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Banking solves the principal–agent problem with incentive contracts which assume a Homo Economicus representative agent. However, professions can solve the principal–agent problem by assuming a 'Reasonable Person' representative agent, from tort law, who reliably tells the truth about hidden action. We describe a non‐virtuous circle in finance, which is a negative feedback loop between motivation crowding out arising from incentive contracts, and the subsequent need to offer incentive contacts because agents change from the Reasonable Person to Homo Economicus. We prescribe less reliance on incentive contracts in the practice of finance, and on Homo Economicus in the theory of finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When The Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death began meeting in 1967, I was a graduate student, with committee member Ralph Potter and committee chair Henry Beecher as my mentors. The question of when to stop life support on a severely compromised patient was not clearly differentiated from the question of when someone was dead. A serious clinical problem arose when physicians realized that a patient's condition was hopeless but life support perpetuated body function. Thus, the committee stated that its first purpose was to deal with the burdens on patients and families as well as on hospitals and on patients needing hospital beds occupied by comatose patients. They intuited the strategy of "defining" these patients as dead, thus legitimating treatment stoppage. They noted that this would also serve a second purpose. Although the dead donor rule had not yet been clearly articulated, they claimed that defining patients as dead would also address controversy over obtaining organs for transplant. My mentors' discussions related to my interest in the intersection between questions primarily of medical fact (When has a human brain irreversibly ceased functioning?) and nonmedical questions of social policy (Should we treat individuals with dead brains and beating hearts as dead humans?). It quickly became clear that most committee members did not appreciate the interplay of these questions.

The reasonable man is the best known, but not the only, legal construct to be born into the nineteenth-century common law. This article introduces the man’s siblings - including those from the areas of trust law, criminal law, contract law, and intellectual property law (both patents and trademarks). The fact that some of these ‘men’ changed the law is not controversial this research further highlights that while several of these came to life in that century, only some had a significant role into the twentieth century. Those that did are tied to the foundations of our society through their role in facilitating innovation and consumer protection. The argument is that it was the constructs’ nature and their capacity to accommodate public policy issues that enabled the vitality of the ‘reasonable person’ (negligence) and the ‘person skilled in the art’ (patents).

Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board concerned a negligent non-disclose of certain risks involved in natural birth. The Supreme Court departed from Sidaway v Bethlem Royal Hospital, which formerly governed negligent risk disclosure. A new test was adopted: risks that are material must be disclosed, the materiality of a risk to be decided by reference to a reasonable person in the patient's position, or where the medical professional should be reasonably aware a particular patient is likely to attach significance to that risk. The Court emphasised risk disclosure practices must focus on what the patient wants to know. Yet the Court's portrayal of this change as a development of Sidaway is questionable. The decision is problematic in its engagement with precedent, the new test's future implications and statements regarding therapeutic privilege. Despite rejecting Bolam v Friern Hospital Management Committee's relevance to risk disclosure, this case is likely to remain relevant.

Stalking is a pattern of unwanted behavior that results in the target or a reasonable person experiencing fear or a sense of threat. Obsessive relational intrusion is a pattern of seeking intimacy from a person who does not want such intimacy. The societal and historical context of stalking, the types of stalkers and the types of stalker behaviors, the ways in which victims attempt to cope, and the effects of stalking reveal the complexity of stalking and obsessive relational intrusion as a social phenomenon. Keywords: aggression; conflict; gender

In sexual harassment law scholarship, it is often argued that the reasonable person standard should give way to a reasonable victim (woman) standard. Yet, this latter standard may unintentionally invite homophobic employees to attempt to use a reasonable homophobe standard to charge gay supervisors with harassment merely for being openly gay at work. In response, I argue that we currently act on an unjustifiable distinction whereby we treat sexuality behavior (behavior that indicates one's sexuality) as necessarily sexualized only for GLBTQ behavior. By disallowing this discriminatory treatment, we can preserve the reasonable victim standard and undermine the homophobe's warrantless charges.

