Involvement

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) the relationship between children’s judgments regarding the legitimacy of potentially injurious sport acts for adults and for children, (b) the relationships between children’s legitimacy judgments and their moral reasoning, aggression tendencies, and sport involvement, and (c) the relative ability of the latter three variables to predict legitimacy judgments. Analyses were based on 78 girls and boys in grades 4 through 7 who participated in a moral interview, completed aggression ten dency and sport involvement questionnaires, and evaluated the legitimacy of potentially injurious sport acts depicted in a series of slides. Analyses revealed that children accepted more acts as legitimate for adults than for children. Boys’ legitimacy judgments were significantly related to their moral reasoning, aggression tendencies, and involvement in high-contact sports, but girls’ legitimacy judgments were correlated only with their life aggression tendencies. Children’s...

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State

Abstract: The Center for Financial Stability (CFS) thanks Paul Tucker for Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State. Unelected Power is extraordinary from many perspectives. It is broad and deep. It stretches from the role of government agencies to central banking now and into the future. The book is extremely well researched. It is a joy to read. The footnotes and quotes are worth the price of admission alone.