Search results

Various achievements of Australia in the field of applied ethics from the 1980s to 2016 are outlined. The review covers academic scholarship, research and teaching; the ethics of business and actions to build ethics into the structures of enterprises. This follows the 3-fold categorization developed by De George (2012). A brief account of the formation and history of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics is included, as is a selection of scandals involving Australian organisations. Australia is shown to have made a significant contribution to the academic discipline of applied ethics and to have been aware of its position, distant from the English-speaking West and in the midst of nations of the global south.

The 19th annual Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) conference was held at St. John's College at the University of Queensland, 28 June–1 July 2012, and was hosted by Rev. Professor John Morgan. This was the third time that John Morgan hosted an AAPAE conference. The Association is very grateful for his support.

National and international ethics associations serve an important purpose in the development of resources which can lead to ethical behaviour in organisations. They bring practitioners and academics together, promote discussion and foster excellence through the presentation and subsequent publication of papers. One purpose of this journal is to publish selected papers from the annual conference of the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics. Our intention is that each year there will be one issue devoted to a theme and one to papers from the conference. Volume 8 was the first themed volume under our editorship, the festschrift in honour of Patrick Primeaux; Volume 10 will have the theme moral saints, moral exemplars and moral heroes.

Students living in urban environments tend to have lower academic achievement and college- and career-readiness skills than students living in suburban environments, as well as tend to be more at-risk for social-emotional learning problems. Research indicates that several school and community variables are related to this education discrepancy, and aligning these variables to best meet the needs of students is the best way to improve educational outcomes. This chapter will describe a collective impact initiative designed to align school, community, and nonprofit resources in an urban environment to best address the needs of students and increase academic success.

In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an “American Civil Religion,” which was distinct from churchly religion and captured the “transcendental” dimension of the American project. In this chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more Weberian lines. Specifically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and religious nationalism longs for their (re)unification, civil religion aims for a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension. Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion – and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that liberalism is highly inclusive but insufficiently solidaristic; that religious nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufficiently inclusive; and that only civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and the common good.

As the demand to substantiate predictions from economic theory with causal empirical evidence increases, economists have begun relying on controlled laboratory experiments. As this field has blossomed it has provided evidence confirming some of the key predictions of economic theory, exposing some of the weaker theoretical predictions, and highlighting the importance of non-pecuniary incentives such as trust and reciprocity in economic decision-making. This has resulted in a symbiotic relationship where experimental evidence is not only used to support theoretical conclusions but has pointed economists into bold and exciting new areas of investigation. In this volume I am pleased to present some of the most recent stimulating work in this field.

In private values settings, the Wickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism leads to efficient auction outcomes, while the theoretical properties of the Simultaneous Ascending (SA) auction are not well understood. This leads us to compare the properties of an SA and a VCG auction in an experimental setting with private values for multiple objects having complementarities. Statistically, we find little to distinguish the two auctions with both auction forms achieving more than 98% efficiency and extracting roughly 95% of the available surplus. Finally, in contrast to experimental results in single object VCG settings, the theoretical prediction of demand revelation in the multiple object VCG auction is largely supported in our experiments.