Ethical Agency Research Articles

Use of generative AI in research: ethical considerations and emotional experiences

ABSTRACT This study examines researchers’ ethical concerns toward the deployment of GenAI in research and their emotional responses. To acquire an in-depth understanding, we used narrative frames and follow-up interviews to collect data from 22 researchers who reported extensive experience with GenAI. An inductive thematic analysis revealed three themes capturing ethical concerns that invoked three types of emotional reactions. From an ethical perspective, our participants were concerned with “human ethical agency in AI research practices,” “cognitive impacts of overreliance on GenAI in research,” and “ethical issues of access, accuracy, and privacy.” From an emotional perspective, they showed “mixed emotions,” “positive emotions,” and “negative emotions” when dealing with GenAI tools. There were close connections between the ethical implications of GenAI and the emotional reactions to them. In this light, we conclude that emotional reactions to GenAI, which are determinants of future use, should be taken more seriously in further research.

Responsible research and innovation: An ambidexterity lens of generalized and specialized responsibilities

AbstractThe incompatibility between diverse responsible principles of science and technology (S&T) and multi‐stakeholders' heterogeneous value assessments underscores the importance of coordinating normative principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI). In this context, this study adopts an ambidexterity lens to address this issue, conceptualizing two constructs—“generalized responsibility” and “specialized responsibility” of S&T (GRST and SRST)—to illustrate the trade‐offs. It explores the antecedents of GRST and SRST from an agency perspective. Drawing from a dataset of 19,707 poll responses, the study employs a fractional logit regression model to examine the relationships between three types of agency (iterational agency, strategic agency, and ethical agency) and GRST and SRST. The results reveal a positive relationship between iterational agency and SRST, and between strategic agency and GRST, as well as U‐shaped effects of iterational agency on GRST, strategic agency on SRST, and ethical agency on both GRST and SRST. Moreover, ethical agency is found to be more important for SRST than for GRST. The study offers theoretical and policy implications for a critical discussion about responsible innovation.

Value Inquiry and Constructing the Good in Organizations

Research has taken important steps towards establishing values work in organizations as a performative phenomenon situated in practice. Yet, researchers have said little about the critical and creative nature of such work, including how it may build its agentic powers more so from what is ethically absent than from what is established. We approach this void by drawing from Dewey’s Pragmatism in a comparative analysis of how three value-laden issues tied to companionate love are handled in a faith-based hospital. We develop the notion of value inquiry, which we understand as a discovery-oriented and transformative constructing of the good that takes its originating creative desires from troublesome situations. Our findings suggest that ethically fruitful value inquiry involves opening such situations in a way that critically examines previous practice, enlists people in co-defining needs and engages them in sustained experimental action. By theorizing value inquiry, we relocate ethical agency as a responsive relational capacity emerging with coactive power in evolving situations. Such emergence highlights the relational processes of work on values in organizations. When inquiring together, people move beyond attending to the use of prescriptive value conceptions and into a creative mode of actively searching for and co-constructing the good.

Recognizing Collectives as Moral Agents

Until recently, discussions on moral agency focused almost exclusively on the individual moral subject. Recognizing that social structures and cultures influence human subjects but do not have agency, this article argues that we must now recognize the moral agency of organized collectives. Invoking the work of philosophers and other theologians who already do, this article turns to theological ethicists writing on community organizing, racism, and social virtues, and, finally, to feminists engaging moral luck and intersectionality to illustrate the importance of collective moral agency. It concludes by describing qualifications for estimating the ethical agency of such collectives.

Relational Legal Pluralism: Ethical Agency, Reflexive Communities, A-legality, and the Revitalization of Democratic Institutions

Relational Legal Pluralism: Ethical Agency, Reflexive Communities, A-legality, and the Revitalization of Democratic Institutions

Privacy, internet and pluralist democracy

The aim of this study is to discuss some important criticism of digital rights, in particular of the right to privacy, by feminist and law economics scholars.Then,its relation to security and transparency is proposed. In particular, I argue that such theoretical lenses would help shed light on recent cases concerning controversial surveillance leaks, which highlight the deficiency of legitimacy as well as of the jurisdiction and ethical agency of leading democratic states: e.g. The NSA scandal. Finally, I will criticize this approach and will highlight some real treats to the fundamental rights when I consider the possibility of a pluralist democracy in the dimension of the Internet.

