These checks are often used by employers as a means of judging a job candidate's past mistakes, character, and fitness, and to identify potential hiring risks for safety and security reasons. Background checks are also used to thoroughly investigate potential government employees in order to be given a security clearance.
Situational ethics is a form of consequentialism, though distinct from utilitarianism in that the latter's aim is the greatest good for the greatest number, while situational ethics focuses on creating the greatest amount of love.
Cheryll Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the undervalued genre of nature writing.