Unethical Research Articles

Helping other customers to avoid harmful brands: The role of idealism, attitude and cynicism

Background: Consumers are not always aware of how their purchase decisions may harm other humans and the environment. Green customer helping behaviours could aid in solving this problem.Aim: The study aims to develop a research model, advancing knowledge of the extent to which idealism (an ethical philosophy) may influence green attitudes and promote green customer helping behaviours that could aid other customers in avoiding harmful brands. The study further aims to gain clarity regarding the moderating role of customer helper cynicism within the proposed model.Setting: A self-administered questionnaire was fielded amongst consumers in South Africa and the United States of America (US).Method: Mplus 8.5 and PROCESS macro in RStudio were used to analyse and compare the survey data obtained from the two samples.Results: All direct relationships assessed were positive and significant for South Africa and the US samples. Varying results were uncovered between the two samples concerning the moderating role of customer helper cynicism.Conclusion: The identified model confirms the important role of idealism in influencing green customer helping behaviours, as mediated by green attitudes and moderated by customer helper cynicism.Contribution: Novel insight is provided into the contribution of ethical philosophy in promoting green customer helping behaviours. Additionally, direction is provided for the deployment of strategies that could promote green customer helping behaviours in diverse green contexts and across continents and that effectively may aid other customers in avoiding brands harmful to society.

Systematic review of ethics and legislation of a Global Patient co-Owned Cloud (GPOC)

Background The use of cloud-based storage for personal health records (PHRs) has significantly increased globally over the past thirty years. The four recently published GPOC Series articles introduced the concept of a Global Patient co-Owned Cloud (GPOC) for personal health records. The series includes a systematic review and meta-analysis, a summit, a sandbox, and a survey, with 100% participation from UN member states and key international health organisations. GPOC aims to establish patient co-ownership of PHRs, addressing integration and access challenges. Methods This study is built upon the published GPOC systematic review and meta-analysis that focused on examining cloud-based personal health records and elements such as data security, efficiency, performance, privacy and cost-based factors. However, this study selectively reviews the ethical, legislative and potential human rights dimensions of GPOC. Thus, it includes ethical aspects of co-ownership, rights, privacy, policies, and AI integration. The original study was PROSPERO registered with CRD42022342597, which serves as the foundation for the current study. Results This study offers a comprehensive global overview of ethics, legislation and initiatives by states and organisations. We analyse AI integration and future challenges for GPOC implementation. We present principles from ‘Ethics by Design’ and the ‘Principles of Biomedical Ethics’ by Beauchamp and Childress alongside the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The study presents a global overview of the relevant global latticework of legislation. Conclusions This study suggests that GPOC could potentially establish a new human right to patient co-ownership of personal health information. GPOC aims to facilitate global AI integration in healthcare and address existing challenges in PHR integration. A decentralised GPOC, supported by blockchain consensus, may offer benefits such as enhanced data security, interoperability, and equitable access to healthcare information globally. Thus, GPOC may have a positive impact on global health.

Practice by Unpractice: Taizhou Moral Philosophy Reconsidered

As followers of Wang Yangming, the Taizhou school places significant emphasis on the body, which has led to challenges concerning the potential dissipation of natural desires. Critics argue that Taizhou philosophy, while acknowledging human’s natural state, fails to adequately address the existence of evil and tends to overlook the role of deliberate moral practice by idealizing the natural as morally perfect. This article employs the framework of embodied cognition to present a novel interpretation of Taizhou moral philosophy and to address critiques regarding its views on evil and moral practice. It explores Taizhou’s holistic approach, integrating mind and body, self and others, to offer fresh insights into the balance between deliberation and spontaneity in moral practice. As a comparative and interdisciplinary endeavor, this article bridges Eastern and Western philosophies, connecting moral philosophy with empirical science. It aims to deepen understanding of Taizhou philosophy while highlighting its broader relevance for ethical behavior and moral reasoning in a global context.

Behavioral symmetry with humanomics: public choice and moral community

Behavioral symmetry with humanomics: public choice and moral community

Duties to Self, Consent, and Respect in Kant’s Moral Philosophy

Abstract In Kantian ethics, do we wrong someone when our use of them requires that they violate a duty to self, even when they have consented to that use? In this paper, I answer this question in the negative. Consent that constitutes a violation of a duty to self is impermissible yet normatively transformative. But it also matters how consent was obtained. For example, it matters whether consent is solicited or unsolicited, whether our action amounts to complicity with the violation, and how the act of consent is shaped by the broader contours of the relationship the parties stand in to each other. In Kantian terms, we might fail in our duties of respect to others even when our interactions with them are consensual. So many, but not all, consensual interactions in which one person violates a duty to self are also instances in which they are interpersonally wronged.