Consent evolved from judge-made law in Great Britain in 1767. The term informed consent entered the judicial lexicon in 1957. The first court case to articulate a reasonable person standard adopted by the high courts in Canada and Australia was heard in the U.S. in 1972. Today, informed consent continues to develop in four areas: (i) the court-based doctrines of consent and informed consent in clinical care in judge-made law; (ii) federal regulations related to research on human study participants; (iii) shared decision making adopted by care organizations and medical societies in the US, Canada, and Europe; and (iv) areas including decision analysis, discourse analysis, ethics, linguistic analysis, patient–physician communication, risk and evidence communication, and social theory. In this paper, we will focus on consent and informed consent in the first part of the twenty-first century. We will examine a range of information and decision making frameworks from the oldest court-established frameworks of consent and informed consent to recent conceptions of information and decision making in evidence-based decision making and shared decision making in the patient–physician relationship. This paper is divided into three parts: I. What informed consent is, II. What informed consent isn't, and III. Future challenges in informed consent and shared decision making.

There are many important moral beliefs that have been comparatively stable over time and across cultures that seem to presuppose that the intention with which one acts can affect the permissibility of one’s action. Until about forty years ago, the consensus among moral philosophers was that these beliefs are indeed best explained and justified by the idea that intention is relevant to permissibility, an idea that has traditionally been articulated in the Doctrine of Double Effect. This is the doctrine that it can be permissible to bring about bad effects, including the deaths of innocent people, provided that they are not intended either as an end or as a means but are unavoidable and proportionate side effects of the pursuit of good ends. Over the last four decades, however, the consensus in support of this view has dissolved. Most consequentialists (for example, act-consequentialists) have always maintained that it is permissible to intend to cause bad effects when this is a necessary means of producing the greatest good, so it is unsurprising that the earliest of the recent attacks on the relevance of intention to permissibility came primarily from philosophers who, if not avowedly consequentialists, are close enough to be reasonably mistaken for consequentialists. 1 Over the past two decades, however, a number of distinguished deontological and contractualist moral theorists have joined the attack, as have many practitioners of “experimental philosophy,” and their combined efforts have probably reduced Double Effect to a minority position among moral philosophers. Between 2000 and 2007, when I was one of the editors of Ethics, I reviewed a number of submissions by junior philosophers in which Double Effect was relegated to a footnote and dismissed as an exploded view that no reasonable person could take seriously. I saw that as evidence of a decisive shift in philosophical orthodoxy. According to the Doctrine of Double Effect, an act can be impermissible if done with a wrongful intention even if the same act — or at least an act

This article argues that there are two different measures of gain-based damages for breach of contract: the Wrotham Park measure and the Blake measure. The former is assessed by reference to the objective value of the benefit received by the defendant and the latter by reference to the defendant's subjective gain. In assessing Wrotham Park damages the courts apply a fixed formula, determining the price that a reasonable person in the position of the claimant might have demanded from the defendant at the time of breach for relaxing its rights under the contract. The Blake measure is different; it requires the defendant to disgorge the actual net profit received from the breach. Unlike the Wrotham Park measure, it deals only with positive and not negative gains. It is also limited by the doctrine of causation so that only those gains that are ‘directly occasioned’ by the breach are recoverable.

