Leadership, Engineering and Ethical Clashes at Boeing.

When there are disasters in our society, whether on an individual, organizational or systemic level, individuals or groups of individuals are often singled out for blame, and commonly it is assumed that the alleged culprits engaged in deliberate misdeeds. But sometimes, at least, these disasters occur not because of deliberate malfeasance, but rather because of complex organizational and systemic circumstances that result in these negative outcomes. Using the Boeing Corporation and its 737 MAX aircraft crashes as an example, this ethical analysis will examine some of the organizational problems that led to changes in management in Boeing and ultimately resulted in the fatal accidents.

Spheres of Influence: A Walzerian Approach to Business Ethics.

Michael Walzer is one of the most distinguished political philosophers and social critics of this century. His ideas have had great import and influence in political philosophy and political discussion, yet very few of his ideas have been incorporated explicitly into the business ethics literature. We argue that Walzer's work provides an important conceptual canvas for business ethics scholars that has not been adequately explored.

Tools for tomorrow's health care system: a systems-informed mental model, moral imagination, and physicians' professionalism.

Physician educators have been charged with incorporating systems-based approaches into medical education and residency training to help future physicians understand how their ability to provide high-quality health care depends on other individual and organizational stakeholders with whom and, in some cases, for whom they work. In part, this also requires that physicians accept that they have responsibilities to various system stakeholders. These changes are controversial because some fear they might distract physicians from their primary ethical obligation to their patients.

Role of organization ethics in critical care medicine.

The authors view the activities involved in critical care medicine as composing a complex adaptive system that is itself operating within a complex adaptive system, the healthcare organization. The authors explain why it is necessary that these systems be viewed this way, and they explain what is necessary to allow them to produce creative or emergent outcomes. They provide a justification for the role of an organization ethics program within this context.

Access, responsibility, and funding: A systems thinking approach to universal access to oral health.

Universal access to oral health care is a justifiable demand for a number of disparate but morally sound reasons. Nevertheless, that conclusion, however reached, has not solved the problem of the lack of access. Market forces, scarcity of funding, and lack of clarity as to who is responsible for ensuring that oral care is available seem to present insurmountable difficulties.

Intellectual property rights, moral imagination, and access to life-enhancing drugs.

Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights--proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates--is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of those challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property we will present another model.

Stakeholder expectations in practice-based medicine.

Competitive pressures are forcing physicians from solo practice into new organizational structures. These new structures and the technologies supporting them have generated suggestions for improving medical practice. This article examines the unspoken assumption often accompanying these suggestions that practice improvement can come about through a closer alignment of the practice's goals and values with its stakeholders' expectations.