Ethical Project Research Articles

A família na unidade de terapia intensiva pediátrica e a atuação do assistente social: da humanização ao direito

O processo de internação sempre afeta em algum grau a família do paciente. Quando se trata de crianças, especialmente em Unidade de Terapia Intensiva (UTI), a situação torna-se ainda mais delicada. Diversos estudos apontam a importância da presença da família para recuperação da criança internada em UTI, além deste ser um direito assegurado pelo Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente, em seu art. 12; e também garantido pela Política Nacional de Humanização do SUS. Entretanto, por vezes as condições concretas não são propícias a tal. Atualmente a UTI Pediátrica do HC-Unicamp, passa por um período de reformas, estando momentaneamente sem alojamento para acolher e acomodar pais e responsáveis vindos de cidades distantes. Compete ao Assistente Social contribuir para o acesso dos usuários aos seus direitos civis, sociais e políticos, estando assim alinhado a seu projeto ético-político profissional. Esse trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar os dados relacionados aos encaminhamentos realizados pelo Serviço Social após a entrevista social na UTI. No período de fevereiro a maio de 2016 foram realizados 32 encaminhamentos para municípios vizinhos para garantia de visitas de pais às crianças e adolescentes internados. Deste modo,por haver a garantia legal da permanência de familiares durante a internação, cabe ao Serviço Social neste espaço socio-ocupacional intervir junto aos municípios de origem dos pacientes a fim de garantir o transporte diário dos familiares ao hospital, o que tem sido uma tarefa árdua tendo em vista o cenário de minimização das ações do Estado em razão da conjuntura econômica atual.

Metafizyka praktycznego rozumu. Autonomia i heteronomia wedle Kanta i Lévinasa

Relacje, które określają dwa odmienne projekty etyki – etykę autonomiczną Kanta i etykę heteronomiczną Lévinasa – są skomplikowane i niejednoznaczne. Z jednej strony Lévinas zalicza Kanta w poczet myślicieli transcendentalnych, którzy bronią silnego podmiotu poznawczego wraz z właściwą mu władzą tworzenia przedstawień. Z drugiej jednak strony Lévinas odnajduje w Krytyce praktycznego rozumu ważny ślad transcendencji, a mianowicie: możliwość przekroczenia skończoności ludzkiego bytu w przestrzeni refleksji moralnej. Wskazanie na sens niezależny od bytu, a więc myślenie wykraczające poza granice zakreślone przez zmysły, to w przekonaniu Lévinasa właściwa zasada Kantowskiej „rewolucji kopernikańskiej”. Największa zasługa Kanta nie polega więc ani na tym, że uznał podmiot za aktywny element poznania, ani na tym, że zażegnał spór między empiryzmem i racjonalizmem. Wielkość Kanta, którego interpretuje Lévinas, polega na odkryciu drogi wiodącej od skończoności wiedzy naukowej do nieskończoności poznania moralnego. Choć mogłoby się wydawać, że w ograniczonym kręgu rozumu teoretycznego jesteśmy zamknięci w sposób nieodwołalny, to jednak szansa przełamania granic wyznaczonych przez zmysłowość pojawia się w polu rozumu praktycznego. Dobitny wykład prawdy o skończoności ludzkiego poznania nie jest ostatnim słowem Kanta. Właściwe przesłanie jego filozofii – zarówno części krytycznej, jak i pozytywnej – można by sformułować w taki oto sposób: tam, gdzie kończy się wiedza ściśle naukowa, rozpoczyna się poznanie o charakterze moralnym. Poza horyzontem świata, który znamy dzięki widzeniu, patrzeniu i dotykaniu, otwiera się pole metafizycznej spekulacji.Te właśnie wątki, a więc zarówno podobieństwa, jak i różnice, które dzielą etykę Kanta i Lévinasa, podejmuje niniejszy artykuł. Kant zastrzega, że wyłącznie „czysty rozum praktyczny”, wolny od wszelkich zmysłowych wrażeń, gwarantuje powszechność prawa moralnego. Lévinas natomiast przekonuje, że to właśnie unikatowe wydarzenie, a więc „twarzą w twarz” z drugim człowiekiem, jest pierwszym impulsem moralności. Zgodnie z wykładem Kanta relacja z drugim człowiekiem jest z góry zapośredniczona przez siłę imperatywu, który nakazuje traktować go zawsze jako cel sam w sobie, nigdy zaś jako środek. To samo zagadnienie inaczej przedstawia Lévinas, który twierdzi, że warunkiem etycznej relacji z drugim człowiekiem jest bezpośrednie doświadczenie jego odmienności. W tak określonej przestrzeni sporu rodzą się dwie konkurencyjne koncepcje etyki.