Among the effects of sexual integration of the workplace has been an increase in the opportunities for, and incidence of, sexual harassment. Sexual harassment, and women's responses to it, can be understood as reflections of the different evolved sexual psychologies of the sexes. Among the issues discussed are whether the abusiveness of work environments should be viewed from the perspective of the ‘reasonable person’ or the ‘reasonable woman,’ whether sexual harassment is really ‘about power’ rather than about sex, and whether harassment that takes a sexual form is necessarily ‘because of’ the sex of the victim. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In common law jurisdictions, the reasonable person is a commonly encountered ¢gure.The reasonable person and the associated idea of reasonableness feature in a number of ¢elds, notably negligence law, criminal law, administrative law, and the law relating to sexual harassment in the workplace. In these areas of the law, judges invoke the reasonable person as a standard by reference towhich they assess the conduct of defendants, claimants, and the decisions of public o⁄cials. But who is the reasonable person? In negligence law, judges and commentators have emphasised the reasonable person’s ordinariness. Thus, they have spoken of the ‘man’ (or, nowadays,‘person’) on the Clapham omnibus or the Bondi tram. This emphasis on ordinariness brings with it a concern with community standards as relevant to the question ‘What is reasonable?’ Hence the reasonable person has been described as ‘the ordinary citizen’ who seeks to act on those considerations that regulate ‘community behaviour’. Here, we are presentedwith a picture of an addressee of the law who is co-operative (perhaps even other-regarding) and, as such, ready to play his or her unremarkable, but practically useful, part in community life. Moreover, descriptions of this sort bespeak negligence law’s com

Contemporary theory of the constitutionally reasonable public servant, established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982 in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, is measured in reference to clearly established constitutional or statutory rights that a reasonable person would have known. In this article, the author seeks to elucidate the evolving contours of the objective reasonableness standard and examines how federal courts have applied it. To gain a firsthand impression of how public officials challenged in federal courts are measuring up to the objective reasonableness standard, the author provides a snapshot of 449 recent court cases selected from two federal circuits, the Eighth and the District of Columbia circuits. He concludes that public officials in these two circuits have fared very well under the standard of objective reasonableness. The flip side is that aggrieved individual citizens must carry a heavy burden to protect their constitutional rights.

broader. Inadvertence may qualify as a culpable mental state in circumstances when a person ought to have adverted. Treating as acting with an absent mental state a person who has acted intentionally but without adverting to a risk when he or she should have is like treating the failure to apply brakes while driving a motor vehicle as a pure omission rather than a dangerous act of driving. In a civil society there should be certain minimum duties of citizenship and every individual should have a responsibility to advert to relevant risks when actively engaging in certain conduct. Failure to live up to that can fairly be labelled culpable. This is not an objective test in the sense of ignoring the accused and asking what the reasonable person would have foreseen. The focus remains on the accused and the question is simply whether his or her mind should have been attuned to the risk. The two children in Rv G were not blameworthy because it was not reasonable to expect an eleven or twelve year old to advert to the risk that materialised. Had they instead been two drunks, it is unlikely that Rv G would have overruled Caldwell. For now, Caldwell is dead, although it lingers on as a ghost of Reid.58 A preferable course of action in Rv G would have been for the House of Lords to have endorsed an overt normative concept of recklessness by refining Glanville Williams' (an avowed subjectivist) proposed modification of Caldwell along the lines suggested here. This would allow courts to evaluate the blameworthiness of the accused's mental state according to prevailing ethical standards and distinguish between individuals who act out of 'stupidity or lack of imagination', and those who act 'outside the bounds of what humane and decent people regard as tolerable'.

What is the best way to reflect human diversity in the structure of the provocation defence, and similar excusatory defences in the criminal law? The House of Lords recently concluded that the right way is to allow the jury to personalise and thereby qualify the apparently uniform ‘reasonable person’ standard mentioned in section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957. In this paper we argue that this is not the right way at all. We argue that the reasonable person standard, unqualified, already accommodates the only variations between people that the law should want to accommodate in an excusatory defence. To defend this view we revive the common law's tripartite analysis of the ‘objective’ (or impersonal) issues in the provocation defence: first, was there an action capable of constituting a provocation? second, how provocative was it? and third, how much self-control should have been exhibited in the face of it? We show that these questions each have a built-in sensitivity to certain variations between different defendants' situations, but that this does not detract from their objectivity (or impersonality). We argue that no more sensitivity is needed in the name of human diversity, and what is more that no more sensitivity is desirable.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the decision points that are important to consider when evaluating the ethics of a placebo-controlled trial. The ethical requirements for research involving human subjects are reviewed, and the rationale for and potential problems with concomitant placebo control are explained. A series of case discussions are used to illustrate each decision point. The critical decision points in the evaluation of the ethics of a placebo-controlled trial are as follows: (i) Is placebo being used in place of standard therapy? (ii) Is standard therapy likely to be effective? (iii) Is the toxicity of standard therapy such that patients routinely refuse this treatment? (iv) Could the use of placebo result in severe suffering or irreversible harm? (v) Is the variability in the placebo response such that it is reasonable to consider other options for the control group? (vi) Would a reasonable person with an average degree of altruism and risk aversiveness agree to participate in this study? The algorithm presented in this article gives researchers and research monitors (such as Institutional Review Board members) the tools they need to evaluate the ethics of a study that uses concomitant placebo control.

