Ethics Of Responsibility Research Articles

Public health ethics: critiques of the “new normal”

The global response to the recent coronavirus pandemic has revealed an ethical crisis in public health. This article analyses key pandemic public health policies in light of widely accepted ethical principles: the need for evidence, the least restrictive/harmful alternative, proportionality, equity, reciprocity, due legal process, and transparency. Many policies would be considered unacceptable according to pre-pandemic norms of public health ethics. There are thus significant opportunities to develop more ethical responses to future pandemics. This paper serves as the introduction to this Special Issue of Monash Bioethics Review and provides background for the other articles in this collection.

Teknologi dan Destruktivitas Manusia

The development of technology began in primitive times along with human civilization, starting from conventional technology and evolving into an all-digital and sophisticated technology. Technology is a set that helps daily human activities. Of course, this will also impact human behaviour and civilization because technology affects the human experience using technology. Technology is included in all lines as a symbol of the progress of civilization and has a positive impact. However, technology that is considered the progress of the times has a negative impact, namely the destruction of nature due to technological destruction, such as global warming, consumerism, addiction, depression, and FOMO, which become problems due to the use of technology. Technology will affect the experience so that it affects the individual human person. Therefore, a development centred on the human point of view has a bad impact because everything is measured from the human point of view. As a result, nature is damaged, and many plants, the environment, and animals die, many animals die. Technology becomes an instrument that leads humans to destruction and arrogance, and arbitrary actions become human nature. Behind the technology behind bringing benefits, some things must be paid for. So there is a need for a discourse on development change by looking at all aspects so that the location of the problem can be known. Overcome, it is necessary to have a discourse on the ethics of responsibility, namely by looking at the negative impact before it happens. So that the development paradigm can be reviewed and practically, individuals can think of undesirable things to avoid.

Experimental Effects of Institutionalizing Co-determination by a Procedurally Fair Bidding Rule

From an institutional perspective we contribute to corporate governance of firms by (1) proposing a procedurally fair mechanism that is ethically desirable, and (2) experimentally testing whether procedural fairness crowds-in ethical behavior of managers (on behalf of shareholders) and workers. The experiment sees one ‘manager’ and three ‘workers’ (possibly representing three sections of the firm) co-determining an efficiency-enhancing investment which could harm some workers. Firstly, the manager claims a share of the investment surplus, then workers ‘bid’ for the investment to express their willingness to satisfy the manager’s claim in case the investment is implemented. If the sum of workers’ bids is less than the manager’s claim, the investment is not implementable, which means its surplus will be lost. Workers’ behavior is ‘ethical’ when they veto unfair managerial claims, because the workers have to sacrifice own earnings. Hence, a manager’s fair claim is the ethical response to the threat of workers’ veto. If the manager claims fairly, workers’ ethical behavior is to ‘truthfully’ bid their investment evaluations; by all doing so, they equally share whatever surplus the manager has left for them. The experimental results show ethical behavior of managers in the form of fair claims. Despite these fair claims, workers behave less ethically by strategically underbidding. So the procedurally fair mechanism only partially crowds-in ethical behavior. This study should interest theorists of stakeholder management, especially those engaged in designing the rules of corporate governance.

A Discourse of Renewal: Higher Education Leadership and Crisis Communication during Black Lives Matter

This case study examines ethical leadership responses and crisis communications at a public institution of higher education in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which occur concurrently with the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional financial crises. The Discourse of Renewal framework requires a focus on what is best for the entirety of the community, rather than simply being a strategic response that only benefits a few. The framework provides a structure for conceptualizing and considering an optimistic discourse in response to crises. A rhetorical analysis of leadership discourse examined four renewal characteristics: overall organizational learning, ethical communication, prospective visioning, and effective organizational rhetoric. Surveys and subsequent analyses of faculty, students, and staff responses provide a feedback mechanism from institutional stakeholders. Subsequent discussions explore issues of navigating stacked crises and how an ethical leadership response can help build beyond crises for the future of the organization.

Inclusive Approaches by VAW Shelters: Respecting Women's Choice to be Together With Companion Animals

Women often delay moving to VAW shelters if their companion animals’ safety is not ensured. Yet, few shelters accommodate them together. The purpose of this study is to explore what may help to promote services for women with companion animals facing violence, through learning from professionals who already provide support. Our email survey with VAW shelters in Ontario, Canada identified services and potential interviewees. Nine semi-structured telephone interviews with professionals were conducted to explore their experiences and views on human–animal relationships. All agencies that provided onsite programs, plus one about to start, participated. We utilized Critical Animal Studies as a theory to understand human–animal relationships through concepts such as intersectionality, anthropocentrism, speciesism, and feminist ethics of responsibility. The study found: (1) seven approaches shelters used to help women with companion animals; (2) programs that accept companion animals helped women move to shelters quickly but also affirmed women’s mutually respectful relationships with companion animals; (3) shelters also benefited, including expanding support from local communities and opportunities to educate them. The study suggests that by shifting ontological and theoretical approaches and including a critical examination of human–animal relationships at interpersonal and social structural levels, professional education promotes mobilizing resources for women with companion animals.

