case study and business ethics crossword

Case study in many business ethics classes Crossword Clue

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CASE STUDY IN MANY BUSINESS ETHICS CLASSES Crossword Answer

Case study in many business ethics classes NYT Crossword

We solved the clue 'Case study in many business ethics classes' which last appeared on November 10, 2019 in a N.Y.T crossword puzzle and had five letters. The one solution we have is shown below. Similar clues are also included in case you ended up here searching only a part of the clue text.

CASE STUDY IN MANY BUSINESS ETHICS CLASSES

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Case study in many business ethics classes NYT Crossword Clue

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CASE STUDY IN MANY BUSINESS ETHICS CLASSES Crossword Clue

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BUSINESS ETHICS Crossword

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WHAT RESPONSIBILITY SHOULD BUSINESSES HAVE? WHAT PEOPLE INVEST IN THE BUSINESS? WHO IS AFFECTED BY THE OPERATION OF A BUSINESS? WHAT IS IT CALLED WHEN SOMEONE MAKES THEIR BELIEFS ON AN UNETHICAL COMPANY PUBLIC? WHAT ETHICAL SYSTEM SAYS YOU SHOULD DO YOUR DUTY BECAUSE IT'S THE RIGHT THING? WHAT ETHICAL SYSTEM SAYS YOU SHOULD CALCULATE THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER? WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM THAT ALLOWS FREE COMPETITION AND PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION? WHAT IS ABOUT THE INTEGRATION OF BUSINESS, ECONOMICS, INDUSTRY AND CULTURE AROUND THE WORLD? WHAT COMPANY CREATED NA CAR THAT EXPLODED? WHAT FACTORY COLLAPSED IN BANGLADESH? LOW ECONOMICALLY _________________ COUNTRY

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Clue: Former energy company in business ethics case studies

Referring crossword puzzle answers, likely related crossword puzzle clues.

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Recent usage in crossword puzzles:

• Universal Crossword - March 14, 2024

• Business Ethics Cases
• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
• Focus Areas
• Business Ethics
• Business Ethics Resources

Find ethics case studies on bribery, sourcing, intellectual property, downsizing, and other topics in business ethics, corporate governance, and ethical leadership. (For permission to reprint articles, submit requests to [email protected] .)

In this business ethics case study, Swedish multinational company IKEA faced accusations relating to child labor abuses in the rug industry in Pakistan which posed a serious challenge for the company and its supply chain management goals.

A dog may be humanity’s best friend. But that may not always be the case in the workplace.

A recent college graduate works in the finance and analytics department of a large publicly traded software company and discovers an alarming discrepancy in sales records, raising concerns about the company’s commitment to truthful reporting to investors. 

What responsibility does an employee have when information they obtained in confidence from a coworker friend may be in conflict with the needs of the company or raises legal and ethical questions.

A manager at a prominent multinational company is ethically challenged by a thin line between opportunity for economic expansion in a deeply underserved community, awareness of child labor practices, and cultural relativism.

A volunteer providing service in the Dominican Republic discovered that the non-profit he had partnered with was exchanging his donor money on the black market, prompting him to navigate a series of complex decisions with significant ethical implications.

The CFO of a family business faces difficult decisions about how to proceed when the COVID-19 pandemic changes the business revenue models, and one family shareholder wants a full buyout.

An employee at an after-school learning institution must balance a decision to accept or decline an offered gift, while considering the cultural norms of the client, upholding the best interests of all stakeholders, and following the operational rules of his employer. 

A senior vice president for a Fortune 500 savings and loan company is tasked with the crucial responsibility of representing the buyer in a multi-million dollar loan purchase deal and faces several ethical challenges from his counterpart representing the seller.

Extensive teaching note based on interviews with Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz. The teaching note can be used to explore issues around whistleblowing, leadership, the blocks to ethical behavior inside organizations, and board governance.

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Former energy company in business ethics case studies

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Ethics book recommendations from the Poe Business Ethics Center

Looking for ethical insights you can apply to a business setting? Check out these recommendations from Brian Ray , Poe Business Ethics Center Director. 

Ethics and Values: A Complete Guide

By The Art of Service – Ethics And Values Publishing

This Ethics And Values Guide is unlike books you’re used to. If you’re looking for a textbook, this might not be for you. This book and its included digital components is for you who understands the importance of asking great questions. This gives you the questions to uncover the Ethics And Values challenges you’re facing and generate better solutions to solve those problems.  Defining, designing, creating, and implementing a process to solve a challenge or meet an objective is the most valuable role… In EVERY group, company, organization and department. 

Unless you are dealing with a one-time, single-use project, there should be a process. That process needs to be designed by someone with a broad enough perspective to ask the right questions. Someone able to ask the right questions and step back and say, ‘What are we really trying to accomplish here? And is there a different way to look at it?’

This Self-Assessment empowers people to do just that – whether their title is entrepreneur, manager, consultant, (Vice-)President, CxO etc… – they are the people who shape the future. They are the person who asks the right questions to make Ethics And Values investments work better.  This Ethics And Values All-Inclusive Self-Assessment enables you to be that person. 

Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI

by Markus Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das

This volume tackles a quickly-evolving field of inquiry, mapping the existing discourse as part of placing current developments in historical context; at the same time, breaking new ground in taking on novel subjects and pursuing fresh approaches.  The term “A.I.” is used to refer to a broad range of phenomena, from machine learning and data mining to artificial general intelligence. The recent advent of more sophisticated AI systems, which function with partial or full autonomy and are capable of tasks which require learning and ‘intelligence’, presents difficult ethical questions, and has drawn concerns from many quarters about individual and societal welfare, democratic decision-making, moral agency, and the prevention of harm. This work ranges from explorations of normative constraints on specific applications of machine learning algorithms today-in everyday medical practice, for instance-to reflections on the (potential) status of AI as a form of consciousness with attendant rights and duties and, more generally still, on the conceptual terms and frameworks necessarily to understand tasks requiring intelligence, whether “human” or “A.I.”

Ethics at Work: Dilemmas of the Near Future and How Your Organization Can Solve Them

by Kris Østergaard (Editor)

The accelerating pace of technological development combined with the massive challenges that humankind faces make ethics evermore important. If we do not stop to think about what is fundamentally important and act accordingly, then we might find ourselves in a world that we do not wish for. 

Being an ethical company is fast becoming a business advantage but soon it will be a hygiene factor. I.e. you will not be rewarded for being an ethical company, but you will be punished if you are not. However, organizations lack a deep understanding of how to act ethically in a business context, they do not have a language to discuss it and they do not have the tools to develop ethical principles and operationalize them to ensure their businesses becomes part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

In this anthology, a select group of global thought leaders within fields such as AI, neuroscience, leadership, culture, strategy, and innovation provides inspiration, insights, and concrete tools to help you solve near future ethical dilemmas to the benefit of your organization and to the benefit of the world.

Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century

by Geroge Lucas, Jr.

This book examines the importance of “military ethics” in the formulation and conduct of contemporary military strategy.  Clausewitz’s original analysis of war relegated ethics to the side-lines in favor of political realism, interpreting the proper use of military power solely to further the political goals of the state, whatever those may be. This book demonstrates how such single-minded focus no longer suffices to secure the interest of states, for whom the nature of warfare has evolved to favor strategies that hold combatants themselves to the highest moral and professional standards in their conduct of hostilities. Waging war has thus been transformed in a manner that moves beyond Clausewitz’s original conception, rendering political success wholly dependent upon the cultivation and exercise of discerning moral judgment by strategists and combatants in the field. This book utilizes a number of perspectives and case studies to demonstrate how ethics now plays a central role in strategy in modern armed conflict.  This book will be of much interest to students of just war, ethics, military strategy, and international relations.

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Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: An Ethics Case Study in Environmental Engineering

Embargo lift date, committee members, degree year, journal title, journal issn, volume title.

The April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion was an engineering and environmental tragedy that led to the loss of 11 human lives and has had far-reaching environmental and economic impacts, the full extent of which is difficult if not impossible to calculate. In 2015 the explosion continues to impact those 11 individual’s families; it continues to have a far-reaching emotional impact on the 115 men and women on board at the time of the catastrophe; scientists are still evaluating the environmental impacts of both the oil dispersion throughout the gulf and the oil dispersant used to curtail the spill at surface depths. Simultaneously, gulf business owners, particularly those who rely on gulf waters for their livelihoods, continue to struggle. This novel and far-reaching real-world disaster is particularly salient for use within engineering curricula due to its inherently complex interplay of ethical issues and the broad scope of stakeholders impacted by the initial disaster and its aftermath.

We have developed and refined this real-world case study with students participating in a graduate level course at Purdue University over three separate years and five course offerings. We designed this case study within a unique pedagogical framework that leads students to reflectively adopt varying stakeholders’ perspectives in order to reason through the case within a team setting. As a final goal, students must decide the appropriateness of continuing deepwater drilling throughout the Gulf of Mexico in light of the human, economic, environmental, and social implications of future potential blowouts. As part of the broader ethics course in which this case is embedded, we selected this case as it provides a uniquely broader scope of stakeholders and a more specific focus on the principles of nonmaleficence and justice when compared to the other cases presented to students. Specifically, this case asks students to consider a broad range of stakeholders. Whereas many engineering ethics case studies focus on human stakeholders and corporations, here the focus also includes marine and aquatic life, challenging a narrowly anthropocentric focus by placing environmental issues as a focal point. In this sense, our focus pushes beyond other case studies in ethics by addressing both macro-ethical issues, where students are encouraged to adopt a broadened societal viewpoint to deduce the most ethical courses of action, and micro-ethical issues, where the focus is towards the professional obligations of an individual engineer, through a scaffolded staged pedagogy.

In this paper we present the case structure and pedagogy to argue for the relevance of this unique, novel, and effective case for increasing engineering students’ ethical reasoning abilities, particularly broadening their awareness of the scope of stakeholders impacted by engineering decisions and their ability to empathize with those stakeholders.

