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two major “modes” of deontology: agent-centered and victim-centered. Agent-centered deontology is concerned with permissions and obligations to act toward other agents, the typical example being parents’ duty to protect and nurture their children. Notice the immediate departure from consequentialism, here, since the latter is an agent-neutral type of ethics (we have seen that it has trouble justifying the idea of special treatment of relatives or friends). Where do such agent-relative obligations come from? From the fact that we make explicit or implicit promises to some agents but not others. By bringing my child into the world, for instance, I make a special promise to that particular individual, a promise that I do not make to anyone else’s children. While this certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t have duties toward other children (like inflicting no intentional harm), it does mean that I have additional duties toward my own children as a result of the simple fact that they are mine.

Agent-centered deontology gets into trouble because of its close philosophical association to some doctrines that originated within Catholic theology, like the idea of double effect. (I should immediately clarify that the trouble is not due to the fact that these doctrines are rooted in a religious framework, it’s their intrinsic moral logic that is at issue here.) For instance, for agent-centered deontologists we are morally forbidden from killing innocent others (reasonably enough), but this prohibition extends even to cases when so doing would actually save even more innocents.

Those familiar with trolleology will recognize one of the classic forms of the trolley dilemma here: is it right to throw an innocent person in front of the out of control trolley in order to save five others? For consequentialists the answer is a no-brainer: of course yes, you are saving a net of four lives! But for the deontologist you are now using another person (the innocent you are throwing to stop the trolley) as a means to an end, thus violating one of the forms of Kant’s imperative:“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”

The other form, in case you are wondering, is: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.”

Victim-centered deontologies are right- rather than duty-based, which of course does raise the question of why we think of them as deontological to begin with.

The fundamental idea about victim-centered deontology is the right that people have not to be used by others without their consent. This is were we find Robert Nozick-style libertarianism, which I have already criticized on this blog. One of the major implications of this version of deontology is that there is no strong moral duty to help others.

contractarian deontological theories. These deal with social contracts of the type, for instance, discussed by John Rawls in his theory of justice. However, I will devote a separate post to contractarianism, in part because it is so important in ethics, and in part because one can argue that contractarianism is really a meta-ethical theory, and therefore does not strictly fall under deontology per se.

deontological theories have the advantage over consequentialism in that they account for special concerns for one’s relatives and friends, as we have seen above. Consequentialism, by comparison, comes across as alienating and unreasonably demanding. Another advantage of deontology over consequentialism is that it accounts for the intuition that even if an act is not morally demanded it may still be praiseworthy. For a consequentialist, on the contrary, if something is not morally demanded it is then morally forbidden. (Another way to put this is that consequentialism is a more minimalist approach to ethics than deontology.) Moreover, deontology also deals much better than consequentialism with the idea of rights.

. One famous attempt at this reconciliation was proposed by Thomas Nagel (he of “what is it like to be a bat?” fame). Nagel suggested that perhaps we should be consequentialists when it comes to agent-neutral reasoning, and deontologists when we engage in agent-relative reasoning. He neglected to specify, however, any non-mysterious way to decide what to do in those situations in which the same moral dilemma can be seen from both perspectives.

Complicating matters further is the fact that these reporting patterns vary over time and are reflected in observed trends.   So, when a change in the police reported crime rate is observed from year to year or across a span of time we may be observing a “real” change, we may be observing a change in how these crimes come to the attention of police, or we may be seeing a mixture of both.

Generally, the most reliable criminal statistic is the homicide rate – it’s very difficult, though not impossible, to miss a dead body. In fact, homicides in Canada are counted in the year that they become known to police and not in the year that they occurred.  Our most reliable number is very, very close, but not infallible.

Crimes known to the police nearly always under measure the true incidence of crime, so other measures are needed to better complete our understanding. The reported crimes measure is reported every year to Statistics Canada from data that makes up the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey. This is a very rich data set that measures police data very accurately but tells us nothing about unreported crime.

We do have some data on unreported crime available. Victims are interviewed (after self-identifying) via the General Social Survey. The survey is conducted every five years

This measure captures information in eight crime categories both reported, and not reported to police. It has its own set of interpretation problems and pathways to misuse. The survey relies on self-reporting, so the accuracy of the information will be open to errors due to faulty memories, willingness to report, recording errors etc.

From the last data set available, self-identified victims did not report 69% of violent victimizations (sexual assault, robbery and physical assault), 62% of household victimizations (break and enter, motor vehicle/parts theft, household property theft and vandalism), and 71% of personal property theft victimizations.

while people generally understand that crimes go unreported and unknown to police, they tend to be surprised and perhaps even shocked at the actual amounts that get unreported. These numbers sound scary. However, the most common reasons reported by victims of violent and household crime for not reporting were: believing the incident was not important enough (68%) believing the police couldn’t do anything about the incident (59%), and stating that the incident was dealt with in another way (42%).

Also, note that the survey indicated that 82% of violent incidents did not result in injuries to the victims. Do claims that we should do something about all this hidden crime make sense in light of what this crime looks like in the limited way we can understand it? How could you be reasonably certain that whatever intervention proposed would in fact reduce the actual amount of crime and not just reduce the amount that goes unreported?

