Ethical Choices Research Articles

The Anthropocene, Cli-Fi and Food: Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam

This article examines Margaret Atwood’s climate fiction novel MaddAddam (2013), a dystopian cautionary text in which food production and eating become ethical choices related to individual agency and linked to sustainability. In the novel, both mainstream environmentalism and deep ecologism are shown to be insufficient and fundamentally irrelevant in the face of a submissive population, in a state of passivity that environmental studies scholar Stacy Alaimo relates to a scientific and masculinist interpretation of the Anthropocene. The article focuses on edibility as a key element in negotiating identity, belonging, cohabitation and the frontiers of the new MaddAddam postapocalyptic community.

Ethical reflections on filming death in end-of-life documentaries

ABSTRACT The end-of-life documentaries that focus on natural death struggle with the question as to whether cinematic technology is able to express death as an event and whether it should even aspire to do so. In the process of filming dying people, questions of vulnerability, privacy, and empowerment become important, and each filmmaker makes ethical choices about how to approach the topic. By interviewing 14 documentary directors, using one audio commentary, and analysing 14 of their documentary films, I recognised two main approaches to filming death. Most documentaries exclude the moment of death, which becomes a private event outside the public eye. These films narrate the experiences of living people and use metaphorical means to communicate the moment of death. They respect the physical vulnerability of the dying people, and protect the viewer from potentially shocking images. Occasionally, some documentaries include deathbed scenes that confront physical aspects of dying. These films create an affective and embodied connection to death and dying in ways that invite the viewer to co-experience the process. In this article, I discuss the ethical approaches related to these two approaches through questions of consent, the films’ content, and viewer’s responsibility.

Gender Differences in Making Moral Decisions: The Ethics of Care Perspective in Pakistan

ABSTRACT This research explored how an ethics of care is practised in a communitarian society in Karachi, Pakistan. To this end 24 participants were interviewed, 12 males and 12 females aged between 19 and 32 years. We used a culturally adapted version of The Ethics of Care Interview (ECI). This adapted measure focused on lived experiences of participants resulting in an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of interview transcripts to explore ethics of care among study participants. The themes that emerged during IPA included the negotiation between norms related to religion and culture, familism, and gender differences. These analyses confirm the link between gender and the ethics of care indicating that women share higher concerns for care, often demonstrating empathy and sacrifice. The results also show that men expect women to care for others and behave in self-sacrificial ways. The intersectional nature of our study shows that culture and not gender may ultimately explain the ethical considerations of men and women. This means that both men and women justified their ethical choices of care because they believed they had a responsibility to do so. This shows that care ethics are more strongly dictated by societal norms of collectivism.

The Ethics of Facial Recognition Technologies, Surveillance and Accountability in an Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Comparative Analysis of USA, EU and UK Regulatory Frameworks

The rapid development of facial recognition technologies (FRT) has led to complex ethical choices in terms of balancing individual privacy rights versus delivering societal safety. Within this space, increasingly commonplace use of these technologies by law enforcement agencies has presented a particular lens for probing this complex landscape, its application and the acceptable extent of citizen surveillance. This analysis focuses on the regulatory contexts and recent case law in the United States (USA), United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) in terms of the use and misuse of FRT by law enforcement agencies. In the case of the USA, it is one of the main global regions in which the technology is being rapidly evolved, and yet it has a patchwork of legislation with less emphasis on data protection and privacy. Within the context of the EU and the UK, there has been a critical focus on the development of accountability requirements particularly when considered in the context of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the legal focus on Privacy by Design (PbD). However, globally there is no standardised human rights framework and regulatory requirements that can be easily applied to FRT roll out. This article contains a discursive discussion considering the complexity of the ethical and regulatory dimensions at play in these spaces including considering data protection and human rights frameworks. It concludes that data protection impact assessments (DPIA) and human rights impact assessments together with greater transparency, regulation, audit and explanation of FRT use and application in individual contexts would improve FRT deployments. In addition, it sets out ten critical questions which it suggests need to be answered for the successful development and deployment of FRT and AI more broadly. It is suggested that these should be answered by lawmakers, policy makers, AI developers and adopters.