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Research: Negotiating Is Unlikely to Jeopardize Your Job Offer

• Einav Hart,
• Julia Bear,
• Zhiying (Bella) Ren

A series of seven studies found that candidates have more power than they assume.

Job seekers worry about negotiating an offer for many reasons, including the worst-case scenario that the offer will be rescinded. Across a series of seven studies, researchers found that these fears are consistently exaggerated: Candidates think they are much more likely to jeopardize a deal than managers report they are. This fear can lead candidates to avoid negotiating altogether. The authors explore two reasons driving this fear and offer research-backed advice on how anxious candidates can approach job negotiations.

Imagine that you just received a job offer for a position you are excited about. Now what? You might consider negotiating for a higher salary, job flexibility, or other benefits , but you’re apprehensive. You can’t help thinking: What if I don’t get what I ask for? Or, in the worst-case scenario, what if the hiring manager decides to withdraw the offer?

• Einav Hart is an assistant professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business, and a visiting scholar at the Wharton School. Her research interests include conflict management, negotiations, and organizational behavior.
• Julia Bear is a professor of organizational behavior at the College of Business at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her research interests include the influence of gender on negotiation, as well as understanding gender gaps in organizations more broadly.
• Zhiying (Bella) Ren is a doctoral student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on conversational dynamics in organizations and negotiations.

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Bill could end holdup for California research on psychedelics and addiction treatment

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California lawmakers could soon clear a governmental logjam that has held up dozens of studies related to addiction treatment, psychedelics or other federally restricted drugs.

The holdup revolves around the Research Advisory Panel of California , established decades ago to vet studies involving cannabis, hallucinogens and treatments for “abuse of controlled substances.”

It has been a critical hurdle for California researchers exploring possible uses of psychedelics or seeking new ways to combat addiction. Scientists cannot move forward with such research projects without the panel’s blessing.

The panel had long met behind closed doors to make its decisions, but concerns arose last year that it was supposed to fall under the Bagley-Keene Act, a state law requiring open meetings. Holding those meetings in public, however, raised alarm about exposing trade secrets and other sensitive information.

So the panel stopped meeting at all. It has not convened since August. Meetings ordinarily scheduled for every other month have been canceled since October.

The result has been a ballooning backlog: As of early May, there were 42 new studies and 28 amendments to existing projects awaiting approval, according to state officials.

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Ziva Cooper, director of the UCLA Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids, said she had submitted one study to the California panel over a year ago — one already approved by the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and an institutional review board. That research will assess the health risks of cannabis for seniors and young adults ages 18 to 25, two groups whose cannabis use has been on the rise, she said. Cooper said the panel sought a small change: adjusting two words in a consent form for study participants. But because the panel has not been meeting, she has been unable to proceed.

The holdup has also snarled two other studies her UCLA center had submitted to the panel — one examining whether cannabis could be used as an alternative to opioids for pain relief, another on whether a psychedelic compound found in mushrooms, psilocybin, could help treat people struggling with cocaine addiction.

And Cooper said she hasn’t even bothered to submit three more studies, including research on the effects of high-potency cannabis. The holdup has left Cooper and other researchers fearing they could lose funding for planned studies or be forced to lay off staff.

The idea of having to study something different because “in California I can’t do the research that I’m trained to do ... is demoralizing,” Cooper said. It aggravates her “to not be able to answer the questions that are desperately needed right now” as the range of cannabis products on the market has grown.

The standstill “has broad implications, costing researchers money in expired grants and contingent grants, shortened patents on new drugs, lost wages for research personnel, lost talent, and lost costs of research drugs for human use that will expire before use,” according to an analysis prepared for a state committee.

That long hiatus could soon end: Under Assembly Bill 2841, the state panel would be able to hold closed sessions to discuss studies that involve trade secrets or other proprietary information. The bill, proposed by Assemblymember Marie Waldron (R-Valley Center), would go into effect immediately if signed by the governor.

“We are focused on reactivating the large amount of research studies that have been on hold for over a year now,” Waldron said in a statement. “This is the quick and urgent solution needed to address that problem.”

How L.A. County is trying to remake addiction treatment — no more ‘business as usual’

A Los Angeles County initiative called Reaching the 95% aims to engage with more people than the fraction of Angelenos already getting addiction treatment.

April 23, 2024

The bill is supported by the nonprofit Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, which supports research into the possible benefits of psychedelics for treating depression and other conditions among military veterans and helps them obtain such treatment abroad.

“Psychedelic research has ground to halt in California — including numerous VA studies, “ said its director of public policy, Khurshid Khoja. If the Legislature does not act swiftly, the state will see “a rapid exodus of skilled researchers from California universities and research institutions to pursue their critically important work elsewhere — not to mention capital flight by funders who’ll deploy research dollars outside the state.”

“AB 2841 is an urgently needed response to address this crisis,” Khoja said.

To many researchers, however, AB 2841 does not go far enough. Dozens of scientists have called for the panel to be eliminated, arguing that even when it was meeting regularly, it was an unnecessary obstruction to research already being scrutinized by other government and institutional reviewers.

