Cross-cultural Ethics Research Articles

Creative data justice: a decolonial and indigenous framework to assess creativity and artificial intelligence

ABSTRACT In the last decade, the Global South has emerged as a significant player in the data economy due to their majority user base, and studying its role is crucial to comprehend the future of AI. As societies grapple with the implications of AI on creative life, there is an opportunity to reevaluate the creative contributions of Global South cultures, ensuring they are acknowledged and foregrounded in the evolving landscape of human and machine creativity. This paper calls for reimagining and restructuring creative value with the emergence of AI enabled technologies by broadening who and what counts as creative in this data-driven era. To democratize creativity, a decolonial and indigenous framework of cross-cultural creative value is needed which critically intersects and examines the relations between creative labor, rights, and learning. The study of the Global South’s data economies is important not only to harness its potential but also to address the cross-cultural ethics of building Creative AI tools with data from their underrepresented communities. At its core, the creative data justice framework emphasizes the need to challenge the existing power imbalances in global data governance. This paper proposes that fair creative value can be achieved by drawing inspiration from indigenous systems of care as a counterforce to neoliberal values of efficiency and utility. This framework will help scholars, policymakers and designers in their inclusive approaches to creativity in the age of AI.

Patient autonomy in an East-Asian cultural milieu: a critique of the individualism-collectivism model

The practice of medicine—and especially the patient-doctor relationship—has seen exceptional shifts in ethical standards of care over the past few years, which by and large originate in occidental countries and...

Ethical codes in the Arab region: comparisons and differences

ABSTRACT Within the professional practice of psychology the code of ethics characterizes what is morally right or wrong, by means of a set of principles, values, and standards of conduct. While there are numerous international mental health organizations that incorporate ethical guidelines such as the APA and EFPA; these codes still fall short in providing guidelines for psychologists working in non-western cultures, especially when there are no universally adopted and valid cross-cultural ethics codes. This paper explores various challenges psychologists in the Arab region face when using a western code which does not reflect the values and traditions of their culture. A comparison of several ethical codes from different Arab countries is presented, with a focus on challenging areas of interest such as confidentiality, informed consent and multiple relationships.

Mutual Legal Assistance in Wildlife Criminal Matters in Eastern Africa

The workshop Strengthening of International Cooperation in Wildlife Criminal Matters in Eastern Africa, held for investigators and prosecutors, commenced in Nairobi in February 2020. Multiple representatives from nine African countries’ national wildlife and prosecution agencies were in attendance (including inter-governmental organization/non-governmental organization representatives). The first author spent six months conducting research in Kenya, respected cross-cultural ethics considerations, and aided in the development and facilitation of the workshop. Workshop evaluations (pre and post-pre) were utilized to identify challenges, experiences, and engagement in cooperation in transnational wildlife cases. Pre-workshop evaluations (N = 23), post-pre-workshop evaluations (N = 24), participant observation data, and illicit wildlife seizure data (obtained from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Container Control Programme) identified three key challenges in transnational wildlife criminal cases within the region: (1) Mutual legal assistance is not being utilized enough; (2) regional legal harmonization and support are necessary; and (3) exhibit management and evidence requirements need to be amended. There are multiple policy implications from these data, mainly the need for regional adoption of an MLA guidance, the need for the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime to be ratified by all countries, and a better understanding of alternatives to mutual legal assistance (MLA) requests for repatriation of large seized wildlife exhibits.

The future of artificial intelligence, posthumanism and the inflection of Pixley Isaka Seme’s African humanism

Increasingly, innovation in artificial intelligence technologies portends the re-conceptualization of human existentiality along the paradigm of posthumanism. An exposition of this through a critical culturo-historical methodology uncloaks the Eurocentric genitive basis of the philosophical anthropology that underpins this technological posthumanism, as well as its dystopian possibilities. As a contribution to obviating the latter, an Africanist civilizational humanism proclaimed by Pixley ka Isaka Seme is proffered as a plausible alternative paradigm for humanity’s technological advancement. Seme, a pan-Africanist thinker of the early twentieth century, proclaimed humanistic-spirituality as the indispensable gift African Civilisation-in-its-renaissance is yet to offer global humanity. His postulation is being provided as a contribution to the archive on cross-cultural ethics of artificial intelligence.