THE NOTION OF FREE WILL AND ETHICAL CHOICE IN THE WORK “SHARH AL- 'AQA'ID” OF SA'AD AD-DIN TAFTAZANI

The article provides an in-depth analysis of Sa’ad ad-Din Taftazani’s philosophical and ethical views on kalam (a popular speculative discipline of medieval Muslim literature that provides any reasoning on religious and philosophical topics) based on rational thinking. In particular, it aims at looking through one of the puzzling issues of kalam philosophy – freedom of will and ethical (moral) choice of a man discussed in “Sharh al- ‘Aqa’id” written by the great thinker. The work of Taftazani describes some features of the Creator as kindness and good deeds originally appeared from His creativity and instructs people to refrain from various actions that may occur due to undesirable human behavior. In this article, we analyze the conceptual ideas and views on the freedom of will and ethical (moral) choice of a man. We presented them as the biggest problems in the outstanding thinker’s spiritual heritage based on the philosophy of time and space. To be specific, the thinker considers the inadequacy of sin and apostasy as the features of disrespectful behavior and social morality. Furthermore, various religious and moral guidelines for testing people through their actions prohibited by socio-moral norms have been substantiated based on intellectual and metaphorical sources. Taftazani perfectly illustrated that the Creator has always commanded the human community to do only good deeds. Next, He commanded to be abstinent from restricted things and actions. He kept the freedom of man under moral criteria as obedience or disobedience to Shari’ah commands. The research discusses the harmony and disproportions in modern philosophy with the philosophical views of the thinker Taftazani in the management of human destiny and freedom of will. It thoroughly compares the notions of voluntarism and fatalism existing in modern philosophical terminology with Taftazani’s views on the issue related to freedom of will and moral choice. Additionally, I provide a comparative analysis on the interrelationship and differences between European philosophers’ views on the subject and Taftazani’s ideas. We have tried to express our views on the issue of freedom of will and ethical (moral) choice using the copy of “Sharh al- ‘Aqa’id” published in Great Britain.

Towards framing the global in global development: Prospects for development geography

AbstractThis paper examines data in the public sphere on the global scope of geography’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) projects. Building on decolonial critiques of development research, I argue that geography should frame “the global” of global research as a sphere of ethical choices in research design and practice. The distribution of funded projects in the UKRI Gateway data suggests geographers succeed where they extend on the more worthy aspects of the discipline’s Area Studies legacy. The discipline’s engagements with early career researchers, international colleagues, and the development sector, however, have potentially been reshaped by the GCRF and thus need closer examination. While the UK government has brought the GCRF programme to a close, further work on these themes should inform the next iteration of global research. The ethical choices that make research global will remain fundamental to equitable design and impact in global development projects, thus scholars in development geography should prepare to make their projects more transparent and accountable.

Lowering barriers to plant-based diets: The effect of human and non-human animal self-similarity on meat avoidance intent and sensory food satisfaction

The connection between plant-based diets and compassion is intuitive. Prior research has demonstrated that food of ethical origin subjectively tastes better to consumers who embrace ethical values. Since meat avoiders generally internalize the values associated with the avoidance of animal-derived products, higher levels of compassion are expected to enhance the subjective taste of meatless food choices, which has implications for lowering barriers to the adoption of vegetarian diets.Three experimental laboratory studies demonstrate that compassion improves the subjective taste of meatless foodstuffs and increases meat avoidance intent, which translates into a higher probability to choose a vegetarian wrap rather than a meat-containing wrap. Two online studies illuminate the underlying psychological process, which is mediated by perceived self-similarity to human and non-human animals.Identifying individual traits that are associated with heightened enjoyment of meatless foods facilitates marketing segmentation for meatless foodstuffs. Furthermore, the tested compassion-inducing visual stimuli can be adapted for product packaging or employed in restaurant décor to elevate consumers’ subjective taste of meatless foods, potentially counteracting the negative individual and societal health effects of excessive meat intake.The moderating effect of meat avoidance intent on subjective taste suggests that, for people who consider reducing their meat intake, transitory zones exist where the perceived enhancement in taste of vegetarian food is not sufficiently motivating to change dietary practices permanently and it may appear more rewarding to simply revert to meat consumption. Social marketers can focus on these zones where moral conflict about meat consumption is salient by providing support to make dietary transitions less frustrating.This set of studies is the first to articulate the connection between compassion and ethical food choices in a consumer-relevant context. The findings point towards avenues to promote meat reduction, improve individual physical and mental health, and reduce the environmental impact of meat production.

Animal Harms and Food Production: Informing Ethical Choices.