In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a coalition of researchers argued that undergoing the state review could delay a study by at least five months, resulting in more than $100,000 in “unnecessary staff expenditures” in that time. Because other states don’t have that hurdle, they argued, California researchers are losing out on competitive funding — and Californians miss chances to participate in local trials for emerging treatments.

The longest, strangest trip: Some psychedelic drug users are stuck with unwelcome highs

A rare condition called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder has puzzled researchers and raised alarms as psychedelics go mainstream.

April 30, 2024

UCLA psychologist and addiction researcher Steven Shoptaw called it “an unequal burden on addiction research” compared with other scientific studies.

The California panel has been vetting not only studies that involve federally restricted drugs, but also those assessing any kind of medication to treat addiction, said Dr. Phillip Coffin, a UC San Francisco professor of medicine who has called to eliminate the panel.

“If I’m testing Prozac for depression, or Prozac for any other disease, I can do my research without waiting” for the committee, he said, but “If I’m testing Prozac for addiction, I have to wait.” By maintaining such barriers, Coffin argued, “we are seriously harming any chance California has of responding to the addiction crisis.”

Short of eliminating the panel, some have also argued for amending the law to exempt any researchers who have gotten federal approval to do such research.

Others have argued that the panel has a valuable role, even for studies that have undergone review by the FDA or other entities. An analysis of AB 2841 prepared for the Assembly Committee on Health said state data from the Department of Justice show that the Research Advisory Panel regularly catches issues with drug safety, consent forms missing important information about safety and privacy, and other potential problems.

The panel “has a record of providing an extra level of protection, which is important given the volume of controlled substance research that occurs in California,” the analysis said. In addition, the committee analysis said the panel is “the only one which ensures that studies conducted in California comply with state law.”

Coffin disputed such arguments, saying that in his experience and that of many other researchers, its feedback had not “improved patient safety or remotely justified the extreme delays.”

If it is truly finding problems that have escaped other reviewers, he argued, “then all research — not just addiction treatment and controlled substances — should be forced to go through this panel.”

DEA’s big marijuana shift could be a lifeline for California’s troubled pot industry

How will the DEA’s decision to reclassify marijuana affect California’s ailing pot industry?

May 1, 2024

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Emily Alpert Reyes covers public health for the Los Angeles Times.

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The Cruel Social Experiment of Reality TV

The new Hulu film about an atrocious moment in ’90s television is shocking, but revelatory.

M ore than a decade after watching it, I still get twitchy thinking about “White Bear,” an early episode of Black Mirror that stands as one of the most discomfiting installments of television I’ve seen. A woman (played by Lenora Crichlow) groggily wakes up in a strange house whose television sets are broadcasting the same mysterious symbol. When she goes outside, the people she encounters silently film her on their phones or menacingly wield shotguns and chainsaws. Eventually, trapped in a deserted building, the woman seizes a gun and shoots one of her tormentors, but the weapon surprises her by firing confetti instead of bullets. The walls around her suddenly swing open; she’s revealed to be the star of a sadistic live event devised to punish her repeatedly for a crime she once committed but can’t remember. “In case you haven’t guessed … you aren’t very popular,” the show’s host tells the terrified woman, as the audience roars its approval. “But I’ll tell you what you are, though. You’re famous.”

“White Bear” indelibly digs into a number of troublesome 21st-century media phenomena: a populace numbed into passive consumption of cruel spectacle, the fetishistic rituals of public shaming, the punitive nature of many “reality” shows. The episode’s grand reveal, a television staple by the time it premiered in 2013, is its own kind of punishment: The extravagant theatrics serve as a reminder that everything that’s happened to the woman has been a deliberate construction—a series of manipulations in service of other people’s entertainment.

The contrast between the aghast subject and the gleeful audience, clapping like seals, is almost too jarring to bear. And yet a version of this moment really happened, as seen about an hour into The Contestant , Hulu’s dumbfounding documentary about a late-’90s Japanese TV experiment. For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen .

Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.

Since The Contestant debuted earlier this month, reviews and responses have homed in on how outlandish its subject matter is, dubbing it a study of the “most evil reality show ever” and “a terrifying and bizarre true story.” The documentary focuses intently on Nasubi’s experience, contrasting his innocence and sweetness with the producer who tormented him, a Machiavellian trickster named Toshio Tsuchiya. Left unstudied, though, is the era the series emerged from. The late ’90s embodied an anything-goes age of television: In the United States, series such as Totally Hidden Video and Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape drew millions of viewers by humiliating people caught doing dastardly things on camera. But Tsuchiya explains that he had a more anthropological mission in mind. “We were trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being,” he tells The Contestant ’s director. Nasubi was Tsuchiya’s grand human experiment.

The cruelty with which Nasubi was treated seems horrifying now, and outrageously unethical. Before he started winning contests, he got by on a handful of crackers fed to him by the producers, then fiber jelly (one of his first successful prizes), then dog food. His frame is whittled down in front of our eyes. “If he hadn’t won rice, he would have died,” a producer says, casually. The question of why Nasubi didn’t just leave the room hangs in the air, urgent and mostly unexamined. “Staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option,” Nasubi explains in the documentary. “It’s a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.”