When ‘I’ becomes ‘we’: An ethnographic study of power and responsibility in a large food retail cooperative

Based on ethnographic research of a large food retail cooperative in New York (the Co-op), this article raises the research question of whether organizations can cultivate an ethic of responsibility to others and, if so, how this can be secured in everyday working practices? It draws principally on the work of Foucault and especially his later writings on the care of the self and ethics but seeks to link these deliberations to Levinas in identifying responsibility to the Other as prior to identity. Indeed, one message that we seek to convey is that attachments to identities are frequently a stumbling block for developing ethically responsible relations and organizations and this may necessitate some normative control. While recognizing that normative control can easily become oppressive and there were occasional signs of this where staff were watching one another and demanding compliance, our research provides a platform for exploring conversations about alternative forms of organization. We explore how relations of power can produce ethically progressive relations, through generative norms that give space to, and nurture, care and responsibility for others to constitute morally engaging organizational life.

Risk communication, ethics and academic integrity in the process of minimizing the impacts of the covid-19 crisis in Ethiopian higher education

This study aimed to analyze the commitment, preparedness, response, and challenges of risk communication for the prevention, ethics, and academic integrity of COVID-19 in Ethiopian higher education. Higher education is among those sectors seriously affected by the pandemic and associated factors. Since it appeared in the country, various ethical risk responses have been employed to minimize its impacts. Every commitment, response, preparedness, ethics, academic integrity, and risk communication are efforts to curve the impacts that transcend the globe. The study used an institutional-based cross-sectional study design. Data were collected from primary and secondary sources. These were extracted using web-based research from academic research, preparedness, protocols, standards, and risk communication working papers that were prepared for the Ethiopian context and university media sources. Therefore, a web-based search was used to gather information on the preparedness, commitments, performances, and challenges of Ethiopian higher education. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to explore the experiences of Ethiopian higher education. The findings show that higher education is one of the main task forces that support the national response scheme against the pandemic. The government makes an enormous effort to reduce and minimize its impacts. The findings show that higher education as a task force has contributed strongly to national efforts based on research, ethics, academic integrity, humanitarian assistance, online meetings, e-learning, and conferences. Although research focused on knowledge, attitude, and practice to date there has been no clinical research. Research conducted on COVID-19 by academicians (374 academic staff) of 26 universities focuses on KAPs. Besides, e-learning was poorly and unethically managed to support disrupted education. The postgraduate program was facilitated outside of campus through e-learning which eroded academic integrity. However, e-learning is the weakest and unethical way to support undergraduate and even partially postgraduate programs. The Internet infrastructure and the acculturation of student e-learning are problematic. Furthermore, external pressures such as ethnic conflicts, wars, and fragile political situations are causing the reopening to be delayed. In Ethiopian higher education, the overall effort to communicate risks, ethical education, and academic integrity is minimal. It lacks continuity. It lacks academic integrity. Thus, academic ethics is eroded. The challenges are the remaining homework of the universities. I suggest that risk communication, ethical and research-based solutions need to be re-evaluated and re-considered.

Hello, Twitter Bot!: Towards a Bot Ethics of Response and Responsibility

In this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies like Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. We suggest that there is a tendency for bot ethics to revolve around the desire to differentiate between bot and human, which does not address what we understand to be the cultural anxieties at stake in the blurring boundaries between human and technology. Here we take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships through a feminist ethics of responsibility as response by taking as our starting point our own experience with bot creation, the Twitter bot “Hello30762308.” The bot was designed to respond with a “hello” to other Twitter users’ #hello, but quickly went in directions not intended by its creators.

Health Crisis and the Dual Reflexivity of Knowledge

Although successive pandemic episodes adversely affect populations and it remains difficult to assess their long-term extent and impact, they may, paradoxically, have a positive effect. In fact, they can promote awareness by reviving a form of reflexivity with respect to public health, economic and social policies, and by driving in-depth reflection on the measures that must be taken to limit the current and future imbalances caused by human activity. Habermas emphasises that the reflexive “push” is no longer just a matter for experts; it is also collective, historical, and political, in the sense that it involves citizens who intend to weigh in on the debate and make their voices and wishes heard by policy-makers and economic actors. Reflecting upon the ethics of responsibility (Weber) is therefore essential. If we are to follow Giddens and Habermas’ thinking, this reflexivity represents an integral part of the modern age. Our intention, in this article, is to show how major events, beyond an initial period of shock, can help to awake different levels of reflexivity in individuals.