Simple SummaryConsideration of animal welfare in food choices has become an influential contemporary theme. Traditional animal welfare views about food have been largely restricted to direct and intentional harms to livestock in intensive animal agriculture settings. However, many harms to animals arising from diverse food production practices in the world are exerted indirectly and unintentionally and often affect wildlife. Here we apply a qualitative analysis of food production by considering the breadth of harms caused by different food production systems to wild as well as domestic animals. Production systems are identified that produce relatively few and relatively many harms. The ethical implications of these findings are discussed for consumers concerned with the broad animal welfare impacts of their food choices.Ethical food choices have become an important societal theme in post-industrial countries. Many consumers are particularly interested in the animal welfare implications of the various foods they may choose to consume. However, concepts in animal welfare are rapidly evolving towards consideration of all animals (including wildlife) in contemporary approaches such as “One Welfare”. This approach requires recognition that negative impacts (harms) may be intentional and obvious (e.g., slaughter of livestock) but also include the under-appreciated indirect or unintentional harms that often impact wildlife (e.g., land clearing). This is especially true in the Anthropocene, where impacts on non-human life are almost ubiquitous across all human activities. We applied the “harms” model of animal welfare assessment to several common food production systems and provide a framework for assessing the breadth (not intensity) of harms imposed. We considered all harms caused to wild as well as domestic animals, both direct effects and indirect effects. We described 21 forms of harm and considered how they applied to 16 forms of food production. Our analysis suggests that all food production systems harm animals to some degree and that the majority of these harms affect wildlife, not livestock. We conclude that the food production systems likely to impose the greatest overall breadth of harms to animals are intensive animal agriculture industries (e.g., dairy) that rely on a secondary food production system (e.g., cropping), while harvesting of locally available wild plants, mushrooms or seaweed is likely to impose the least harms. We present this conceptual analysis as a resource for those who want to begin considering the complex animal welfare trade-offs involved in their food choices.

A Conceptual Metaphor Account of Desdemona: Body, Emotions, Ethics

This paper aims to delve into Desdemona’s mind in Shakespeare’s Othello. In this paper, Desdemona’s utterances are perused through conceptual metaphor analysis. The objective of this study is to disclose Desdemona’s cognitive complexity, and conceptual metaphor analysis offers an opportunity to enter Desdemona’s cognitive world notwithstanding the degradation of her speech. These conceptual metaphors will follow three major axes of scrutiny: body, emotions, and ethics. The findings of this paper demonstrate that a cognitive exploration of the character reveals a structured system of thoughts where corporeal passions, emotional acuity, and ethical choices are culminated in a coherent and dynamic female protagonist. Desdemona’s conceptual metaphors confirm a sensual and wilful persona who broke an ascetic image of femininity associated with conditioning and interdictions. The study aspires to demonstrate how Desdemona would become a haunting presence on stage, triumphant even as all other characters fell, and how she would reach from beyond the grave to hold the audience in the throes of empathy. The intent of the paper is also to point out that conceptual metaphor analysis, with its ties to cognitive poetics, can furnish character criticism with dissimilar readings.

Reduced Meat Consumption: from Multicriteria Argument Modelling to Agent-Based Social Simulation

A second nutrition transition seems to be emerging towards more plant-based diets, curbing meat consumption in developed countries at the beginning of the 21st century. This shift suggests that rational arguments tend to influence an increasing number of individuals to adopt vegetarian diets. This work aimed to understand and simulate the impact of different types of messages on the choice to change food diets at the individual level, and the impact of the diffusion of opinions at the collective level. It provided two results: (1) a network of arguments around vegetarian diets is modelled using an abstract argumentation approach. Each argument, formalized by a node, was connected with other arguments by arrows, thus formalizing relationships between arguments. This methodology made it possible to formalize an argument network about vegetarian diets and to identify the importance of health arguments compared to ethical or other types of arguments. This methodology also identified key arguments as a result of their high centrality in being challenged or challenging other arguments. The results of constructing this argument network suggested that any controversy surrounding vegetarian diets will be polarized around such high centrality arguments about health. Even though few ethical arguments appeared in our network, the health arguments concerning the necessity or not of animal products for humans were indirectly connected with ethical choices towards vegetarian diets; (2) an agent-based simulation of the social diffusion of opinions and practices concerning meat consumption is then introduced. The purpose of this simulation was to capture the balance of vegetarian vs. meat-based diets. It contributes to modelling consumer choices by exploring the balance between individual values and external influences such as social pressure, communication campaigns and sanitary, environmental or ethical crises.

The Virtual Online Supermarket: An Open-Source Research Platform for Experimental Consumer Research

It is controversially discussed if and which interventions policymakers should implement to promote healthier, more sustainable, and more ethical food choices. Often, policy measures suffer from a lack of data. This is especially true for the growing field of online grocery shopping. Yet, it not always feasible to test the impact of each possible policy intervention in the field. Here, computer-simulated shopping experiments offer a complementary approach. Recent evidence suggests that they heighten the realism of consumer experiments and collect valid data at a relatively low cost. In this paper, we introduce an open-source toolset that offers multiple avenues to develop and run experiments in the context of online grocery shopping. Hence, it supports researchers and policy makers in evaluating instore-intervention aiming to support more sustainable food choices.