Tagore: Global Author Through A Pepperean Lens

The global reach of Tagore’s achievement can be freshly understood through a theory of purposive behavior by the American philosopher, Stephen C. Pepper. Pepper proposed dividing human purposes in three categories: conative achievement, and affective. Tagore’s prose fiction can fill out the theory with more complex and problematic examples towards a cross cultural ethics. His novels about the emerging professional class in India reveal the tensions between traditional values of the family and religious observance against individual efforts to fulfil desire, find pleasure, and be productive outside or in home life. The last completed prose fiction of the Bengali master presents a distinct challenge for critics and filmmakers as his longstanding sympathy for the plight of women may cause us to misread the rollickingly satirical "Laboratory" in which a scientist's legacy is fought over by a thoroughly corrupt mother and daughter.

Translational Challenges in Cross-Cultural Digitization Ethics: The Case of Chinese Marriage Documents, 1909–1997

Abstract Digitization of archival materials has gained global popularity as both practice in cultural heritage institutions and a scholarly topic. However, ethical issues involved in digitization, especially the challenges brought by cross-cultural archival digitization practices, have been only weakly explored. In the domain of Asian Studies librarianship in the United States, digitizing archive materials acquired from Asian countries in academic and research libraries has facilitated Asian Studies research, but also brought up ethical concerns of inappropriately translating the original culture for new audiences. This paper treats digitization as a translational device bridging cultural contexts, public audiences, and personal accounts, as well as openness and privacy. Focusing on the unique open-access digital archival collection The Chinese Marriage Documents (1909–1997) at the University of Pittsburgh as a case study, I examine crucial cross-cultural ethics involved in the digitization process and discuss best practices to digitize and disseminate culturally sensitive archives ethically.

How Can We Know Wai-Horotiu—A Buried River? Cross-cultural Ethics and Civic Art

The complex interactions and ruptures between contemporary settler colonialism, environmental ethics, and Indigenous rights and worldviews often emerge in projects of civil engineering. The continued capture, control and burial of natural water courses in Aotearoa-New Zealand is a case in point, and exemplifies a failure to stay abreast of evolving understandings and renewed relationships we seek with our waterways, our ancestors. Wai-Horotiu stream used to run down what is now Queen Street, the main road in Auckland, Aotearoa-New Zealand’s largest city. Treasured by Māori as a source of wai (water) and mahinga kai (food), it is also the home of Horotiu, a taniwha or ancestral guardian—a literal ‘freshwater body’. However, as Tāmaki-Makaurau transitioned into Auckland city, Wai-Horotiu became denigrated; used as an open sewer by early settlers before being buried alive in the colonial process. How, now, can we know this buried waterway? Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 that affords the Whanganui River juristic personality and moral considerability offers one possible solution. It acknowledges that waterways, incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements, exist in existential interlinks with Māori as part of their whakapapa (genealogical networks). This paper asks, can a corresponding and appropriate ethics of association and care be fostered in and expressed by the political descendants of British settlers (Pākehā) and later immigrants who live here under the auspices established by Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840? Here is a conversation between a Māori earth systems scientist and a Pākehā interdisciplinary scholar. Where Hikuroa speaks from and to direct whakapapa connections, beginning with pepeha, Lythberg’s narrative springboards from public art projects that facilitate more ways of knowing Wai-Horotiu. Together, we contend that a regard for Indigenous relationships with water can guide best practice for us all, and propose that creative practices can play a role in attaching people to place, and to waterways.

A Case Study in Cross-cultural Health Care and Ethics: Who Decides What Is in the Child’s “Best Interest”?

A Case Study in Cross-cultural Health Care and Ethics: Who Decides What Is in the Child’s “Best Interest”?