Data is collected at all levels of the crime continuum with differing levels of accuracy and applicability. This is nicely reflected in the concept of “the crime funnel”. All criminal incidents that are ever committed are at the opening of the funnel. There is “loss” all along the way to the bottom where only a small sample of incidences become known with charges laid, prosecuted successfully and responded to by the justice system.  What goes into the top levels of the funnel affects what we can know at any other point later.

“After the war, PR becomes a very big deal,” Schudson said. “It was partly stimulated by the war and the idea of journalists and others being employed by the government as propagandists.” Many who worked for the massive wartime propaganda apparatus found an easy transition into civilian life.

People “became more conscious that they were not getting direct access, that it was being screened for them by somebody else,” Schudson said. But there was no turning back. PR had become a fixture of public life. Concern about the invisible filter of public relations became a steady drumbeat in the press

When public relations began its ascent in the early twentieth century, journalism was rising alongside it. The period saw the ferocious work of the muckrakers, the development of the great newspaper chains, and the dawn of radio and, later, television. Journalism of the day was not perfect; sometimes it was not even good. But it was an era of expansion that eventually led to the powerful press of the mid to late century.

Now, during a second rise of public relations, we are in an era of massive contraction in traditional journalism. Bureaus have closed, thousands of reporters have been laid off, once-great newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News have died. The Pew Center took a look at the impact of these changes last year in a study of the Baltimore news market. The report, “How News Happens,” found that while new online outlets had increased the demand for news, the number of original stories spread out among those outlets had declined. In one example, Pew found that area newspapers wrote one-third the number of stories about state budget cuts as they did the last time the state made similar cuts in 1991. In 2009, Pew said, The Baltimore Sun produced 32 percent fewer stories than it did in 1999.

even original reporting often bore the fingerprints of government and private public relations. Mark Jurkowitz, associate director the Pew Center, said the Baltimore report concentrated on six major story lines: state budget cuts, shootings of police officers, the University of Maryland’s efforts to develop a vaccine, the auction of the Senator Theater, the installation of listening devices on public busses, and developments in juvenile justice. It found that 63 percent of the news about those subjects was generated by the government, 23 percent came from interest groups or public relations, and 14 percent started with reporters.

The Internet makes it easy for public relations people to reach out directly to the audience and bypass the press, via websites and blogs, social media and videos on YouTube, and targeted e-mail.

Some experts have argued that in the digital age, new forms of reporting will eventually fill the void left by traditional newsrooms. But few would argue that such a point has arrived, or is close to arriving. “There is the overwhelming sense that the void that is created by the collapse of traditional journalism is not being filled by new media, but by public relations,” said John Nichols, a Nation correspondent and McChesney’s co-author. Nichols said reporters usually make some calls and check facts. But the ability of government or private public relations to generate stories grows as reporters have less time to seek out stories on their own. That gives outside groups more power to set the agenda.

1. The harm principle bases our ethical considerations on other beings’ capacity for higher-level subjective experience. Human beings (and some animals) have the potential — and desire — to experience deep pleasure and happiness while seeking to avoid pain and suffering. We have the obligation, then, to afford creatures with these capacities, desires and relations a certain level of respect. They also have other emotional and social interests: for instance, friends and families concerned with their health and enjoyment. These actors also deserve consideration.

2. If we have a moral obligation to act a certain way toward someone, that should be reflected in law. Rights theory is the idea that there are certain rights worth granting to people with very few, if any, caveats. Many of these rights were spelled out in the founding documents of this country, the Declaration of Independence (which admittedly has no legal pull) and the Constitution (which does). They have been defended in a long history of U.S. Supreme Court rulings. They have also been expanded on in the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the founding documents of other countries around the world. To name a few, they include: freedom of belief, speech and expression, due process, equal treatment, health care, and education.

3. While we ought to consider our broader moral efforts, and focus on our obligations to others, it is also important to place attention on our quality as moral agents. A vital part of fostering a respectable pluralist moral framework is to encourage virtues, and cultivate moral character. A short list of these virtues would include prudence, justice, wisdom, honesty, compassion, and courage. One should study these, and strive to put these into practice and work to be a better human being, as Aristotle advised us to do.

most people already are ethical pluralists. Life and society are complex to navigate, and one cannot rely on a single idea for guidance. It is probably accurate to say that people lean more toward one theory, rather than practice it to the exclusion of all others. Of course, this only describes the fact that people think about morality in a pluralistic way. But the outlined approach is supported, sound reasoning — that is, unless you are ready to entirely dismiss 2,500 years of Western moral philosophy.

Efforts in at least eight other states to restrict gaming content have been rejected by various courts. Video game makers have the support of various free-speech, entertainment, and media organizations. Nine states also agree, noting California's law has good intentions but would compel law enforcement to become "culture critics" and "distract from the task of policing actual violence." But 11 other states back California, saying they have enjoyed a traditional regulatory power over commerce aimed at protecting children, including such goods as alcohol and cigarettes.