Anger Is All the Rage: A Theoretical Analysis of Anger Within Emotional Ecology to Foster Growth and Political Change

Background and Purpose: Anger is implicated in nearly every social pathology, from war to bullying to child abuse. Yet, it is also the spark of reform for nearly every positive social movement, from civil rights to labor rights to handicapped rights. This article examines how anger has been understood and misunderstood across different discursive spaces in society, research, and education to offer a peace-promoting, emotional ecology theory of anger to foster emotional growth and political change. Research Design: This article employs theoretical research, which is a logical exploration of a system of beliefs and assumption to increase understanding, develop new theory, and explore implications. Findings: Anger is reconceptualized as a crucial emotional and political experience rooted in the emotional ecologies and histories of family, school, and society. Three distinctive features characterize it: An ethical response, an emotional response, and an action response. Five steps to anger resolution follow from this analysis including: mindfulness, compassion, insight, action, and a therapeutic response (or MCIAT). Recommendations: Future studies on anger should span developmental stages and include ways anger intersects with curricula, emotional experience and intellectual understanding. Teachers, social workers, and therapists must work together to address the emotional and political aspects of anger in education. Addressing our most painful and angering global challenges in all their complexity requires full integration of the personal, educational, civic, and therapeutic dimensions of emotional ecology and this worthy enterprise should inspire interdisciplinary dialogue and future research.

Jewish Environmental Ethics for the Anthropocene: An Integrative Approach

Abstract This article argues that the Judaic understanding of creation care is a potent response to the challenges of the Anthropocene because Judaism acknowledges that humans have much in common with all other created beings, while respecting their alterity, and because Judaism insists on human responsibility toward and care of the created world. However, Jewish environmental ethics of care and responsibility could be greatly enriched if it incorporates the insights of the feminist ethics of care, ecofeminism, and environmental virtue ethics, three discourses to which Jewish environmentalists have paid limited attention so far, even though the secularization of Judaism in the twentieth century has impacted these discourses.

“I Smell the Ellero River Already”: Roberto G. Fernández’in Holy Radishes! Romanında Travma ve Sürgün

Trauma studies aims to construct an intellectual and ethical response to human suffering and their cultural and artistic representations. Trauma studies have inspired an array of disciplinary and interdisciplinary criticism that offer paradigms for understanding human behavior and coping strategies. Drawing on postcolonial trauma theory, this essay analyzes how Roberto G. Fernández in his novel Holy Radishes! complicates and challenges existing trauma paradigms suggesting that existing European psychoanalytic origins of the trauma theory are not adequate for depicting Cuban trauma experience. The text focuses on the specificity of trauma that constructs meaning through considering social, historical, and cultural contexts of traumatic experience. In other words, the paper aims to break with Eurocentrism by analyzing the text that bears witness to the suffering caused by exile. Thus the paper aims to discuss the usefulness of trauma theory for understanding colonial trauma caused by forced migration, exile, dispossession, diaspora, and political violence.

Intellectual Property Rights as Ethical Response to Global Climate Change Crisis

Debate regarding the contribution of Intellectual Property (IP) rights to lessening climate change is intensifying. On one side, IP optimists emphasize their function in encouraging investment in Research, Development and Commercialization. However, alternative view, principally associated with developing countries, sees the monopoly rights embodied in IP as a barrier to technology adoption and international transfer and this has led to a dilemma in IP rights ethically responding to global climate change.The role of intellectual property rights with regards to climate change has remained a divisive issue. Not only has no agreement been reached in this area, but even the path to a constructive and meaningful discussion seems elusive. Unless the role of intellectual property is addressed in a constructive and balanced manner, the potential for achieving sustainable and realistic outcomes from the climate talks could be compromised.This article explored the complex relationship between IP rights and climate change through technology-based reductions in emissions and with reference to sustainable development laws. It also considers the role IP rights can play in delivering technological change to abate the issues of climate change crisis by arguing that climate change is legally disruptive, with existing legal doctrines and frameworks forced to confront, respond, and perhaps even evolve to respond to climate change, beyond the application and incremental development of existing rules and doctrines written in the context of linkages between private international law and public international law.It concludes by outlining some plausible strategies that are necessary in resolving the dilemma associate with IP rights ethically responding to global climate change.