But the timing of his confinement also offers a clue about why he might have stayed: 1998, when the comedian was first confined, was a moment in flux, caught between the technological innovations that were rapidly changing mass culture and the historical atrocities of the 20th century. Enabled by the internet, lifecasters such as Jennifer Ringley were exposing their unfiltered lives online as a kind of immersive sociological experiment. Webcams allowed exhibitionists and curious early adopters to present themselves for observation as novel subjects in a human zoo. Even before the release of The Truman Show , which came out in the U.S. a few months after Nasubi was first put on camera, a handful of provocateur producers were brainstorming new formats for unscripted television , egged on by the uninhibited bravado and excess of ’90s media. These creators acted as all-seeing, all-knowing authorities whose word was absolute . And their subjects, not yet familiar with the “rules” of an emerging genre, often didn’t know what they were allowed to contest. Of Tsuchiya, Nasubi remembers, “It was almost like I was worshipping a god.”

In his manipulation of Nasubi, Tsuchiya was helping pioneer a new kind of art form, one that would lead to the voyeurism of 2000s series such as Big Brother and Survivor , not to mention more recent shows such Married at First Sight and Love Is Blind . But the spectacle of Nasubi’s confinement also represented a hypothesis that had long preoccupied creators and psychologists alike, and that reality television has never really moved on from. If you manufacture absurd, monstrous situations with which to torment unwitting dupes, what will they do? What will we learn? And, most vital to the people in charge, how many viewers will be compelled to watch?

S ome popular-culture historians consider the first reality show to be MTV’s The Real World , a 1992 series that deliberately provoked conflict by putting strangers together in an unfamiliar environment. Others cite PBS’s 1973 documentary series An American Family , which filmed a supposedly prototypical California household over several months, in a conceit that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”

But the origins of what happened to Nasubi seem to lie most directly in a series that ran on and off from 1948 to 2014: Candid Camera . Its creator, Allen Funt, was a radio operator in the Army Signal Corps during World War II; while stationed in Oklahoma, he set up a “gripe booth” for soldiers to record their complaints about military service. Knowing they were being taped, the subjects held back, which led Funt to record people secretly in hopes of capturing more honest reactions. His first creative effort was The Candid Microphone , a radio show. The series put its subjects in perplexing situations to see how they’d respond: Funt gave strangers exploding cigarettes, asked a baker to make a “disgusting” birthday cake, and even chained his secretary to his desk and hired a locksmith to “free” her for her lunch break. “With the candid microphone, we are at the beginning of the Age of the Involuntary Amateur,” one critic wrote in 1947. “The possibilities are limitless; the prospect is horrifying.” Sure enough, a TV series soon followed.

For all that critic’s revulsion, Funt was earnest about the potentially revelatory power of his shows. He was seemingly influenced by two parallel trends. One was a sociological school of thought that was trying urgently to analyze human nature following a wave of real barbarities: the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s great purges. The other was an interest in art that captured the contours of real life, in an outgrowth of the naturalist movement that had come out of the late 19th century. Émile Zola, one of its practitioners, argued in The Experimental Novel that fiction writers were essentially omnipotent forces dropping characters into realistic situations to consider how they might respond. Literature, he argued, was “a real experiment that a novelist makes on man.”

The invention of television, as the academic Tony E. Jackson has argued , offered a more literal and scientific medium within which creators could manipulate real human subjects. This was where Candid Camera came into play. Funt’s practical jokes—setting up a subject in an elevator in which every other person suddenly turns their back to him—tended to consider the nature of compliance, and what humans will go along with rather than be outliers. Candid Camera was considered so rich a work that Funt was asked to donate episodes to Cornell University’s psychology department for further study.

Funt was also highly influential to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who turned his Yale studies on conformity into a documentary titled Obedience . The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, asked members of the public to inflict fellow subjects with electric shocks—faked, unknown to them—when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Inspired by the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and the experience of his own family members who’d survived concentration camps, Milgram tweaked the Candid Camera model to more explicitly study how far people would follow orders before they objected. As the film professor Anna McCarthy has written , Milgram paid particular attention to the theatrical elements of his work. He even considered using recordings of humans screaming in real, rather than simulated, pain to maximize the authenticity of the subject’s experience. “It is possible that the kind of understanding of man I seek is an amalgam of science and art,” Milgram wrote in 1962. “It is sure to be rejected by the scientists as well as the artists, but for me it carries significance.”

This studied interest in human nature continued in PBS’s An American Family ; its presentation of ordinary life up close, the anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued, was “as important for our time as were the invention of the drama and the novel for earlier generations—a new way for people to understand themselves.” Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, television was similarly fixated on exposure, although shock value quickly took priority over genuine curiosity and analysis. During the ’90s, on talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and Maury , people confessed their most damning secrets to anyone who cared to watch. Series including Cops and America’s Most Wanted offered a more lurid, voyeuristic look at crime and the darkness of human nature.

Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment

By the time Tsuchiya had the idea to confine a man to a single apartment to see whether he could survive the ordeal, the concept of humiliation-as-revelation was well established. “I told [Nasubi] that most of it would never be aired,” the producer explains in The Contestant . “When someone hears that, they stop paying attention to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.” As an organizing principle for how to get the most interesting footage, it seems to stem right from Funt’s secret recordings of people in the 1940s. Tsuchiya appeared to be motivated by his desire to observe behavior that had never been seen before on film—“to capture something amazing … an aspect of humanity that only I, only this show, could capture.” And extremity, to him, was necessary, because it was the only way to provoke responses that would be new, and thus thrilling to witness.

The reality-show boom of the early 2000s was intimately informed by this same intention. When Big Brother debuted in Holland in 1999, it was broadly advertised as a social experiment in which audiences could observe contestants under constant surveillance like rats in a lab; the show was compared by one Dutch psychologist to the Stanford prison experiment . (Another called the show’s design “the wet dream of a psychological researcher.”) The 2002 British show The Experiment even directly imitated both the Stanford setup and Milgram’s work on obedience. But although such early series may have had honest intentions, their willingness to find dramatic fodder in moments of human calamity was exploited by a barrage of crueler series that would follow. The 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of a 21-year-old model from Mexico, who was revealed in the finale to be transgender—an obscene gotcha moment that mimics the structure of Candid Camera . Without a dramatic conclusion, a nonfiction series is just a filmed record of events. But with a last-act revelation, it’s a drama.

Contemporary audiences, blessedly, have a more informed understanding of ethics, of entrapment, and of the duty of care TV creators have to their subjects. In 2018, the British show Love Island spawned a national debate about gaslighting after one contestant was deemed to be manipulating another. There’s no question that what happened to Nasubi would trigger a mass outcry today. But reality TV is still built on the same ideological imperatives—the desire to see people set up in manifestly absurd scenarios for our entertainment. The Emmy-nominated 2023 series Jury Duty is essentially a kinder episode of Candid Camera extended into a whole season, and the internet creator known as MrBeast, the purveyor of ridiculous challenges and stunts, has the second most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube. What’s most remarkable about The Contestant now is how its subject managed to regain his faith in human nature, despite everything he endured. But the ultimate goal of so many contemporary shows is still largely the same as it was 25 years ago: to manufacture a novel kind of social conflict, sit back, and watch what happens.

Boeing at risk of prosecution for breaking deal over crashes

Boeing faces possible criminal prosecution after the US Justice Department found the company violated a deferred-prosecution agreement tied to two fatal crashes half a decade ago, intensifying the crisis engulfing the embattled US plane maker.

The company breached the $2.5 billion settlement “by failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations,” according to the filing late on Tuesday.

Boeing now has four weeks to respond with its analysis and comments, which will be taken into consideration with regard to any next steps. The Justice Department said it’s still determining how to proceed, including whether and how to punish the company.

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The decision escalates the legal risks facing the plane maker in the wake of a near-catastrophe in early January, when a fuselage panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 mid-flight after workers failed to install critical bolts. The accident took place two days before the expiration of the deferred-prosecution agreement, in which Boeing agreed to comply with the settlement and cooperate with the government for a period of three years, after which the charge would be dismissed.

“We believe that we have honored the terms of that agreement, and look forward to the opportunity to respond to the Department on this issue,” Boeing said in a statement after the Justice Department filing.

Under the terms of the accord, the company adopted a compliance program designed to prevent it from deceiving regulators, including the Federal Aviation Administration. The deferred-prosecution agreement, reached in the waning days of the Trump administration, appeared to give Boeing the equivalent of a “get out of jail free” card despite the two crashes that took the lives of 346 people.

Boeing also faces another ultimatum, that one from the FAA, to devise a plan to fix what the regulator called “systemic” quality-control issues. Those 90 days, issued in late February, are set to run out at the end of this month.

US prosecutors in Seattle have already sent subpoenas seeking documents and communications from Boeing and supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which made the door plug that blew out. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is also scrutinizing Boeing’s comments about its safety practices after the Alaska Air accident.

The 2021 agreement not to prosecute Boeing over the two 737 Max jetliner crashes sparked intense criticism, including from victims’ families. Members of the victims families were outraged that prosecutors had not reached out to them before cutting the deal with Boeing, which agreed to pay a criminal fine of $243 million, but was allowed to dodge a fraud charge for withholding important information about the 737 Max from the FAA.

In 2022, the families were able to convince the presiding judge in the case that the Justice Department had improperly excluded them, in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. Even so, the judge declined to alter the terms of the Boeing agreement.

Scrutiny of Boeing has ramped up in the months since the Alaska Airlines accident, the February FAA report, and amid a wave of new whistle-blower allegations pertaining to the plane maker’s manufacturing processes. Congressional panels, including the Senate Commerce Committee, have already held hearings on some of these issues with plans to have both the FAA and Boeing executives testify in the near future.

Lawyers for families of crash victims hailed the Justice Department’s findings.