Augmented Reality and the Dematerialization of Experiential Art

One of the most compelling effects of digitally enhanced and digitally enabled immersive exhibitions is their paradoxical dematerialization of “analog” experience. What leads exhibition visitors to accept that immersion is a state achieved only through technological mediation? Are we not already perceptually immersed in the world, as the phenomenologists asserted? This essay explores how digital enhancement disengages self-awareness by masquerading as immersion. In contrast, contemporary artists Karin Sander, Janet Cardiff, and Chris Salter employ desynchronizing and dislocating tactics to challenge naïve notions of what comprises an aesthetic experience, in order to requaint viewers with their own perceptual and ethical agency.

Existential Ethics: Thinking Hard About Lawyer Responsibility for Clients’ Environmental Harms

Abstract This paper challenges the conventional understanding among many legal ethicists that environmental harm can be a necessary, if regrettable, collateral effect of lawyerly work. It argues that lawyers sometimes do things that cost society too much and that legal ethics (being the rules of ethical conduct set out by regulators of lawyers and broader theories of ‘good’ lawyering) has the potential to act as a mediator on lawyers’ environmental harm-causing action. The paper begins by examining lawyers’ formal rules of professional conduct in England & Wales, showing how those rules require lawyers to provide active counselling to clients but do not fully address clients’ legally permissible choices that may result in environmental harm. The paper then turns to theories of legal ethics that go beyond these baseline rules. Here, I argue that the dominant ‘Standard Conception’ of lawyers as neutral technicians is not only implausible in the context of environmental law but also fundamentally incomplete. The paper also considers the ethical implications of a lawyer’s initial decision to represent a client. The commonly held belief that ‘Everyone deserves legal advice’ often masks a simple ethical choice, where lawyers prioritise commercial concerns over environmental considerations, unburdened by more complex ethical constraints. However, this rationalisation rests on unsound premises and frequently clashes with lawyers’ personal moral boundaries; a problem I label ‘Meatloaf Lawyering’. Ultimately, I argue that lawyers have significant ethical agency and that their professional obligations do not impede (and sometimes require) an active, ethically responsible stance towards environmental harms.

Freiheit neu vorstellen: menschliches Handlungsvermögen in Zeiten der ökologischen Katastrophe

Abstract I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory, starting from the premise that, today, such theories must focus on the global ecological disaster. I assume, furthermore, that radical societal change is necessary in order to arrest our current disastrous ecological trajectory. Radical societal change calls for a fundamental re-orientation in values globally, on both an individual and collective level. This entails a thorough-going change in perceptions of what it means to lead an ethically good life, including revision of deepseated conceptions of ethical agency, in particular, the idea of individual freedom. Wearing the hat of an engaged theorist, I propose a re-imagining and rearticulation of freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency. Taking social institutions as an example, I discuss non-authoritarian authority as a force for forming and transforming ethical perceptions and attribute a similar non-authoritarian potential to critical social theories, in this case a disclosive one. While a change in ethical perceptions will not be sufficient for the required societal transformation, I claim that it is an integral component of it.

The ethical agency of AI developers

Public and academic discourse about the ethics of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science has largely focused on the algorithms and the companies deploying them. Little attention has been paid to the ethical agency of the developers. This study is the first of its kind that centers developers in the ethical environment. Semi-structured interviews with 40 developers about the ethics of being a developer revealed more than 20 themes, 3 of which are the subject of this paper: ethics in the occupational ecosystem, developer ethical agency, and the characteristics of an ethical developer. These themes reveal significant gaps between how developers perceive themselves and the reality of their work experiences. Their ethical agency is likewise variable. They have some authority to intervene for ethical reasons in systems they work on, but they often do not realize just how many ethical decisions they make. Nonetheless, this study reveals a growing ethical wisdom in this community, one that needs to be surfaced and nurtured by engaging with developers.

Business and Local Government: Prevention of Unethical Conduct

The case describes the developments of an ethics code observed in the local government of Suffolk County, New York, USA. In Suffolk County, there is now a dedicated Board of Ethics Agency (“Board”) within the local government to ensure that business operations and government operations run as ethically compliant as possible. This Board was created in 2012 in order to follow compliance with a law that established a replacement for the Ethics Commission (previously existing within Suffolk County) because this Ethics Commission had been involved in a serious controversy. The former County Executive, Steve Levy, was found guilty of compromising the “integrity of an ethics commission”. Suffolk County government prescribed various measures in order to ensure that the citizens of Suffolk County were protected from business ethical violations. The Board also preemptively created laws that discouraged businesses from acting unethically.

