Relational Ethics Research Articles

Beyond Judicial Solitude: Listening in the Politics of Criminal Sentencing

Criminal sentencing has grown into an increasingly interactive process featuring a multiplicity of potential actors—prosecution, defence, the individual convicted of the crime, probation officers and case workers, victims or their families, the police, community representatives, community workers, and even academics. The philosophical foundations of sentencing scholarship, however, regularly assume a model of judicial solitude in which sentencing judges are separate and apart from other actors. This article suggests the need to take sentencing’s interactivity and its politics seriously and draws on democratic theory to address this gap. Accordingly, it argues that listening—as conceived of by deliberative democrats—is essential to a relational ethic that ensures both the legitimacy and quality of sentencing decisions, particularly in cases involving marginalized communities. In doing so, it turns to judicial practice and highlights both the need and possibilities for listening to be taken up as an explicit feature of judicial ethics.

Designing for Relational Ethics in Online and Blended Learning: Levinas, Buber, and Teaching Interfaith Ethics

Designing for Relational Ethics in Online and Blended Learning: Levinas, Buber, and Teaching Interfaith Ethics

Couples therapy and the challenges of building trust, fairness, and justice.

The cornerstone of the contextual family therapy model is predicated on the belief that all family members benefit from trustworthy relationships, which result from (a) acknowledging the contributions of deserving family members, (b) engaging in responsible interactions, and (c) ensuring a fair distribution of relational burdens and benefits. Nonetheless, conflicts may arise when one partner asserts a claim to relational resources based on need, while the other believes they are entitled to such resources based on merit. Based on relational ethics and the development of trust, this paper focuses on the therapist's role in facilitating the conflict-resolution process to assist couples in reestablishing individual responsibility and accountability within the systemic framework of couple therapy. It elucidates several clinical strategies, including (a) cultivating trust through fairness and focusing on the importance of reciprocity and equitable give-and-take, (b) detecting destructive entitlement, and (c) marital relationships and ethics of care. Several clinical examples are discussed, as well as common couple relational issues associated with horizontal and vertical relationships, partnership, and fusion, and the impact of gender and power dynamics and trustworthiness based on the feminist lens.

Indigenous justice frameworks for relational ethics in land-based design

ABSTRACT In the face of systematic expropriation, massive biodiversity loss, and the ongoing climate crisis, Indigenous peoples, knowledge, and labor have protected over 80% of the global biodiversity. This is remarkable given that Indigenous management or tenure remains over 20–25% of the planet’s terrestrial surface. Indigenous people’s capacity to protect biodiversity within their territories cannot be separated from the ethical frameworks that shape their relationships with land. These frameworks have been articulated by a diverse array of Indigenous scholars across the globe, and while they cannot be generalized, many share principles that go beyond dominant Western Scientific approaches that normalize utilitarian or idealized (e.g. ideals of wilderness) ethical systems. We argue that dominant policy and research discourses around land-based practices such as nature-based solutions and green infrastructure, will not be effective ‘solutions’ to ongoing crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Instead, we must go beyond paradigms of improvement and anthropocentric utility and ground land-based practices in the paradigm of relational ethics. Through this perspective paper, we argue that rather than seeking solutions through redesigning ecosystems for utilitarian reasons, all interventions on Indigenous ancestral lands (recognized by settler states or not) should first center relational ethical approaches for land-based design practices and ground efforts in Indigenous justice. Our proposed ‘Indigenous Justice Frameworks for Relational Ethics in Land-based Design’ is based on the inseparability of bodies, lands, and knowledges, and is guided by the following elements: (1) generative refusal, (2) centering healing, reparation, and right relations, and (3) restoring and evolving Indigenous governance.

Relational ethics in immigrant families: The contextual therapy five-dimensional framework.

Contextual family therapy offers a unique explanatory and clinically valuable framework to address complex multigenerational processes in families of immigrants who experience cumulative migration-related traumas. In this paper, we offer a new extended, specific conceptualization of immigrant families' generational dynamics using existing literature within the five-dimensional contextual therapy framework illustrated with a clinical example. We highlight the importance of social and relational justice, loyalty, entitlement, and parentification in transgenerational processes in addressing manifestations of these traumas that are frequently overlooked in clinical practice with different generations of immigrant families. Clinical guiding principles include acknowledgment of the social nature of situational injustices and their consequences for relational justices, exploration of loyalty conflicts (familial, cultural, and national), active dialogue of mutual care, exoneration, and stimulating constructive entitlement through active giving. This paper contributes to further development of contextual therapy theory and provides practical guidance for clinicians working with international migrants including second and third generations.