The Implementation of LAUDATO SI as the Embodiment of Integral Ecology in Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University

The wrong paradigm towards self and others leads humans to individual pride and collective egoism. Technocratic and mechanical views can obscure human dignity, because humans are considered as objects and usability values only. Anthropocentric, mechanistic and technocratic paradigms make individuals alienated from others, both with each other, as well as with other creatures and entities. This research aims to explore the Encyclical Laudato Si and its implementation in Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University (UAJY). As a university, UAJY plays an important role in creating a catholic education that respects human dignity, the value of interconnectedness and builds an integral ecology. The results of the research are expected to be more effective in realising the encyclic in Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University. This research uses a qualitative method, and the approach used was a mixture of library research and field research. The material object of the research is policy, while the formal object is moral philosophy.

Moral decision making: Explainable insights into the role of working memory in autonomous driving

The intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and moral philosophy presents unique challenges in the development of autonomous vehicles, particularly in scenarios requiring split-second ethical decisions. This study examines the relationship between working memory (WM) and moral judgments in simulated AV scenarios, quantifying the effects of varying cognitive load on utilitarian decision-making under different time constraints. We experimented with 336 participants, each completing 16 simulated driving trials presenting unique ethical dilemmas. Results reveal a complex interplay between cognitive load and ethical choices. Under high temporal pressure (1-second response window), utilitarian decisions decreased significantly from 92.77 % to 70.08 %. Extended time constraints led to increased utilitarian choices. Statistical analyses validated these findings across diverse ethical contexts. Chi-square tests revealed significant associations between WM load and utilitarian decisions in 1-second conditions, particularly for high-stakes scenarios. Logistic regression showed that WM significantly decreased the likelihood of utilitarian decisions in these scenarios. Six supervised machine learning models were employed, with Gaussian Naive Bayes achieving the highest predictive accuracy (82.2 % to 97.0 %) in distinguishing utilitarian decisions. Partial Dependence analysis revealed a strong negative correlation between WM and utilitarian decisions, especially in the 1-second interval. The 2-second interval emerged as potentially optimal for balancing time constraints and cognitive load. These findings contribute to the theoretical understanding of ethical decision-making under cognitive load and provide practical insights for developing ethically aligned autonomous systems, with implications for improving safety, optimizing takeover protocols, and enhancing the ethical reasoning capabilities of autonomous driving systems.

Disposisi, Kehendak Bebas, dan Kontingensi

This article discusses the long-standing philosophical challenge of integrating disposition, free will, and contingency. We place the above three realities into a coherent theoretical framework. Various disciplines have extensively studied the concepts of disposition, free will, and contingency. Nevertheless, their complex interrelationships still need to be more adequately explored. The result is a persistent dichotomy that gives rise to debates about causation, agency, and the reality of modalities. Thus, this article proposes a new framework called triadic relations to explain the mutual dependencies and emergent properties of the interaction of these fundamental ideas. The article uses a systematic synthesis approach of recent developments in dispositional essentialism, compatibilist theories of free will, and the metaphysics of the modal. We aim to show how dispositions provide the ontological foundation for free will and contingent possibilities. After all, free will operation actualizes specific potentials and introduces original novelty. This method offers an exciting resolution to the compatibilist libertarian debate by providing a new perspective on mental causation, moral responsibility, and the nature of contingency. Our findings suggest a dynamic ontology that transcends traditional philosophical categories. The findings redefine metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and interdisciplinary areas. Triadic relations emerge as a new paradigm for reconceptualizing the structure of reality and human agency to reshape the landscape of philosophical inquiry.

THE Moral Intuitions in Moral Decision-Making

Moral intuitions are strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs. Scholars have put forward many theories about the origin of moral intuition from different perspectives. Based on many scholars’ theoretical analysis of moral intuition, this paper takes Kant’s moral philosophy as the basic framework. It further introduces caring ethics and utilitarianism as supplements to analyze the role of moral intuition in moral decision-making. This essay argues that while moral intuitions can serve as valuable initial guides, they must be critically examined and refined through a Kantian framework that integrates the categorical imperative with reasoned emotions and utilitarianism, enhancing their trustworthiness by aligning them with rational moral principles.