CONTESTED SOVEREIGNTY: ISLAMIC PIETY, BLASPHEMY POLITICS, AND THE PARADOX OF ISLAMIZATION IN PAKISTAN

ABSTRACT Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam from what they imagine to be a deluge of incidents of blasphemy, a veritable moral panic organized around a set of blasphemy laws pertaining to the regulation and protection of Islam. The violence of blasphemy politics, which is disproportionately directed at sectarian and religious minorities, is predicated on the claim that is the duty and mandate of the state to enforce the blasphemy laws, and where the state fails, the onus falls on ordinary Muslims to fulfill the demands of Islam. In this article, I focus on the response to this blasphemy politics by Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Like other Islamic groups in Pakistan, Tablighis consider blasphemy to be a grave sin and a deep threat to the Islamic community, but Tablighis believe that the solution to the growing incidence of blasphemy is to spread virtue through their distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat). I show that these different ethical responses to blasphemy reflect different approaches to the relationship between Islam and state sovereignty. Specifically, I argue that blasphemy politics presupposes the sacralization of the state but Islamic piety among Pakistani Tablighis provides an alternative ethical framework for addressing the moral injury of blasphemy.

Review of Humanity in Crisis: Ethical and Religious Response to Refugees

Review of Humanity in Crisis: Ethical and Religious Response to Refugees

Rethinking Freedom: A Framework for the Implementation of Ethical Space in the Academy

Knowledge making is a social act requiring people, texts, and resources besides the individual author, affecting both self and others. In knowing the world, we transform it. Thus, knowledge making bears a responsibility toward the lives, lands, and world shaped by it. As such, the authors question the ethics involved in the liberal value of freedom as a guiding principle for colleges and universities. We claim the liberal tradition of freedom is a Settler freedom, and its modes of practice enact and maintain Settler-colonial domination. Within the university, academic freedom and freedom of expression are neither intrinsically good nor universally extended to academe’s members. Privileging such freedoms over other values helps form and sustain inequities within and outside the academy. As the Truth and Reconciliation process underway in Canada tasks post-secondary institutions with decolonizing structural and systemic inequities in education and administration, we offer exemplification of Indigenous 1 epistemological concepts to shift a focus from exclusively on the rights of individuals in the academy to considering all our relations and what might be the ethics of responsibility and accountability that come into focus when we see and practice knowledge making within an ethical space of engagement.

Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures

Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures

Forming Pity: Responses to Suffering in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

This article argues for the critical importance of pity for understanding Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. It shows that in his translation of the popular Troilus narrative Chaucer greatly expanded the role of pity from his sources, and it investigates the consequences of this expansion for the poem's larger consideration of the ethics of responding to others. "Forming Pity" proposes that, in his increased attention to pity, Chaucer revises and indicts medieval modes of ethical response to the suffering of others. He moves away from an ethics of identification prevalent in other medieval models of pity, including Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and towards an ethics that acknowledges and privileges the alterity of another's suffering. He does so through a careful investigation of the social efficacy and limitations of pity as it was understood in different medieval pity discourses—most notably chivalric ethics, fin amor, and Christian ethics. As he explores pity in these discourses, Chaucer contends with pity's power to ease suffering, but also its capacity to maintain dangerous social hierarchies and its inability to end the problem of suffering. This article argues that it is pity's limited capacity to ease suffering that helps to make sense of the poem's famously difficulty conclusion. It shows that in the poem's final transition to Christian ethics and passion meditation, Chaucer abruptly switches from speaking of pity to mercy: a change that Chaucer uses to make a distinction between limited human pity and limitless divine mercy.

Fiat Lux/Fiat Lex: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Reason and Law

Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is an enigmatic text. It is a depressing tale of the evitability of technoscientific civilization ending in apocalypse, a comedic story of ignorant monks producing gold-embellished illuminated copies of electronic circuit blueprints and an ambiguous examination of the tensions between faith and science. This paper reads A Canticle for Leibowitz as an examination of legality. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s observation that Catholicism has a “juridical logic,” this paper identifies that A Canticle for Leibowitz brings to life, and questions, the Thomist worldview of reason, reasonability and layered orders. It is a novel that brings to life, but also interrogates, Catholic intellectualism. It is tempting to conclude that Miller argues for a Thomist ethic of responsibility to temper technoscientific self-destruction. However, that is not where the novel ends. Its endings are hopeful, notwithstanding the nuclear holocaust in the final pages. There are suggestions of new nomoi: In the diasporic human extra-terrestrial colonies, ministered to by a nomadic Church, and a radiated Eden inherited by humanity’s prelapsarian successors anticipated in the coming to life of Rachel.

Radical Ethics in Time of Plague

ABSTRACT What literary and philosophical resources can help us situate ourselves ethically during and after plague time? Returning to Camus’ The Plague provides a thoughtful entry to the timeless time of COVID-19. Isabel Wilkerson describes and challenges white supremacy as plague and caste system, both blatant and in its less obvious (to whites) forms. Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Ejler Løgstrup bring us the priority of the other and an ethic of responsibility.