“This is a positive first step, and for the families, a long time coming,” said Paul Cassell, a lawyer representing the crash victims’ families. “But we need to see further action from DOJ to hold Boeing accountable, and plan to use our meeting on May 31 to explain in more details what we believe would be a satisfactory remedy to Boeing’s ongoing criminal conduct.”

Erin Applebaum, a partner at Kreindler & Kreindler who also represents families, said her clients “hope that DOJ will continue to pursue justice for Boeing’s victims and move forward with a prosecution against Boeing for its egregious criminal acts that resulted in the deaths of 346 innocent people.”

The Justice Department said it plans to confer with the families and their lawyers on May 31 and inform the court of its decision for any punishment against Boeing no later than July 7.

Boeing took steps to improve safety following the two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, including creating a chief aerospace safety officer and changing the management structure so its engineers reported to chief engineer Howard McKenzie rather than business leaders. But the measures didn’t go nearly far enough, according to scathing report issued by the Federal Aviation Administration in February.

The yearlong study found that many Boeing employees didn’t know how to flag potential safety issues and didn’t trust the “Speak Up” program the company put in place to flag wrongdoing. The plane maker was also faulted for ineffective procedures and training.

In Idaho, don’t say ‘abortion’? A state law limits teachers at public universities, they say

Idaho's public university professors say a law barring state employees from ‘promoting’ or ‘counseling in favor of’ abortion limits their ability to teach..

This story was published in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity , a newsroom that investigates inequality.

University of Idaho student Bergen Kludt-Painter started school in August 2022, a few months after a U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down Roe v. Wade. Soon after, abortion was banned in Idaho in almost all instances.

The political science major was eager to discuss the precedent-shattering case in class, but, she said, “we talked about everything except for abortion.”

During a political science course on how to write a research paper, her professor said he could not give her feedback on her chosen topic — abortion. The issue didn’t come up in her other political science classes either, even as state after state changed their abortion laws. Nor did abortion get mentioned in her Introduction to Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies course.

“It wasn’t discussed,” she said, “which I found odd, personally, because it feels like something that would be relevant to talk about in a class like that.”

But few, if any, public university professors in Idaho are talking about or assigning readings on abortion these days. That’s due to a 2021 law that makes it illegal for state employees to “promote abortion” or “counsel in favor of abortion.” Professors have said those two phrases put them at risk of violating the law, known as the No Public Funds for Abortion Act , just for discussing abortion in class. The possible penalties include significant fines and even prison time.

Six named University of Idaho professors and two faculty unions filed a lawsuit against the state in August for violating their First Amendment right to free speech and academic freedom and their 14 th Amendment right to a clearly worded law. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union are representing the professors.

“The more I heard about it, the more worried I was that I really can't teach my class in a responsible way without putting myself at risk,” said Aleta Quinn, an associate professor of philosophy for the University of Idaho and a plaintiff in the case.

Quinn teaches a course in biomedical ethics that typically features readings and class discussions about abortion. When she saw that the highest penalty for breaking the law was 14 years in prison, “I decided I would not — I couldn't — teach the subject of abortion.”

The bulk of the arguments in the case center on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that a statute “so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning” violates a person’s right to fair treatment under the law. 

The case also raises an important First Amendment question about protections for academic freedom in America: Are public university professors exempt from laws that could otherwise govern the speech of state employees?

Supreme Court precedent suggests the government has significant leeway to regulate the speech of the people it employs while they are performing their professional duties.

Still, the most recent court opinion on the issue left open the question of how much that speech could be regulated for one key group: public university professors. 

“We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching,” then Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 2006 majority opinion in Garcetti v. Ceballos .

The Supreme Court has not yet returned to that decision. 

“So establishing that legal principle, in and of itself, is an important endeavor for those [Idaho] professors,” said Helen Norton, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Colorado who is not involved in the case.

Interestingly, none of the professors suing in the Idaho case are nursing instructors or even biology professors. They aren’t teaching anyone about the physical nature of abortion. Their concerns, as scholars of subjects like philosophy, political science, gender studies and English, are focused on whether they can speak about abortion as an ethical, political and historical issue.  

For example, a sworn statement by an English professor named in the case explained that he used to assign Sallie Tisdale’s 1987 Harper’s Magazine essay, “We Do Abortions Here,” in one of his classes. The essay about her work as a nurse in an abortion clinic explores the complicated morality of helping women end their pregnancies. It’s also considered to be an example of powerful writing. He has now removed it from his syllabus.

Lawyers for the state of Idaho agree that professors fall under a different regulatory framework than other public employees when it comes to what they are permitted to say in the course of their duties. In their motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the state’s attorneys concede that settled law establishes protections for academics’ speech.

A month after the case was filed, Idaho’s attorney general, a defendant in the case, issued a non-binding opinion that the law does not apply to the “teaching or scholarship” of public university professors. If it did, Raul Labrador wrote, “the prohibition would likely be unconstitutional.”

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office declined to respond to repeated requests for an interview.

Republican state Rep. Bruce Skaug, the sponsor of the No Public Funds for Abortion Act, later introduced legislation to create a specific protection for classroom discussion of abortion, but it failed to pass. Skaug did not respond to requests for an interview.

