Ethical Control Research Articles

The Ethics of Control [From the Editor

The Ethics of Control [From the Editor

Hospitality, Risk, and Justice: Rethinking Service-Learning Through the Work of Letty M. Russell and Sharon D. Welch

In the last several decades, service-learning has become a key feature of higher education. In this article, I argue that the work of Christian feminists Letty M. Russell and Sharon D. Welch enriches current scholarship on service-learning by drawing attention to foundational ethical issues. The first section of the article provides background on service-learning at U.S. colleges and universities, identifying major values and priorities that have informed its development. The second and third sections analyze Russell’s concepts of “weaponized difference” and “deformed hospitality” alongside Welch’s “ethic of control” and “ethic of risk.” I use these concepts to interrogate prominent aspects of traditional service-learning models and craft a framework, centered on two risk questions, to aid faculty and administrators as they reimagine service-learning opportunities, particularly in Christian educational contexts.

The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics

The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics

On White Racial Ignorance and Releasing the Ethic of Control: A Reflection on the 2018 Annual Meeting of the REA

In response to the events of the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Religious Education Association, the author reflects on white racial ignorance as the inability to read racialized situations with nuance and to respond appropriately, naming three particular practices of academic conferencing in which her own actions potentially contribute to perpetuating white supremacy. The desire to be professional, to control how one's own actions are perceived, and to be above reproach are named as barriers to disrupting white supremacy, while willingness to be accountable and to continue showing up to do the work are encouraged.

Ethical Economic Engagement in a World beyond Control

Political projects are often grounded in theoretical analyses that present themselves as adequate to the world they hope to transform. This is true of many projects on the right as well as many on the left. In contrast, J. K. Gibson-Graham refuse any such notion of adequacy. Their refusal substantially complicates the ethical dimensions of academic practice, especially for those scholars who seek to promote projects of economic emancipation and justice. Gibson-Graham's practice provides a challenging vision of how we can engage ethically a world we cannot control. It is a practice based on what theologian Sharon Welch calls an “ethic of risk” rather than an “ethic of control.”

SOCIOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF THE PRESENT (2007 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS)

This essay attempts to take a broad view of the historical forces that have shaped the discipline of sociology and continue to shape it. It is organized around the concept of crisis, arguing that sociology has been produced by crises and that it has been defined by its responses to crises. It identifies an ethic of control and manipulation as a chief product of 19th century responses. It suggests that we have once again entered a period of disruption and rapid change, and that the current challenge of sociology is to situate ourselves, reflexively, within a dense web of philosophical, psychological, social, biological, and environmental linkages, recognizing that we can never see the network in its entirety because we ourselves are nodes within it. However, the ethic of control and manipulation that we have inherited from earlier sociological responses often prevents sociologists from developing an immanent, reflexive, and ecological approach to the crisis of the present that would enable us to place ourselves within this web.

Toward a Philosophical Orientation on Control

I argue that CMS scholars should focus and orient on our role as philosophers as we theorize control into the future. I assert that by concentrating on the philosophical ethics of control—how we rhetorically create control as a moral organizational force—we can integrate and unite our critical efforts in ways that position us to change, substantively, managerial practice and to enhance the relevance of our field. I discuss the basis of a philosophical orientation on control grounded in shared moral values and describe the points in organizational discourse at which we can look to find and assess these values.

Theomusicology and Christian Education: Spirituality and the Ethics of Control in the Rap of Hammer

Theomusicology and Christian Education: Spirituality and the Ethics of Control in the Rap of Hammer

If Only AIDS Were Different!

In most Western European countries and North America, strategiees to contain the spread of AIDS have emphasized civil liberties. This may be due more to the epidemiology of the disease than to moral progress. When the plague claimed its first victim in the Derby, shire village of Eyam on 7 September 1665 the villagers were faced with a terrible dilemma, one that presents itself to all those with a communicable disease. The dilemma, simply stated but often agonizingly difficult to resolve, is how those who have the disease or are at acute risk are to understand and discharge their responsibility to limit its spread. Eyam presents one celebrated and terrible solution. As the infection spread, the rector, William Mompesson, and his nonconformist colleague, Thomas Stanley, persuaded the villagers to impose on themselves a voluntary quarantine. remaining in the village and so reducing the chances of the plague's spreading throughout Derbyshire. In accepting this responsibility the villagers must have known that they would probably contract the plague and so die. As the plague took hold, Mompesson arranged for supplies of food and other necessaries to be left at the boundary stone of the village; the payment was disinfected by placing the coins in running water or vinegar. All in all about 260 villagers were claimed by the plague, a heroic shouldering of civic and moral responsibility felt and acted upon in the absence of any social welfare provision or reciprocal care for the diseased. Nor was there compensation for those who took on the burdens and dangers of voluntary quarantine. AIDS has not so far required (or even raised questions about) a comparably dramatic response. In most Western European countries and in North America the response to the AIDS epidemic has been characterized by a relatively liberal approach, thereby distinguishing it from the draconian measures often instituted in the past when an epidemic arose. We do not expel those infected with HIV from society, require them to wear special clothes, or demand that they ring a bell and shout unclean when they enter human habitations.[1] Nor for that matter have those infected with HIV imposed such restrictions on themselves. There have of course been departures from the liberal approach, but all in all, the Western European and North American countries have put a value on the individual liberty of citizens higher than that put on the interests of society in controlling the spread of the disease. The liberal nature of the present response could be taken to indicate that our societies have progressed morally, leaving an old ethics of control, punishment, or self-denial behind and embracing a new morality of individual autonomy and freedom. There is undoubtedly some truth in this interpretation. We would, however, like to suggest that the difference in the response to the AIDS epidemic compared to previous epidemics is not only the result of a change in society's ethics. Specifically we want to suggest that two crucial features in the natural history of HIV infection have allowed a more liberal response toward this epidemic than would be possible or even desirable toward other actual and possible epidemics with a deadly disease. These features are: 1. the low infection rate of the human immunodeficiency virus, which is a result of 2. the inability of the virus to be transmitted by normal social contact or even through ordinary contact with, for example, excreta from infected persons (see below). If it is true that the liberal response to the AIDS epidemic is not primarily caused by a change in social ethics, but is predicated on features specific to the natural history of HIV infection, then this fact has major implications, not only for our understanding of how social ethics have evolved but perhaps more crucially for our use of the AIDS epidemic as a model for future policy. …

Birth Control Ethics?

Birth Control Ethics?