Creating a space for global media ethics

ABSTRACTThis article argues that, despite scepticism and many obstacles, a global media ethics can be realised to a significant degree. It can become a much needed and influential guide for responsible journalism in a global media world. After defining the term ‘global media ethics’, the paper provides a conception of the goals and structure of a plausible global media ethic. It concludes on a practical note, proposing a number of ways in which the project of global media ethics can be advanced so as to become a dominant approach to media ethics.

ON THE POSSIBILITY OF SPECULATIVE ETHICAL ABSOLUTES AFTER KANT

According to Quentin Meillassoux, one of the principal aims of speculative philosophy “must be the immanent inscription of values in being.” In this regard, the return to speculation in contemporary philosophy is in many ways a deeply ethical project. This “inscription of values” can only be successful, however, if it can somehow assert an absolute ethical value without, on the one hand, resorting to the kind of dogmatism laid to rest by the Kantian critique; or, on the other, by falling into some form of ethical relativism incapable of grounding universal ethical judgments. Unfortunately, too many of these attempts have failed. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to explore the structure and failures of two such attempts through an analysis of the ethical projects of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, respectively; and then, secondly, to show how both of these thinkers, and the project of speculative ethics in general, could benefit by turning to the work of F.W.J. Schelling on the concept of good and evil as absolute ethical values.

Ethics support in community care makes a difference for practice.

Through the Norwegian ethics project, ethics activities have been implemented in the health and care sector in more than 200 municipalities. To study outcomes of the ethics activities and examine which factors promote and inhibit significance and sustainability of the activities. Two online questionnaires about the municipal ethics activities. Participants and research context: A total of 137 municipal contact persons for the ethics project answered the first survey (55% response rate), whereas 217 ethics facilitators responded to the second survey (33% response rate). Ethical considerations: Based on informed consent, the study was approved by the Data Protection Official of the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Around half of the respondents found the ethics project to have been highly significant for daily professional practice. Outcomes include better handling of ethical challenges, better employee cooperation, better service quality, and better relations to patients and next of kin. Factors associated with sustainability and/or significance of the activities were sufficient support from stakeholders, sufficient available time, and ethics facilitators having sufficient knowledge and skills in ethics and access to supervision. This study shows that ethics initiatives can be both sustainable and significant for practice. There is a need to create regional or national structures for follow-up and develop more comprehensive ethics training for ethics facilitators. It is both possible and potentially important to implement clinical ethics support activities in community health and care services systematically on a large scale. Future ethics initiatives in the community sector should be designed in light of documented promoting and inhibiting factors.

Ecological challenges to ethics

This article is an attempt to shed new light on the environmental challenges of ethics related to over­‑exploitation of the world by humanity. This article aims to formulate guidelines for the project of new ethics that will be able to respond to these challenges, to appreciate the intrinsic value of the world without diminishing the value of human being. The starting point of the analysis is the increase of ecological awareness, observable both among scientists and politicians as well as among citizens and the Church. In the next part of the article, contemporary ecological ethics are compared with traditional anthropocentric ethics. The paper presents the diagnosis of the reasons for the exploitation of nature resulting with ecological crisis and offers a method of overcoming the crisis. It argues in favour of anthropocentrism, but rejects its radical version. In the last part of the paper there is a proposal to create a new ethics, appropriate for us and the world, which would be an extension and refinement of Christian ethics in dialogue with contemporary secular trends.