“If it can be done, it will be done:” AI Ethical Standards and a dual role for public relations

This research reports a five-year study with different types of participants to examine questions related to ethics in artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of AI in public relations and professional communication. AI specialists from computer engineering and closely related fields, as well as CCOs, communication directors/managers, public affairs officers, and CEOs participated in this research, explaining and assessing the role of ethics in AI. Through numerous points of data collection, the topic of AI ethics in public relations was examined through a mixed method approach. This study offers insight into the ethics and design of AI systems that communication professionals must not only use in practice but also understand, advise upon, ethically oversee, and occasionally defend in the public sphere when used (or commissioned) by our organizations. After a review of broad literature and longitudinal data from hundreds of sources, recommendations for a more robust framework for AI ethics in public relations are proposed. Ethical considerations and quantum and neuromorphic computing are posed as means to avoid technocracy, and base use of these advanced systems on moral values.

Epistemic silences, subversive politics: post-disaster economic assessments as technologies of persistent coloniality and route to an emancipatory climate justice agenda in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT Economic analyses of losses and damages or post-disaster needs assessments (PDNAs) are silent about the longstanding reparatory claims related to the legacies of African enslavement, colonial violence and indigenous dispossession that compound uneven racialized geographies in the Caribbean. This paper unpacks these so-called ‘objective’ valuations drawing attention to their (neo)liberal framings, technocratic underpinnings, and historical origins in the Caribbean plantation economy. Using case studies of catastrophic hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017) and Dorian (2019) in Haiti, Antigua and Barbuda, and The Bahamas respectively, the paper exposes critical tensions, knowledge hierarchies, and contradictions embedded within empirical assessments that justify and prioritize preferred policies of powerful international development, financial and governance institutions. PDNAs under-value and neglect important community and local knowledge, solidarity practices, cultural institutions, and relational ethics in the face of climate disasters in these Caribbean islands. Taking a Black geographies and political economy approach, the paper addresses the limitations and risks associated with PDNAs, deemed political tools or technologies of climate disaster that reinforce oppression. To advance an emancipatory climate justice agenda to enable more radical reparative measures and possibilities, the paper suggests that analyses and political strategy must be grounded in people's history, cultural, ethical, and communal governance practices.

“Dear John”: Overriding institutional axiology by privileging Indigenous relational ethics

Institutional ethical oversight of research involving humans conducted at Canadian universities is guided by the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2). Beginning in 2010, the TCPS2 included a chapter specific to research involving First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Peoples of Canada, which is intended to provide a framework for the ethical conduct of research with Indigenous communities. These institutional guidelines reflect progress in the way research is done with Indigenous communities. However, concerns remain about the ways in which these guidelines are taken up, interpreted, and operationalized by institutional research ethics boards, which include creating tensions and challenges for Indigenous scholars conducting research together with their own communities. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the challenges and conflicting expectations we faced as an Indigenous doctoral student and non-Indigenous academic supervisor, navigating the axiological differences between institutional ethical oversight and community relational ethics with the aim of supporting other Indigenous scholars who may experience similar challenges and influencing policy change and relational engagement in ethical review processes in university settings. We outline the various critiques of institutional oversight of Indigenous research, share several examples of how we experienced the tensions and potential/actual harm that institutional power interference caused in the review process and how we worked through them, and demonstrate how, in our experience, it was not bureaucratic institutional procedures that protected community participants from risk, it was community relationships. We conclude by discussing implications and offering our suggestions for change.

A Critical Examination of Business Ethics in Relation to Economic Sense: Perspectives of Customers and Business Proprietors in Region (5) Guyana

This study was pursued to provide statistical and empirical evidence of whether or not business ethics makes economic sense. A critical examination of business ethics and whether or not it makes economic sense was examined by taking into consideration the perspectives of business stakeholders. Economists, business proprietors and customers do not always agree on the concept of business ethics as the moral principles and values implemented for good governance. Customers and business proprietors were targeted to gain insights from different stakeholders on the issue of business ethics and whether or not it makes economic sense. The recommended strategies to be implemented to perpetuate business ethics while at the same time ensuring business growth and development were also considered. This research paper utilized a mixed methods research approach in conjunction with a descriptive online survey and structured interview for the quantitative and qualitative aspects respectively. The inculcation of primary and secondary data provided empirical and statistical substantiation to establish recommendations and to draw conclusion. An element of triangulation was integrated to add robust analytical evidence. The perspectives of customers and business owners on business ethics and economic sense were analyzed through the online survey and interviews responses were grouped, coded and themes were generated to answer the research question: To what extent does business ethics makes economic sense? The perspectives of customers guided the critical examination of what customers expect from businesses, where business ethics was the point of focus. On the other hand, the perspectives of business owners provided data on the implications of adhering stringently to business ethics and whether or not business ethics makes economic sense. The views of participants from opposing ends provided both conflicting and correlated data. However, both customers and business owners were in agreement that businesses should adhere to business ethics.