Rather than arguing about the First Amendment claim, lawyers for the state focused on the professors’ assertion that the law is unconstitutionally vague under the 14th Amendment.

“Plaintiffs have alleged that there is a law that prohibits them from teaching college courses concerning abortion, producing scholarship in favor of abortion, and grading papers concerning abortion,” the state’s lawyers write in the November motion to dismiss. “There is no such law in the state of Idaho.”

The state’s attorneys argue that any reasonable reader of the law would see that the statute refers only to the act of advising a specific person to have an abortion. As written, they argue the law could not be interpreted as a prohibition on, say, giving a strong grade on a writing assignment where the student had chosen to make an ethical argument in favor of abortion. 

Because of the attorney general’s opinion and the “plain language” in the law, the state’s lawyers say the professors are imagining themselves to be at risk of prosecution when, in reality, no such risk exists.  

Lawyers for the plaintiffs disagree. Federal courts have issued rulings with varied interpretations of the word “promote.” And the lawsuit offers numerous hypothetical situations in which a professor could be prosecuted for promoting abortion even if that were not their intent.

Norton, the University of Colorado law professor, said it was reasonable for the professors to question the law’s language.

“That’s shown so far to be the focus of the dispute — what does ‘promoting’ or ‘counseling’ mean?” she said. “And it seems like that’s an important thing to nail down.”

Because there’s no definition of the terms in the law, she said, “there’s absolutely room for folks to argue about whether or not we should be quick or slow to interpret broadly or narrowly.”

The current case challenging Idaho’s No Public Funds for Abortion Act does not directly include the state’s many other public employees, like social workers and school counselors, who are unlikely to qualify for any special First Amendment protections. 

Public school teachers in the K-12 system do not have the same level of academic freedom protections as professors, either. But a high school history teacher could face the same concerns that speaking about abortion in class could be construed as either promoting or counseling in favor of it. 

However, those employees would no longer have their speech curtailed if the professors prevail and a court strikes the law down.

That matters because Idaho’s restrictions surrounding abortion are so tight at this point that nearly every other action connected to encouraging abortion has been outlawed some other way. At this point, regulating how public employees speak about abortion is arguably the only thing the No Public Funds law still does. Opponents of the law have questioned why the state is fighting to uphold it, if not to limit speech about abortion.

Wendy Heipt, a reproductive rights attorney with Legal Voice who is working on a challenge to Idaho’s ban on helping minors travel to receive abortions without parental consent, calls the state Legislature “extremist.” She worries that the state has become a “testing ground” for the far right.

“You would notice [these laws] in Texas,” where more than 30 million people live, she said, “not Idaho,” home to less than 2 million.

Indeed, copycat travel ban bills restricting the movement of minors seeking an abortion were introduced in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Oklahoma this session, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that works to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights.

No one interviewed for this story had heard about a copycat law that raised the same combination of First and 14th Amendment concerns as Idaho’s No Public Funds measure.

A judge heard the professors’ case in Idaho District Court in April. His decision on whether the preliminary injunction they’ve asked for will be granted is expected soon. The judge could also decide to dismiss the case, as the attorney general’s office has proposed. If the judge doesn’t dismiss the case, he will likely ask both parties to reconvene for another hearing before a final resolution.

In the meantime, professors are continuing to stay quiet about abortion in class. 

For someone dedicated to the free exchange of ideas like Quinn, that silence feels wrong. When she started teaching, her goal was to make the world a slightly better place by helping young people learn how to think, not what to think. She feels like she’s not fulfilling her duty to her students by ignoring an ethical debate as relevant to daily life as abortion.

“Philosophy is thinking critically about ideas and concepts and arguments, and considering which arguments are stronger and which are weaker and how they apply and all their implications,” Quinn said. “My goal is to enable people to have the skills to evaluate positions on their own.”

Kludt-Painter, the University of Idaho student, is the president of the Young Democrats. But her issues with the No Public Funds law weren’t about the politics of abortion. It’s an education she wants and feels she is being at least partially denied.

“It's a form of censorship,” she said. “College students should be able to handle hearing about these difficult topics. And educators should be able to discuss them and have a free exchange of ideas without being worried about getting fired or having criminal charges be brought against them.”

Hayden Cassinelli, the vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Idaho, said the topic of abortion came up in one of his classes recently but was "quickly avoided" when a teaching assistant told students he couldn’t discuss it. 

Despite Cassinelli’s opposition to abortion, the sophomore education major believes the topic should be discussed in class. He doesn’t think the No Public Funds law prevents such discussions. But he supported his university’s decision to issue guidance to professors in fall 2022, urging them to be cautious when talking about abortion.

"Given many professors' thoughts on abortion — including the fact that some of them may advocate for it and [encourage] a student to commit a crime — a temporary hold on any abortion-related discussion until legal clarity is established is a sound decision," Cassinelli wrote in an email.

Kludt-Painter thinks professors are just trying to protect their jobs when they avoid discussing abortion in class, but she wishes they didn’t feel that way. 

“It takes away from the whole academic freedom thing that post-secondary education is supposed to be about,” she said.