Historical Narrative as a Moral Guide and the Present as History as an Ethical Project

The aim of this paper is to explain why the many turns that historiography has undergone from the middle of the twentieth century to the present are related to the “living experiences” that have occurred outside of academia. Trying to grasp the concept of “practical past” from Oakeshott and White, it will be argued that the disciplinary transformations such as “gender history” or the “historiography of decolonization” that accompany “living experiences” outside of academia are the result of the “practical attitude” that accompanies historical narratives and function as a moral guide to the present. Finally, it will be discussed that if historians assume a critical attitude toward the “living experiences” and regard the “present as history,” then the different transformations of the discipline can be explained by a critical attitude and go together with an ethical project.

Small data, online learning and assessment practices in higher education: a case study of failure?

In this paper, we present an in-depth case study of a single student who failed an online module which formed part of a master’s programme in Professional Education and Leadership. We use this case study to examine assessment practices in higher education in the online environment. In taking this approach, we go against the current predilection for Big Data which has given rise to ‘learning analytics’, a data-intensive approach to monitoring learning. In particular, we draw attention to the model of the learner produced by learning analytics and to issues of ‘dataveillance’ in online learning. We also use the case to examine assessment in higher education more broadly, exploring the tensions between the requirements for certification and the need for learning. We conclude that assessment practices in higher education may have more to do with ‘quality assurance’ and regulatory frameworks than with ‘enhancing the student experience’ and inculcating the qualities that mark out higher education as an ethical project.

Educating for ethical leadership through web-based coaching.

Ethical leadership is important for developing ethical healthcare practice. However, there is little research-based knowledge on how to stimulate and educate for ethical leadership. The aim was to develop and investigate the feasibility of a 6-week web-based, ethical leadership educational programme and learn from participants' experience. Training programme and research design: A training programme was developed consisting of (1) a practice part, where the participating middle managers developed and ran an ethics project in their own departments aiming at enhancing the ethical mindfulness of the organizational culture, and (2) a web-based reflection part, including online reflections and coaching while executing the ethics project. Focus group interviews were used to explore the participants' experiences with and the feasibility of the training. Participants and research context: Nine middle managers were recruited from a part-time master's programme in leadership in Oslo, Norway. The research context was the participating leaders' work situation during the 6 weeks of training. Ethical considerations: Participation was voluntary, data anonymized and the confidentiality of the participating leaders/students and their institutions maintained. No patient or medical information was involved. Eight of the nine recruited leaders completed the programme. They evaluated the training programme as efficient and supportive, with the written, situational feedback/coaching as the most important element, enhancing reflection and motivation, counteracting a feeling of loneliness and promoting the execution of change. The findings seem consistent with the basic assumptions behind the educational design, based partly on e-health research, feedback studies and organizational ethics methodology, partly on theories on workplace learning, reflection, recognition and motivation. The training programme seems feasible. It should be adjusted according to participants' proposals and tested further in a large-scale study.

Two Hearts Believing in Just One Mind? The Humanistic Management Network and the Global Ethic Project

It is drearily fashionable to criticise the business community for its chronic refusal to take values - beyond the bottom line - seriously. A more honest investigation of the phenomenon of moral bankruptcy in global business and finance, however, reveals that a prior crisis among humanists - widespread denial of the very existence and even desirablility of universal values - predates the financial crises and big business scandals of recent decades, and deserves a healthy portion of the blame for them. Opposition to this quest for common values takes many forms, principled as well as practical. Values, it is commonly argued, belong in the realm of individual freedom; organisations, including corporations, have no business trying to impose moral preferences on their employees. The only solution fit for the 21st Century, with its highly differentiated and increasingly global labour markets, is, on the standard neoliberal account, to leave individuals alone to pursue their own conceptions of the good life on the condition that they display a minimum of respect for the rule of law within the organisations in which they operate. Such ethical minimalism, however, leaves a society more or less defenceless against the excesses of its most powerful actors, which today most certainly include multinational corporations. Without demanding higher, global standards of ethical responsibility beyond mimimum legal compliance, a ‘race to the bottom’ among business actors desperate for survival is, and has been, the inevitable result of this total abandonment of higher humanistic principles. The reintroduction of Basic Trust, necessary for all ethical behaviour, into the system in which global managers operate - an impossible task without turning to an updated global patrimony of humanistic learning - is the common goal of the Humanistic Management Network and the Global Ethic Project. This brief paper critically explores the paths to reform proposed by the two movements, and shows how each can play an important supporting role in helping the other to achieve its main goals.