Building the Foundation: Towards a Theoretical Framework for Forensic Accounting

This study proposed a forensic accounting theory after examining how the impact of certain variables and their interplay on forensic accounting practices can contribute to developing integrated and robust fraud prevention strategies, enhance organizational accountability, and strengthen the overall integrity of financial and internal control systems. In literature, most studies on forensic accounting and fraud prevention have primarily focused on broader aspects such as governance, ethics, and accountability and are largely predicated on theories such as fraud diamond theory and agency theory that seek to understand the causes of fraud, highlighting the importance of forensic accounting in fraud prevention and detection, without suggesting practical forensic accounting frameworks. Also, the forensic accounting theory developed by Peterson Ozil in 2020 examines how the investigator’s attitude or mindset at the time of decision-making influences the outcomes of a forensic investigation. While these studies provide valuable insights into the overall context of fraud prevention, there is a scarcity of research on the specific forensic accounting processes that should be implemented to enhance the effectiveness of fraud prevention measures. This is the significant difference between the current study and previous studies. Therefore, the proposed Vutumu Forensic Accounting Theory serves as the guiding philosophy that underpins the integrated approach of combining control system reliance, litigation support, whistleblower hotlines, sustainable governance systems, ethical philosophy, digital fraud review frequencies, accounting record to reporting quality, and the frequency of system reviews, thereby enabling organizations to establish a proactive framework that addresses various dimensions of fraud prevention and detection. The implementation of the theory emerges as a formidable and comprehensive anti-fraud strategy, seamlessly integrating multiple elements to create a robust defense against fraudulent activities, safeguarding financial integrity, ethical conduct, and accountability within organizations. Furthermore, it is the researcher’s desire that this study serve as a foundation for further research and practical implementation of forensic accounting frameworks in strengthening the ability to detect and prevent fraud.

Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition.

It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while "contractualist" ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents-an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, psychology, economics, biology, and cultural evolution. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others' utilities ("consequentialist" reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic ethical properties of certain actions ("deontological" reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational approximations of a contractualist ideal. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds-how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology-commonly described in terms of systems in conflict-can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constraint. Our resulting "triple theory" of moral cognition naturally integrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns.

The victims' shoes trope and emerging solidarity in political protest

AbstractBy providing an overview of the rich and surprising ways in which the victims' shoes trope becomes utilised in political protests as the focus of interaction ritual chains, this article elaborates on the three distinct ways through which moral communities of solidarity position themselves. Firstly, moral communities are often formed around aspects of large‐scale atrocities such as commemoration, victimhood and past injustices that, I argue, strengthen nationalist sentiments. The second type of moral communities of solidarity are those that demand ‘rights’ and claim ‘duties’ for promoting particular sectoral agendas. In the third type, the shoes serve to build solidarities that are future‐oriented and aim at promoting universal human rights. By using Goffman's Frame Theory and Collins' Interaction Ritual Chain Theory, this article analyses protests from around the world in which the victims' shoes trope has been utilised to tackle a wide range of subjects—gun and domestic violence, unemployment, Covid‐19 policies, institutional abuse, road safety, commemorations, antiwar and climate protests and more.

Human Life Obligations According To Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who put forward the idea of ​​rational ethical philosophy. He is also a philosopher who succeeded in interpreting ethics in terms of moral imperatives, not only in terms of efforts to achieve happiness. He also proposed a rational transcendental philosophy as opposed to a speculative metaphysical-dogmatic philosophy. The purpose of this research study is an attempt to study the inherent structure of the mind or the inherent laws of thought. In the context of rational transcendental philosophy, Kant directed his ethical or moral philosophy to religion, even though religion was not directly used as the basis for religion. The research method used in this research is Kant analyzing the nature of human knowledge, especially in his discussion of Transcendental Analytics. Kant applied the Analytical Method by asking three basic things. The result of this research is that Kant's life as a philosopher is divided into two periods. First, the precritical period was passed by adopting the rationalistic attitude launched by Leibniz and Wolff. Second, critical period. This second period was a time when Kant gradually abandoned rationalism because he was influenced by Hume. In this second period Kant began to change the face of philosophy radically. The research conclusion is that the highest goal of Kant's ethical philosophical thought is the social goal or essential social good (summum bonum).

Decolonial Critical Bioethics and Access to Treatment for Hemophilia in the Americas

Over the past two decades, the integration of sociology with the analytical and normative practices of bioethics has become firmly established. This integration has given rise to two similar yet distinct conceptions of bioethics: empirical bioethics, which utilizes social sciences to enhance ethical scrutiny, and critical bioethics, which not only employs research methods but also draws from established social theories. Critical bioethics aims to overcome the decontextualized analyses inherent in the concept of applied ethics, which relies solely on moral philosophy. This epistemic deepening enables a comprehensible evaluation of the impacts of biotechnologies’ production and distribution within their social and global contexts, ultimately leading to more robust normative frameworks. This article presents the conceptual framework of a model of critical bioethics that we term “decolonial”, developed through the synthesis of the Frankfurt School and decolonial studies. To illustrate the relevance of its analytical parameters, we will examine to clotting factor concentrates in countries across the Americas.