Teaching Ethics in a Statistics Curriculum with a Cross-Cultural Emphasis

ABSTRACTLike most professional disciplines, the ASA has adopted ethical guidelines for its practitioners. To promote these guidelines, as well as to meet governmental and institutional mandates, U.S. universities are demanding more training on ethics within existing statistics graduate student curricula. Most of this training is based on the teachings of Western philosophers. However, many statistics graduate students are from Eastern cultures (particularly Chinese), and cultural and linguistic evidence indicates that Western ethics may be difficult to translate into the philosophical concepts common to students from different cultural backgrounds. This article describes how to teach cross-cultural ethics, with emphasis on the ASA Ethical Guidelines, within a graduate-level statistical consulting course. In particular, we present content that can help students overcome cultural and language barriers to gain an understanding of ethical decision-making that is compatible with both Western and Eastern philosophical models. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

An International Study of Culture, Gender, and Moral Ideology on Sales Ethics Evaluations: How Should Educators Respond?

While international demand for sales positions is growing, negative sales stereotypes, partially fueled by ethical abuses in the sales arena, are prevalent and may dissuade students from pursuing sales careers. To help combat the situation globally, educators must develop and utilize effective sales ethics pedagogies. The first step involves understanding cross-cultural sales ethics perspectives. A convenience sample is drawn from five countries (United States, France, Germany, Indonesia, and New Zealand), and the Personal Selling Ethics Scale (PSE-2) is successfully used to examine culturally specific and gender-based evaluation differences. Gender-based ethical perspectives are of particular interest due to the growing gender diversity within sales professions. The study finds that cultural traditionalism/secularism and individualism/collectivism affect sales ethics evaluations. Likewise, gender and moral ideology affect evaluations. Women are more sensitive to ethical misconduct than men, and absolutist are more sensitive than exceptionists, situationists, and subjectivists. Specific pedagogical recommendations are provided.

Communication of Ethics – Across Cultural Boundaries

AbstractIs it possible to communicate ethics across cultural borders? Not according to representatives of “the incommensurability thesis”, who claim that values and norms are culturally bounded. This article argues against this thesis. A first problem is that cultures and traditions are seen as comprehensive, delimited, and exclusive. Normally, however, a culture develops from and is in dialogue with other cultures. Further, the inner diversity of cultures and traditions opens the possibility of communication and shared understandings across cultural borders. Finally, the teaching and discussion of cross-cultural ethics provide practical evidence of the possibility of dialogue and mutual understanding.

A Pragmatic Approach to Ethical Decision-Making in Engineering Practice: Characteristics, Evaluation Criteria, and Implications for Instruction and Assessment.

This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the practical plausibility of ethical decision-making. In addition to the quality of ethical justification, the value of a moral action also depends on its effectiveness in solving an ethical dilemma, cultivating healthy working relationships, negotiating existing organizational cultures, and achieving contextual plausibility in everyday professional practice. This paper uses a cross-cultural ethics scenario to further elaborate how a pragmatic approach can help us rethink ethical reasoning, as well as ethics instruction and assessment. This paper is expected to be of interest to educators eager to improve the ability of engineers and other professional students to effectively and appropriately deal with the kinds of everyday ethical issues they will likely face in their careers.

The Dynamic North: Northern Climate Change from an Anthropological Perspective

325 I RECENT YEARS, the University of Calgary’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology has fostered faculty expertise in circumpolar history, cultures, and environments. With five faculty members currently dedicated to research in the circumpolar North, we have been in a unique position not only to offer new courses on northern and Indigenous issues, but also to deepen the university’s existing research and teaching connections with northern communities. In 2016, I had the opportunity to offer a new, Yukon-based field school for undergraduates entitled “The Dynamic North: Climate, Economy and Culture in Anthropological Perspective.” This field school, coordinated by the University of Calgary’s Group Study Program, ran its pilot program for five weeks in May and June 2016 and will continue to be offered every two years. While field schools in Yukon are not new, so far most of them have been situated within natural science or archaeology degree programs. The Dynamic North, however, aims to provide students with an unrivalled opportunity to learn firsthand about the resilience of northern Canadian societies and the challenges they face in an era of climate change, with an emphasis on contemporary environmental politics. Furthermore, students can learn experientially about the research methods, cross-cultural ethics, and politics central to social science and qualitative research in the North. I have especially emphasized the importance of meeting with and learning from northern residents themselves. With this goal in mind, I tried throughout the program to connect student research interests with deeper forms of community engagement, especially with northern Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents, local grassroots and nonprofit organizations, the Yukon Government and Yukon First Nations self-government institutions. A primary goal of this program was encouraging students to critique the idea, traditionally taught in southern universities, that a researcher alone should formulate the main research questions, driven largely by her or his own interests. Students were pushed to think about what community-based research looks like and how researchers might respond to research questions formulated by Northerners, research designed by northern communities, and research carried out by Northerners in partnership with universities and other research institutions. The Dynamic North:

Beyond Medical "Missions" to Impact-Driven Short-Term Experiences in Global Health (STEGHs): Ethical Principles to Optimize Community Benefit and Learner Experience.

Increasing demand for global health education in medical training has driven the growth of educational programs predicated on a model of short-term medical service abroad. Almost two-thirds of matriculating medical students expect to participate in a global health experience during medical school, continuing into residency and early careers. Despite positive intent, such short-term experiences in global health (STEGHs) may exacerbate global health inequities and even cause harm. Growing out of the "medical missions" tradition, contemporary participation continues to evolve. Ethical concerns and other disciplinary approaches, such as public health and anthropology, can be incorpo rated to increase effectiveness and sustainability, and to shift the culture of STEGHs from focusing on trainees and their home institutions to also considering benefits in host communities and nurtur ing partnerships. The authors propose four core principles to guide ethical development of educational STEGHs: (1) skills building in cross-cultural effective ness and cultural humility, (2) bidirectional participatory relationships, (3) local capacity building, and (4) long-term sustainability. Application of these principles highlights the need for assessment of STEGHs: data collection that allows transparent compar isons, standards of quality, bidirectionality of agreements, defined curricula, and ethics that meet both host and sending countries' standards and needs. To capture the enormous potential of STEGHs, a paradigm shift in the culture of STEGHs is needed to ensure that these experiences balance training level, personal competencies, medical and cross-cultural ethics, and educational objectives to minimize harm and maximize benefits for all involved.

Guidelines for Teaching Cross-Cultural Clinical Ethics: Critiquing Ideology and Confronting Power in the Service of a Principles-Based Pedagogy

This paper presents a pedagogical framework for teaching cross-cultural clinical ethics. The approach, offered at the intersection of anthropology and bioethics, is innovative in that it takes on the "social sciences versus bioethics" debate that has been ongoing in North America for three decades. The argument is made that this debate is flawed on both sides and, moreover, that the application of cross-cultural thinking to clinical ethics requires using the tools of the social sciences (such as the critique of the universality of the Euro-American construct of "autonomy") within (rather than in opposition to) a principles-based framework for clinical ethics. This paper introduces the curriculum and provides guidelines for how to teach cross-cultural clinical ethics. The learning points that are introduced emphasize culture in its relation to power and underscore the importance of viewing both biomedicine and bioethics as culturally constructed.

A busca pela cidadania global no ciberespaço: a perspectiva da ética intercultural no conflito israelo-palestino

The following article is a critical reflection on the impact of socio-technical networks of info-communication in the prevailing ethical framework of the underground international conflict environment. It uses the intricate Israeli-Palestinian relationship to outline the reflection. By explicating a cross-cultural ethics, the article attempts to deduce how best to build a global citizenship within a conflict relationship. To accomplish the task, it analyses two political resistance groups, the Gush Emunim, and Hamas, both groups being directly dedicated to conflict, Hamas for the Palestinian side, and the Gush Emunim for the Israeli side, where both sides share the same concerns, namely citizenship and participation in the global cyberspace community.

A busca pela cidadania global no ciberespaço: a perspectiva da ética intercultural no conflito israelo-palestino

The following article is a critical reflection on the impact of socio-technical networks of info-communication in the prevailing ethical framework of the underground international conflict environment. It uses the intricate Israeli-Palestinian relationship to outline the reflection. By explicating a cross-cultural ethics, the article attempts to deduce how best to build a global citizenship within a conflict relationship. To accomplish the task, it analyses two political resistance groups, the Gush Emunim, and Hamas, both groups being directly dedicated to conflict, Hamas for the Palestinian side, and the Gush Emunim for the Israeli side, where both sides share the same concerns, namely citizenship and participation in the global cyberspace community.