Between exclusion and emancipation: Foucault's ethics and disability.

The aim of the study was to demonstrate how Foucault's ethics, which we understand as a tension between exclusion and emancipation, helps both critically reassess two disability models that prevail in the contemporary literature concerning disability, that is the medical model and the social one, and support and inspire an ethical project of including people with disabilities in spheres of life from which they have been excluded by various power/knowledge regimes. We claim, following Foucault, that such a project should be informed by critical reflection on exclusion-generating forms of knowledge about people with disabilities and focused on individual ethical actions fostering self-realization and emancipation of people with disability.

LA MEDICINA ANTIGUA: UNA ÉTICA EXISTENCIAL EN MICHEL FOUCAULT

Este artículo pretende resaltar la lectura que Michel Foucault realiza de lamedicina grecolatina en el mundo antiguo. Más que caracterizarse por susrasgos terapéuticos, tal discurso médico buscaba la producción de una éticade la existencia. A partir de diferentes textos prescriptivos desarrolladospor filósofos, moralistas y médicos, se muestra la importancia que losantiguos otorgaban a la salud como elemento esencial dentro del ejerciciode la libertad. El uso general del cuerpo, involucrando la alimentación,así como la práctica de los placeres sexuales, se convertía en un objetode inquietud permanente para quien deseara “estilizar su ser”. Destacarestas características de la medicina antigua occidental permite delinearuna genealogía de los valores morales actuales vinculados al autocuidado,práctica importante para los dispositivos de seguridad de las racionalidadespolíticas contemporáneas.

The work of the teacher-educator in Australia: Reconstructing the “superhero” performer/academic in an audit culture

ABSTRACTWhat is it that teacher-educators “do”? This paper draws on interview data with Deans/Heads of Schools of Education in the Australian context to explore this question by asking: How is the teacher-educator produced as a category of academic worker? Using critical approaches to discourse analysis, the paper presents two interlocked storylines woven with varying emphasis through the interviews. First, the teacher-educator is produced as a superhero researcher and teacher, elevated by the expectations of the Excellence in Research for Australia audit/surveillance tools. Second, there is a concomitant struggle to reconcile pressure to research with commitment to meeting the needs of schooling systems, and to addressing the work of the teacher-educator in ethical terms. It is suggested that teacher-educators’ work reflects a desire to legitimate various performances of teacher education within current dynamics of audit culture pressures, set against the less visible ethical project of education more broadly conceived.

Law, Ethics, and the Needs of History: Mendelssohn, Krochmal, and Moral Philosophy

AbstractAlthough the role of ethics in modern Jewish thought has been widely explored, major works by foundational philosophers remain largely absent from such discussions. This essay contributes to the recovery of these voices, focusing on the Hebrew writings of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840). I argue that these texts reveal the existence of a shared ethical project animating these founding philosophical voices of Jewish modernity, and that reconstructing their claims contributes to broader conversations about the relationship between ethics and law. Mendelssohn and Krochmal present Jewish law as addressing needs emerging from the history of moral philosophy—from the modern histories of Platonic and Aristotelian ethics. Moreover, my reading highlights these thinkers’ ongoing relevance, suggesting that their work illuminates the role of law in ethical cultivation.

