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This chapter asks whether it is helpful to consider a profession to be a practice and to what extent this meshes with the idea that ‘profession’ is a moral concept. It examines MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as an activity that pursues internal goods, finds that MacIntyre’s articulation of the concept by itself is not enough to describe what it is to be a profession and seeks to supplement this with ideas from others, primarily Miller and Davis. This supplementation, however, still leaves open the question of the origin of a profession’s authority (or licence) to use what can be called the ‘dangerous knowledge’ that differentiates the work of professions from other occupations. For this, Veatch provides useful ideas.

Addresses the issues inherent when analysing marketing philosophy and knowledge, illustrates by examples from various philosophers, pricipally Aristotle. Explores the relationship between knowledge and action, questioning what kind of knowledge informs good practice. Highlights two types of knowledge, “technical rationality” and “practical judgment”, and the kinds of activities encapsulated within each paradigm. Covers the character of the natural sciences including the proven and established theories of the technicist logic and the varied and unpredictable nature of the social sciences, incorporated within practical judgment. Suggests that properties required by a trainee in the practical field in order to learn good practice and “judgment”, include resourcefulness and flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS), an initiative for rural medical education in Nepal, and show its implications for rural medical education in other contexts.

The paper employs a methodology from the field of design to identify solution requirements based on an understanding of the operational context and evaluates how the initiative meets these requirements.

The PAHS model meets the extremely challenging requirements of the Nepali context for rural medical education by providing a model of education that is closely integrated with rural communities and working to develop leaders in community health. It faces important future challenges in obtaining sustainable funding and implementation of tele‐health.

On several levels, the project offers potential lessons for similar initiatives in North America: community health leadership; early and sustained community engagement; a pre‐medical course to bring students to a common standard; and role modeling by faculty. The approach will be of interest to those responsible for rural medical education in the developed and developing worlds.

The paper shows how the local context in rural medical education can be understood by evaluating desirability for users, viability and feasibility.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept and the content of courses on ‘social ethics’. It will present a dilemma that arises in the design of such courses. On the one hand, they may present versions of ‘applied ethics’; that is, courses in which moral theories are applied to moral and social problems. On the other hand, they may present generalised forms of ‘occupational ethics’, usually professional ethics, with some business ethics added to expand the range of the course. Is there, then, not some middle ground that is distinctively designated by the term ‘social ethics’? The article will argue that there is such a ground. It will describe that ground as the ethics of ‘social practices’. It will then illustrate how this approach to the teaching of ethics may be carried out in five domains of social practice: professional ethics, commercial ethics, corporate ethics, governmental ethics, and ethics in the voluntary sector. The aim is to show that ‘social ethics’ courses can have a clear rationale and systematic content.

How can public institutions achieve their goals and best nurture virtue in their members? In this chapter, I seek answers to these questions in a perhaps unlikely place: the television series The Wire. Known for its unflinching realism, the crime drama narrates the intertwined lives of police, criminals, politicians, teachers and journalists in drug-plagued urban Baltimore. Yet even in the thick and quick of institutional dysfunction the drama portrays, human virtue springs forth and institutions (despite themselves) sometimes perform their roles. I begin this exploration of The Wire by drawing on Montesquieu and other political theorists to evaluate the problems facing state institutions – problems of diversity and principle as much as selfishness and power-mongering. I then turn to the prospects for virtue within modern institutions, developing and applying the system of Alasdair MacIntyre and paying particular attention to the role of narrative in cementing and integrating virtue.

How can we explain the development – or equally the non-development – of professional ethics norms in a particular case? And how can we enhance compliance with existing professional ethical norms? In this chapter, I develop a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that call for the construction, reform or continuance of a professional ethos. These demands may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective clients and the general public collectively as interested third parties. The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: these are the felt-motivations of individual professionals at the coalface of action that drive them to recognize, acknowledge and act upon a professional norm. This material includes traditions and stories, the conscious application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of cultivating attractive role-identities and so on. As well as considering such ethical-materiel, I canvas the institutional and cultural supports that facilitate the production of these motives.

Explores the concept of quality in education, by means of a dialogue. Discusses different conceptions and dimensions of quality, and shows how they are largely contingent on different views of what education is all about. Attempts to transcend commonly encountered dichotomies by proposing an alternative approach, taking the notions of arête and phronesis as points of departure. Assessing educational quality implies high complexity if the approach is going to be comprehensive and holistic, and take both external and internal factors into account. The framework of the discussion is the political context, on the assumption that this is the right context for questions concerning the worthwhileness, values in and quality of education. The authors hope that this dialogue illustrates the irenic mode of communication briefly discussed in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of marketing’s philosophical conversation over the past 120 years, focusing on the emergent meaning of the notion that marketing should become more “scientific”.

This paper focuses on the US academic marketing literature, primarily journal articles and books published in the first half of the 20th century.

The Aristotelian distinction between techné, epistemé and phronesis provides a rich basis for framing philosophical discussion in marketing, and should supplant the art-science debate and Anderson’s distinction between science₁ and science₂. Prior to 1959, the marketing journals provided a forum for phronesis, though this diminished as the academic marketing community largely abandoned the inductive, contextual approach in favour of a deductive, “scientific” methodology. The Ford Foundation played an important role in effecting this change.

The paper highlights the importance of forums where practitioners can reflect on the ethical and social implications of their practices and then work to enhance these practices for the greater social good.

Questions the value of distinctions between marketing theorists and practitioners and the consequential focus of marketing journals.

Advances the concept of phronesis in the marketing literature and distinguishes it from epistemé, which has dominated academic marketing discourse over the past 60 years.

Married couples receive tax benefits such as favorable tax rates, higher exclusions, higher phase-outs, and combined deductions. However, joint and several tax liability is a major issue facing these taxpayers. The term innocent spouse relief, within the Internal Revenue Code, is a direct result of one spouse failing to satisfy the joint liability for the married couple. Since both individuals are jointly and severally liable for the combined liability, the innocent spouse may be responsible for the liability in whole or in part. Our study examines this highly litigated arena of innocent spouse relief. To assist in this area of taxation, the Internal Revenue Service has provided taxpayers and tax practitioners with guidance. Revenue Procedure 2003-61 (2003-2 CB 296) outlines factors useful in determining whether innocent spouse relief should be granted. Additionally, this study creates a predictive model containing only three significant factors (economic hardship, knowledge/reason, significant benefit) capable of predicting with approximately 89% accuracy. These same three variables are significant after running multiple regression with p-values of 0.002 (economic hardship), 0.000 (knowledge/reason to know), and 0.001 (significant benefit). These factors provide valuable insight to practitioners when advising clients on challenging or accepting the Internal Revenue Service's decision. Additionally, abuse is marginally significant in the regression model. Also, judge gender and political affiliation are analyzed. However, the gender of the judge and political affiliation fail to be statistically significant using the chi-square test and regression model.