A serviceable Research Biobank model: Charter of Principles and Biobank Ethics Consultation Service (BECS) as a formal toolkit to promote an expert ethical guidance to biobank research

The complexity of biobank research has recently increased generating a number of novel ethical issues. In recent years the University of Insubria is committed to provide specific training programs in Bioethics, Applied Ethics and Clinical Ethics aimed to face to critical topics related to medicine, research and biobanking. Actually we design the Insubria Biobank as a research infrastructure with an appropriate Ethical Framework and responsible for the custody of biospecimens and data according to a model of Charitable Trust. So to answer certain questions is crucial: How could biobank respect the trust placed in it? What resources could promote the goals of the biobank? Do professionals require a specific ethical training? This credit of trust must be fed and confirmed by the ethical choices of the biobank and ensuring maximum transparency and traceability of decisions. The aim of the Insubria Biobank is to become an ethical subject to secure the public trust and to define the ethics criteria to be made public and to which the biobank will comply. In our model we propose the prospective involved parties that could guarantee the achievement of this goal: Informed Consent, Charter of Principles and Biobank Ethics Consultation Services (BECS). Our purpose is to offer a Charter of Principles and BECS to help scientists, health care professionals, patients, donors, institutional review board and policymakers, better navigate the ethical issues in biobanking. An exploratory survey to identify the willingness to use BECS represent our future research plan.

Ethical choices behind quantifications of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research.

Moral Music Management: Ethical Decision-Making After Avicii

Abstract Following the tragic suicide of Avicii (Tim Bergling) in 2018, many in the popular media, and reportedly the musician’s own family, were seen to question the ethics of decisions taken by his manager (Williams, 2018; Ralston, 2018). By applying a moral intensity test (Jones, 1991) in the form of a scenario-based questionnaire to six music managers based in London (UK), this article interrogates how and why music managers make the moral and ethical choices they do. The findings suggest that music managers are aware of ethical challenges emanating from their work, but that the relatively informal, loosely regulated nature of the music workplace complicates the negotiation of ethical and moral tensions. However, music managers’ close awareness of the ‘social consensus’ and ‘proximity’ of moral intensity suggests that cultural (as opposed to regulatory) change can help guide and inform managerial decision-making.

Ethics and AI Innovation

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has astonishing potential to solve many of humanity’s problems, but it has also brought about an array of new threats. The challenge is to find a way to mitigate the negatives of the Revolution without impairing the extraordinary potential of AI to accelerate all areas of human development. AI ethics offers a possible basis for doing so by providing a set of aspirational ideals as to the role of AI, rather than a minimum standard for compliance which is likely to become increasingly irrelevant. Throughout history, humans have adapted and adjusted to the technologies of the time and though the integration of AI into all human experience and decision-making will come to be seen as normal and taken for granted, there will still be a number of profound ethical choices that must be made. Implementing ethical AI will require a multi-modal and co-regulatory approach. There are a variety of existing approaches but some common principles have emerged. These provide a framework for action.

Is urban growing of fruit and vegetables associated with better diet quality and what mediates this relationship? Evidence from a cross-sectional survey

Urban agriculture (UA), the growing of fruits and vegetables in urban and peri-urban areas, may improve food security and access, public health and dietary quality on both a broad and personal scale. However, there is little research on the relationship between UA and diet, and potential mediating factors are also unclear. This study aimed to investigate if proximity to and engagement with UA is associated with better diet quality, and what accounts for this relationship. UK-based adults (N = 583, 69% Female) completed measures of proximity to and engagement with UA, perceived access to fruits and vegetables, health and ethical food choice motivations, connection with nature, psychological distress and dietary quality in an online survey. Participants were recruited from UA-related groups and the general public. Proposed relationships were analysed using a structural equation model. Greater proximity to and engagement with UA was associated with greater perceived access to fruits and vegetables, more health-related food choice motivations, more ethical-related food choice, feeling more connected with nature, and, surprisingly greater psychological distress. Furthermore, proximity to and engagement with UA was indirectly associated with better diet quality via health-, and ethical-related, food choice motivations. While the direct pathway between proximity to and engagement with UA and diet quality was not significant, UA is associated with better diet quality, partly via healthier and ethical food choice motivations. Upscaling UA may have benefits for dietary quality via these factors, and more research is needed to test causal relationships and understand these complex interactions.

Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”

AbstractIn 2015, Donna Haraway introduced the Plantationocene concept as an alternative to the Anthropocene in Environmental Humanities. Engaging Black feminist scholars who were thinking about the plantation before Haraway's Plantationocene, this article argues that a transregional centering of Black feminist scholarship within plantation studies is a mutually productive and ethical endeavor that affirms the rightful place of Black feminist scholars in the field of anthropology and builds more robust transnational feminist forms of restorative justice. Analyzing Black, Indigenous and feminist critiques of the Plantationocene, this article is a “reparative reading” (Sedgewick 2003) response to Lynn Bolles' call to identify the “ways of ‘miseducation’ in anthropology” (Bolles 2013, 58) and seeks to repair the erasure of Black feminists' contributions to plantation studies outside the Americas and Afro‐Caribbean contexts, specifically in South Asian studies. Situating new research among landless, minority Tamil plantation residents through a re‐reading of plots on Sri Lanka's tea plantations, I suggest that thinking alongside Black feminist scholarship outside plantation studies' “regional closets” (Alexander 2005) is not only an ethical choice but also one of co‐survival and liberation within the white habitus (Bonilla‐Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006) of anthropology.

Business Ethics Decision-Making: Examining Partial Reflective Awareness

The aim of this research was to examine partial reflective awareness in ethical business choices in Croatia. The ethical decision-making is interlinked with sustainable practices, but it is also its prerequisite. Thus, better understanding of business ethics decision-making provides a basis for designing and implementing sustainability in a corporate setting. The research was done on student populations who will soon carry important roles and make important decisions for individuals, organizations, and society. The field research was conducted using Kohlberg’s scenarios. The results reveal that the process of decision-making goes through the lenses of respondents’ own preferred ethics. However, the reflective awareness of respondents’ preferred ethics is skewed and regularities in that deviations point out to the relevance of the context characteristics and arousal factors. In addition, the individuals do not use all available information in the assessment process. The revealed partial reflective awareness contributes to explanation of why people have problems with justifying their choices. As there are many examples of unethical behavior in the environment that remain unpunished, it is necessary to raise awareness of the issue. Improvement in reflective awareness would contribute to more sustainable ethical choices and reveal a possibility of an intervention design within the higher education framework.

COVID-19: A Crisis and a Tragedy—What’s Next?

Reflecting on the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, theological ethics examines political dynamics, focuses on those affected, discusses hard ethical choices, comments on religious engagements, considers language choices, reflects on the impact on ordinary lives, and ponders what should follow after controlling the infection. Learning from the past and the present, looking forward requires targeted engagements aimed at promoting health, a critical rethinking of human progress, a renewed solidarity accompanied by social reforms, and a sustainable future.

Végétarisme, végétalisme, véganisme : des comportements (alimentaires) au service de l’identité ? Une étude qualitative en population française

IntroductionThese last years have been marked by an evolution as to how people feed themselves, highlighting a growing interest for vegetarian food. Vegetarianism at large refers to several types of food that are characterized by the partial or total exclusion of animal foods. This study aims at relating various elements associated to vegetarianism, such as eating motives, behaviors, self-perception and others’ perception, in relation with the notion of identity. MethodParticipants were recruited via vegetarian and vegan (for food and for lifestyle) groups on Facebook, once their agreement was obtained. Six interviews were conducted by a clinical psychologist around the notion of being and identity related to food, as well as the food history of the individual and his/her family. The use of retrospective investigation makes possible to establish a continuity between the past and the current eating behavior. These interviews, once manually transcribed, were the subject of a complex semantic analysis via TROPES software (version 8.4). ResultsThe results showed a major use of state's and identity's verbs (being, becoming, “I”) and the personal pronoun “we”, referring to a construction of both individual and collective identity around the diet. The commitment to vegetarian/vegan diet has been primarily motivated by ethical concern. And, positive feelings have emerged following the adoption of this type of diet, such as pride, inner purity and a sense of being healthy and holy. Despite the fact that their diet is ethically focused, participants spontaneously addressed the issue of weight and body image. Discussion/conclusionWhatever the food's history of participants, identifications to disorders related to body image or identifications to weight categories have preceded the identification to a specific diet. And the following of a vegetarian/vegan diet appears at the base of positive feelings toward oneself and a better self-esteem. So, we can assume that adopting a vegetarian/vegan diet could improve self-perception. Otherwise, the ethical choice mentioned by the participants, may be an acceptable sociable justification to control more or less the fate of their body (inside and outside). More research is needed to better understand the underlying mechanisms of vegetarian/vegan diet, to explore the personality profiles of individuals and their relation to the body.