A Secular Manifesto for Europe

Abstract The article argues that secularism in Europe needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. Everywhere European secular states face a double threat: On one hand fundamentalist religion, on the other negative secularism. Firstly, the paper explains negative secularism and the reason it is a problem rather than an asset. It then elaborates a new conception of positive secularism that can be understood either as a political or as an ethical project. Either way, the point of positive secularism is to distance itself from religion in order to embrace diversity of all types, religious and non-religious. Political secularism, however, relies on an elusive hope of reaching overlapping consensus between religious and non-religious people. Ethical secularism aims instead to protect diversity by promoting the establishment of a marketplace of religions, which acknowledges a public role for religion while regulating it. The marketplace of religions promotes religious pluralism and helps to iron out the different treatments between religions. Ethical secularism aims to be a worldview of worldviews that creates the preconditions for all religious and non-religious people to live well together.

The evangelical financial ethic: Doubled forms and the search for God in the economic world

In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in the financial economy. The ministries’ uses of budgets also challenge the idea that market devices gain power primarily by formatting economic transactions and establishing conditions for market exchange. Evangelical financial ministries show how, in everyday calculative practices, a device such as a household budget renders the spiritual economic, and the economic spiritual. In the exercise of evangelical ethics, financial ministry returns the divine touch to the invisible hand. [Christianity, economy, ethics, finance, households, markets, United States]

RATIONALISM AND THE THEATRE IN LUCRETIUS

Lucretius' primary didactic aim in De Rerum Natura (DRN) is to teach his readers to interpret the world around them in such a way as to avoid the formation of false beliefs. The price of failure is extremely high. Someone who possesses false beliefs is liable to experience fear (of the gods, or of death, or both), and so will not be able to attain the state of tranquillity that, for Epicureans, constitutes the moral end. Equipping readers with sufficient knowledge always to form true beliefs about the phenomena they encounter thus serves no less a purpose than the enabling of their future happiness. This paper is concerned with how Lucretian intertextuality contributes to this primary didactic aim. For reasons to be explained below, I will focus on Lucretian engagement with the texts of Greek and Roman drama. I will show that allusions to drama in DRN, rather than functioning simply as ‘honey on the rim of the cup’, make a direct contribution to Lucretius' ethical project, teaching readers how to respond rationally to the full variety of their cultural experience.

The Risk of Over-Reliance on the Institutional Review Board: An Approved Project Is Not Always an Ethical Project

The Risk of Over-Reliance on the Institutional Review Board: An Approved Project Is Not Always an Ethical Project

Where the Prophet’s Wife Rode a Camel: a Review of the Feminist Perspectives and Orientations Rooted in Islam

TEXT The ethical project of Islamic feminism shares the central ideals and values of Islam itself —of justice, egalitarianism, equity, compassion, and tolerance. By opening up the question of who has the authority to interpret scripture, and by challenging the power of traditional interpretive communities and the producers of religious knowledge, Islamic feminists are at the forefront of the contemporary reformist movement. Writers such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas are conferring upon themselves the authority to challenge the monopoly of traditional interpreters of the Quran, whilst scholars such as Fatima Mernissi are engaged in contesting received notions of Hadith literature. All such scholars are engaged in revisiting Islamic sources and actively furthering what has been succinctly termed the ―democratization of ijtihad. 1 Working within Islamic jurisprudence, this entails the use of an interpretive methodology, ijtihad (to strive or) to dynamically reinterpret foundational Quranic principles in order to bring about equal rights for women. 2

Hegel and Nietzsche on thought, freedom, and ‘the labour of the negative’

The argument advanced in this essay is that Hegel and Nietzsche’s method of critical enquiry is not only consonant but embraces a concept of practical freedom that for both philosophers tethers the affective will to the empty formalism of the Kantian rational will. Defining his own philosophical practice as a ‘yea-saying to opposition and war’ ( Ecce Homo), Nietzsche engages in a rigorous discipline of thought that proceeds on the dialectical principle of affirmative negation, thereby recuperating what Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit refers to as ‘the labour of the negative’. Contrary to Deleuze’s emphatically anti-Hegelian reading of Nietzsche, it is contended that Nietzsche’s yes is the fruit of a cruel and resolutely dialectical no – a no that not only undergirds his affirmative ideal but constitutes the sine qua non of his ethical project of self-overcoming.