In Ellison v. Brady, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that the perspective of a reasonable woman, rather than just a reasonable person, should be used in deciding whether or not the plaintiff has experienced sexual harassment. One of the assumptions underlying the Ellison opinion, traceable to findings from research, is that men and women perceive and define sexual harassment differently. In this article, we review the research to see if the conclusion is warranted. In general, the finding that women define sexual harassment more broadly and inclusively than men is reliable, but the difference is small, often smaller than intrasex differences, and is affected by a variety of factors, including characteristics of the study itself. After reviewing the evidence, we evaluate the use of a reasonable woman standard, concluding that this standard is not helpful.

In research, adequate disclosure generally means providing all the information that a reasonable person would consider material to deciding whether to participate. But in cross cultural settings, determining what constitutes "adequate" disclosure is difficult. Outsiders are less able to ascertain what information is material to decisionmaking-what seems to Western research adequate can become "information overload" for prospective participants from non-Western cultures. While doing research in Grenada, we found that what appeared to be adequate disclosure caused harm. One of us (Connolly) was a student from the U.S. and new to Grenada. The other of us (Macpherson, a member of Connolly's thesis committee) was also from the U.S. but had lived in Grenada for several years. Our observations elucidate the complexities of providing adequate disclosure in cross cultural settings. Grenada (an independent Caribbean island) has a population of about 95,ooo and consists of about 90 square miles that are mostly rural. The island is undergoing rapid socio-economic development and diseases of lifestyle are increasingly prevalent. Tourism is a main source of income, but the average annual income for many is about US$3,ooo. Dairy products and other supplies are not produced locally so these are imported and expensive. Health care and education are available to all, but facilities and standards are seriously limited by economic factors. Even among educated Grenadians traditional cultural beliefs about health persist-for example, many believe that going out in the rain causes illness that sometimes results in death.

Although over twenty years have passed since the Hart-Devlin exchange, the controversy over society's right to punish homosexuals remains alive, as is shown by recent concern over the spread of AIDS and the recent announcement of the Supreme Court that “majority sentiments about the morality of homosexuality” constitute an adequate justification for sodomy statutes under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment.1 Lord Devlin's moral justification for punishing homosexual conduct seems to follow a similar line of reasoning. The one argument to which his critics have paid the most attention begins with the assertion that society consists of a seamless web of ideas and values, the content of which is determined by whether the ordinary, reasonable person is disgusted by a particular type of conduct.2 Among the types of conduct that disgust the ordinary person, he continues, is homosexual conduct.3 Therefore, Devlin concludes, society may punish homosexual conduct, even if it is consensual.

Centralized decisions that impose risks demand a justification. The most promising way to justify these decisions is in terms of consent of those people who will be affected by them. Attempts to determine how safe is safe enough in terms of justice, rights, or efficiency are unlikely to get us very far. The problem with consent, however, is that actual consent is impossible to obtain for decisions that affect large numbers of persons. For this reason, we need to explore other kinds of consent and the idea of what a reasonable person would agree to. Three models of consent are described, each one more powerful (but more controversial) in terms of its potential for justifying centralized decisions.