Metaleptic Confessions

This essay focuses on Paul Auster’s novel, Invisible (2009), aiming to explore the text’s intricate metafictional dimensions, especially the deployment of metalepsis as the main organizing principle of its narrative structure. The author argues that the novel employs a subtle metaleptic narrative structure, which moves beyond the classical postmodernist phase of textual experimentation, and serves as a means of raising questions of ethical and existential relevance. Metalepsis is construed in the paper as a trope of transgression, whereby its epistemological and ontological functions are regarded as a means to an end, which is the problematization of the interrelation between narrative structure and ethical agency. The main contention of the article is that the novel’s surreptitiously deployed metaleptic structure results in the ontological destabilization of the narrative, which in turn undermines the epistemic function (truth-telling) of the act of confession, so its ethical purpose (atonement, absolution) remains unfulfilled. (PCS)

Dissenting from heteronormativity: growing sideways in religious education

AbstractTensions across religious and LGBTQ concerns have played out in education for some time. In this paper, I make efforts to respond productively to this context by theorising what it might mean for young people in religious schools to dissent from the heteronormativity of religion in religious education (RE). To do this, I survey perspectives across Jewish, Christian, and Muslim accounts of education to claim that there is precedent for dissenting from heteronormativity in religious school settings more generally given these accounts’ resistance to a uniform conception of religious identities and traditions, coupled with their sensitivity to pluralism and difference as enriching features of religious communities and experiences. The value of these accounts notwithstanding, I move to identifying two limiting dimensions to some of these perspectives for theorising dissent, namely: (1) an assumed commonality of religious identity in religious school settings, however internally diverse; and (2) an inordinately propositional and disembodied account of religious encounters. With the specific curricular context of RE in mind, I suggest that dissent from heteronormativity can (perhaps more helpfully) be understood as a mode of ethical agency that: (1) attends to that which exceeds identity in people’s encounters with religion; and (2) builds on the embodied, material, and affective dynamics of encountering religion in the RE classroom. Put differently, I understand dissent as a mode of ‘growing sideways’ in RE, where young people encounter alternatives to the limits of heteronormativity within the context of the present.

Artificial Intelligent Systems and Ethical Agency

The article examines the challenges involved in the process of developing artificial ethical agents. The process involves the creators or designing professionals, the procedures to develop an ethical agent and the artificial systems. There are two possibilities available to create artificial ethical agents: (a) programming ethical guidance in the artificial Intelligence (AI)-equipped machines and/or (b) allowing AI-equipped machines to learn ethical decision-making by observing humans. However, it is difficult to fulfil these possibilities due to the subjective nature of ethical decision-making. The challenge related to the developers is that they themselves lack training in ethical skills. The creators who develop an artificial ethical agent should be able to foresee the ethical issues and have knowledge about ethical decision-making to improve the ethical use of AI-equipped machines. The suggestion is that the focus should be on training professionals involved in the process of developing these artificial systems in ethics rather than developing artificial ethical agents and thereby attributing ethical agency to it.

Artificial Friends and Becoming-Machine: A Digital Humanities and Posthuman Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun presents a society with dormant layers that obscure the issues surrounding the human and the alterity of machines. With its technological advancements in gene editing and androids called Artificial Friends, Ishiguro’s novel presents a posthuman world where the posthuman concept of becoming-machine is seemingly mired in aporia. This paper attempts to examine this notion of “becoming-machine” and its entanglements in Ishiguro’s novel with digital humanities tools, Google Books NGram Viewer and Voyant Tools and a posthuman lens. I argue the claim that the diegetic process of child lifting and Klara’s sense of ethics, reveal the seemingly intertwined, but distinct notions of becoming within the text. One, becoming the machine, is a tangible, yet precarious process of humanity losing their ethical sense. While the other is one where Artificial Friends are ethically, in a posthuman sense, gaining ethical agency, or becoming-machine.

Agents of Grace

This article contributes to theorizations of ethical agency in the anthropology of Islam by turning to the medieval moral theologian Abū āmid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111). Building on Talal Asad’s engagement with Ghazālī, this article closely reads the latter’s writing on intentionality, which amply illuminates his theory of ethical agency. Ghazālī neither elaborates an idealist theory of ethical agency nor posits an ethical subject whose practices are “directed at making certain kinds of behaviors unconscious or nondeliberative” (Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 139). Rather, he articulates ethical agency as a site of contingency and ambivalence, as action involves not only knowledge, resolution/will, and bodily capacity but also divine grace. Grace, this article argues, is a cipher for the non-sovereignty of the ethical subject, since for Ghazālī agency is split between the subject’s discursive and material capacities (knowledge, resolution, and bodily strength) and a certain metamorphic spontaneity/enablement that is experienced as a gift of the Other (grace). By turning to Ghazālī, then, this article encourages serious engagement with the concept of grace for understanding ethical agency in the anthropology of Islam. “[The pious ancestors] knew that intention is not what a person pronounces with his tongue when he utters, ‘I intend.’ Rather, it is the springing forth in the heart of the flowing stream of openings from God, [a springing forth] that sometimes happens easily and sometimes with difficulty.” —Ḥujjat-ul-Islām Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī

Constructing a ‘Different’ Strength: A Feminist Exploration of Vulnerability, Ethical Agency and Care

This article explores how ethical agency, as ‘other-oriented’ caring, emerged from feelings of being ‘different’ in a cultural organization by drawing on feminist ethics of care. By analyzing interview material from an ethnographic study, we centralize the relationship between feelings of being ‘different,’ vulnerability and the development of sensibilities, practices and imaginaries of care. We elaborate on how vulnerability serves as a ground for caring with rather than for others, and illustrate how it allowed individuals to challenge both organizational, normative diversity discourses and essentialization of differences. We contribute to the literature on critical diversity management by furthering problematizations of instrumental diversity management from the perspective of care, and to the organizational literature on feminist care ethics by empirically exploring how ethical agency emerges from tensions related to feeling ‘different.’ While previous studies have shown how marginalized individuals use their sense of ‘otherness’ to negotiate, conform to and resist organizational norms, practices and discourses, we provide further insights on how it also can drive concern and care for others, and thus serve as possible ground for ethical change initiatives within organizations.

Effects of an ethics education program on nurses' moral efficacy in an acute health care facility.

This study aimed to evaluate an ethics education program developed to increase moral efficacy among nurses in an acute health care facility. Moral distress among nurses can cause serious problems in terms of hospital organisations and patient safety. To reduce moral distress and promote professional confidence in nursing practice, a strategic intervention program is needed. An ethics education program introduced methods to increase self-efficacy in accordance with Bandura's social cognitive theory. Eight nurses were recruited from 2017 to 2019, and all conversations and discussions regarding the ethics consultation were recorded on IC recorders and analysed qualitatively. Four core categories-Convinced to take an active role in ethical issues; Progressed in nursing practice with ethical agency; Experienced professional transformation; and Empowered by the presence of colleagues-emerged as outcomes of the ethics education program that related to moral efficacy. The four core outcome categories suggested that the participants had gained confidence after taking part in the ethical education program. The results of the participants' described behaviours and actions suggested that they would be proactive in contributing to reductions in moral distress in the future.

The Landscape of Durance: Utopianism and Eastern Europe in Video Games

This paper considers the video games S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl (2007), Metro 2033 (2010), Papers, Please (2013), This War of Mine (2014) and Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic (2021), which all explore the recurring chronotope of Eastern Europe as an experimental space designed for testing the player's ethical agency. I argue that there is a thread linking formal ludic iteration, and the returns of modernist utopian discourses as post-apocalyptic within these games. This thread weaves ethical and unethical choices into a simulacral ludic history, trapping the player within a virtual embodiment of their own utopian desire, to provoke them to escape it, or seek alternatives to it. All these games allegorize Eastern Europe as a site of both normalized oppression and of sovereign choice, holding the player responsible for both options. They imagine and stereotype Eastern Europe as a durance: an entrapping space of looming ideological oppression that can be territorialized only through being survived. This paper interrogates the critical potential of video games by considering what may be the medium's most oppressive aspect ‒ its immense facility at ideological training disguised as sovereign freedom of choice.

Identity Work as Ethical Self-Formation: The Case of Two Chinese English-as-Foreign-Language Teachers in the Context of Curriculum Reform

Curriculum reform urges teachers to constantly reflect on existing identities and develop probably whole new identities. Yet, in the wake of the poststructuralist view of identity as a complex matter of the social and the individual, of discourse and practice, and of agency and structure, teacher identity is a process of arguing for themselves and hence ethical and political in nature. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ethical self-formation and its adoption by Clarke (2009a) “Diagram for Doing Identity Work” in teacher education research, this 2-year-long case study explores how two Chinese English-as-foreign-language (EFL) teachers engaged in identity work in a changing curricular landscape. The analysis of narrative frames and semistructured interviews reveals the relations between the relative stable and the evolving elements of teachers’ identity work, and the essential role of teachers’ ethical agency based on reflective and critical responsiveness to the contextual reality and the dynamic power relations during the reform. The findings argue for the importance of nourishing teachers’ reflective identity work and ethical agency during the turbulence of educational change.