Marking Territory: Rawi Hage’s Novels and the Challenge to Postcolonial Ethics

THERE HAS BEEN A SUSTAINED INTEREST in recent years, both in academic circles and in mainstream readership, in non-Western narratives of trauma and conflict, evidenced in popularity of novels such as The Kite Runner, Half of a Yellow Sun, Beasts of No Nation, What is What, and A Sunday at Pool in Kigali, as well as non-fiction memoirs such as Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The attention afforded to texts such as these, texts that describe hardships that are too often a symptom of postcolonial condition, can certainly indicate a trend in Western readership that is concerned with questions of social justice, human rights, and cross-cultural ethics. The mainstream Western reader and scholarly Western critic seem united in a desire to bridge ethical gap between First and Third worlds, a desire that ultimately conceives of reading of postcolonial literature as a vehicle for enacting cross-cultural ethics and betterment of world. It is no surprise, then, that Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game, a novel documenting experiences of a Lebanese teenager in war-torn Beirut circa 1982, has attracted critical attention. What is significant about Hage's fiction--specifically De Niro's Game and his second novel, Cockroach--is way in which its narratives challenge conventional representations of postcolonial trauma and expose imbalances in standard models of cross-cultural ethics. (1) Syrine Hout addresses this challenge in her book-length study Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction, in which she contends that postwar generation of Lebanese literature is distinctive as a genre, insofar as both Anglophone and Francophone writers are concerned primarily with the debunking of two myths: return to a golden age of a romanticized Lebanon and slavish imitation of a supposedly superior Western lifestyle (9). The protagonists in this genre, Hout suggests, neither idealise their country of origin nor shed their past to embrace unquestioningly a Western mode of living (9). As Hout argues, Hage's novels fall into a genre that is markedly diasporic, insofar as its subjects have no firm foundation in either home country or new host country, in past or in present, upon which to build a stable identity. As Salah D. Hassan suggests, Bassam, in De Niro's Game, roguishly turns his back on history and embraces figure of refugee: he harbors no thought of return and no desire to settle (1628). Similarly, Hout, in her analysis of Cockroach, describes that novel's unnamed narrator as a refugee or exile who clearly has no interest in acclimatising to mainstream Canadian culture--but nor is he keen on flaunting his origins (170). As well as offering a tangible manifestation of Hout's generic definition, however, I would argue that Hage's fiction goes further to consider how this diasporic state shines an interrogative light on standard formulations of postcolonial ethics and ultimately proposes a much more complex but potentially enriching definition of postcolonial hospitality. The fundamental question of postcolonial ethics is deceptively simple: How might citizens of First World relate, ethically and productively, to diasporic subject, to new immigrant, to refugee? Rawi Hage's second novel Cockroach begins with just such a negotiation, as Genevieve, a Montreal therapist, attempts to connect with and heal unnamed Lebanese refugee who narrates this text: Last week I confessed to her that I used to be more courageous, more carefree, and even, one might add, more violent. But here in this northern land no one gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across balcony, to curse your neighbours' mothers and threaten their kids. When I said that to therapist, she told me that I have a lot of hidden anger. So when she left room for a moment, I opened her purse and stole her lipstick, and when she returned I continued my tale of growing up somewhere else. …

The relationship between cultural values and moral philosophy: a generational subculture theory approach

Scholarly interest in culturally-driven determinants of ethical behavior has grown substantially in recent years. This phenomenon is due to increasing pressure placed on top management teams of multinational firms to ensure high moral standards. One theory that has been overlooked in culture-based business ethics research is generational subculture theory. This theory will be explored in the current paper with respect to its relationship to moral philosophy. A theoretical model and conceptual matrix are developed and research propositions proposed. The resulting framework will aid future researchers of cross-cultural ethics due to the incorporation of generational subculture as a variable of analysis.