Trust, Contextual Impartiality, and Open-Mindedness in Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Abstract This article analyses impartiality in Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) by identifying the way that the parties’ trust in arbitrators is constructed. Drawing on the findings of a large-scale empirical project, it questions the applicability of an orthodox judicial doctrine of impartiality to ISDS on the grounds that trust in arbitrators is constructed on a fundamentally different basis from that of trust in judges. The primary feature of a judicial doctrine of impartiality is that trust is founded on an absolutist approach to impartiality which is intended to ensure that judges have no predispositions to parties. In contrast, trust in ISDS is founded on the method of party appointment which is based on a very different assumption—that arbitrators’ predispositions can be valuable and appropriate in the decision-making process. Drawing on empirical findings, moral philosophy, and psychology, this article proposes the idea of contextual impartiality. Under this approach, the question is not whether an arbitrator can meet universal standards of impartiality irrespective of the context within which the arbitrator operates. Rather, the critical distinction is between permissible and impermissible partiality which depends on whether the individual is reasonably expected to act partially because of their circumstances. In this respect, the article identifies open-mindedness as a fundamental feature of a contextual approach to impartiality and a bright line between permissible and impermissible partiality.

HOW SHOULD HISTORIANS EMPATHIZE?

ABSTRACTReflecting on the ethical and unethical ways of empathizing is a necessary task for historians interested in the ethics of history. Research on empathy often classifies its various parts into affective, cognitive, and prosocial dimensions. However, in historical scholarship, the cognitive‐intellectual dimension of empathy is overemphasized to the detriment of its affective and prosocial dimensions, whose roles in determining the ways historians should practice history are often disregarded. In this article, I will discuss the relations between empathy and ethics and how historians should empathize. Doing so, I argue that empathy's ethical potential for historical scholarship needs to be de‐intellectualized by historical scholarship, a task that requires a complementary and supplementary approach to empathy that is in dialogue with moral philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, and animal studies. Only by recognizing empathy as a socially developed evolutionary capacity shared among humans and other species can historians fully develop its possibilities as a tool to guide human morality and ethical decision‐making. Finally, I will claim that empathy as an ethical imperative for an ethics of care and vulnerability should guide historians' ethics toward more responsive and responsible ways of relating with others across time, space, cultures, generations, species, and so on.

Keynes and the Long Run — to ‘Live Wisely and Agreeably and Well’

ABSTRACT This paper revisits Keynes’s essay titled ‘The economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, featuring Keynes both as a growth theorist and a moral and social philosopher of capitalism. We discuss the three broader trends identified by Keynes that he expected would come to characterize the socio-economic evolution of advanced countries under capitalism: first, continued technological progress and capital accumulation as the main drivers of exponential growth in economic possibilities; second, a gradual general rebalancing of life choices away from work; and third, a change in the code of morals in societies approaching an envisioned stationary state of zero net capital accumulation in which mankind has solved its economic problem and enjoys a lifestyle predominantly framed by leisure rather than disutility-yielding work. We assess actual outcomes by 2024 and attempt to peek into the future economic possibilities for this generation’s grandchildren.

On the Human in Human Dignity

Only the incurious and philosophically challenged doubt the significance of dignity as a central issue in human interactions. Human dignity is much debated in religion, law, moral philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, philosophical anthropology, psychology, communication studies, and elsewhere. It is subject to competing discourses of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and logic. It appears in intercultural and international discussions of rights, autonomy, race, ethnicity, economics, war, and peace. It is contrasted with guilt, shame, and humiliation, both ordinary and extreme. However, the dynamic roots of dignity are usually presupposed or ignored in favor of reductionist typologies and antinomies. Returning us to lived experience and with post-humanist animal studies and the medical model of psychiatry as exemplary cases of reductionism, I interpret H. Plessner’s semiotic phenomenology as a communicative philosophy of the humane in dignity.

Mind the Vicarious Responsibility

Abstract Vicarious responsibility exists. It is (also) a species of moral responsibility. Nevertheless, it is seldomly discussed or considered as such in the main debates within moral philosophy. This article presents a case for the relevance of vicarious moral responsibility to several of these discussions. It seeks to provide new insights for the debate between historicism and structuralism and presents a further case for distinguishing between various facets of moral responsibility. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that an agent need not enter into the relation of vicarious responsibility freely in order to be responsible. This idea then allows us to present new cases for compatibilism, demonstrating the consistency of moral responsibility with determinism.

Minimal metaphysics in moral and political philosophy

The aim of this paper is to apply the methodology of minimal ontological commitments to moral and political philosophy. As minimal metaphysics in the philosophy of science endorses scientific realism, so we subscribe to moral realism, arguing that the presumption of liberty is the fundamental assumption defining a person. What needs to be justified then are restrictions to liberty and, in particular, the application of coercion upon persons. In examining knowledge claims about normative facts going beyond the presumption of liberty, such as, for instance, facts about a common good, we show that an ontological commitment to such normative facts is at odds with minimal metaphysics. We thus show how minimal metaphysics vindicates a Kantian deontological stance in moral and political philosophy: moral realism is limited to the obligations that follow from extending the presumption of liberty to all human beings in virtue of them being rational animals, hence to respect every person as an end in itself.