Sexuality, Secrecy—and Sewing with Mum

This article explores the author’s experience of navigating relational ethics. It details the aftermath of a reflexive discussion with the author’s parents, which focused on autoethnographic episodes about family experience, within a wider autoethnographic exploration of the author’s experience as a trainee counselor. The work, which had originally examined what it feels like for counselors to disclose erotic countertransference within clinical supervision, grew to encompass the author’s parallel experiences of (dis)honesty around sexuality, specifically regarding disclosures to the author’s parents and church: his original “moral supervisors.” As he and his mother spend time together sewing, recovering from the previous reflexive conversation and looking ahead to the next, the author considers the emotional impact of sharing an autoethnography with intimate others who are alive. Through evocative autoethnography, the article aims to use narrative analysis (as opposed to analysis of narrative) to capture an embodied and emotional response to the sharing of an autoethnography. It asks: what is it like to be honest?

ETHICS OF BUSINESS RELATIONS AS THE BASIS OF CORPORATE CULTURE

The article is devoted to the study of modern trends in management changes in business, due to the rapid development of market relations, new technologies and globalization. Special attention is paid to the role of the ethics of business relations in corporate culture, management processes and interaction between participants in business activities. The causes and nature of conflicts in the business environment are determined, offering effective methods of their resolution, including negotiations, mediation and analysis of the causes of conflicts. The barriers preventing effective communication in business, such as communication, psychological and organizational barriers, as well as trust barriers, are substantiated. The role of ethics in the processes of management and responsible decision-making, which contributes to increasing the efficiency of enterprises in modern conditions, is highlighted. Emphasis is placed on the need to develop ethical literacy of managerial staff through education, training, corporate codes and self-improvement. The development of such skills allows specialists not only to increase personal responsibility and efficiency, but also to strengthen the ethical basis of the entire enterprise. An important role in this is played by methods of increasing knowledge in the field of business ethics and compliance with ethical standards in business. Ethical standards are an integral part of successful management activities and contribute to the formation of a sustainable corporate culture. The development of moral consciousness and the introduction of ethical principles into daily activities help to minimize conflicts, strengthen trust between participants in business processes and enhance the company's reputation in the market

Pain During Incarceration: Searching for Safety in Hypermasculine Correctional Settings.

Hypermasculine prison culture produces hierarchies based on individuals' ability to assert dominance through strength and violence. Pain can impact physical strength, thereby limiting the ability to elevate or maintain social status within such hierarchies. The aim of the study was to explore the pain experiences of incarcerated men who were embedded into hypermasculine prison culture. Interpretive description co-positioned with relational ethics informed the study design. Twelve males participated in 1-hour interviews, which were transcribed verbatim and analyzed inductively to identify themes. The data analysis occurred in three phases: sorting and organizing, making sense of patterns, and transforming patterns into findings. We found that correctional settings were characterized by a social culture of toxic hypermasculinity that influenced the pain experiences of people who were incarcerated. Individuals who experienced pain were more vulnerable to self-isolation in situations in which pain threatened their ability to defend themselves and their previously established social status within the prison hierarchy. Yet, those who felt secure in subordinate hierarchical positions and had effective peer relationships perceived greater safety in communal settings, which proved to be a distraction from pain. In the context of incarceration, positive peer relationships and perceptions of safety positively influenced individuals' experience of pain.

Decent deepfakes? Professional deepfake developers’ ethical considerations and their governance potential

AbstractPolicymakers and societies are grappling with the question of how to respond to deepfakes, i.e., synthetic audio-visual media which is proliferating in all areas of digital life– from politics to pornography. However, debates and research on deepfakes’ impact and governance largely neglect the technology’s sources, namely the developers of the underlying artificial intelligence (AI), and those who provide code or deepfake creation services to others, making the technology widely accessible. These actors include open-source developers, professionals working in large technology companies and specialized start-ups, and for deepfake apps. They can profoundly impact which underlying AI technologies are developed, whether and how they are made public, and what kind of deepfakes can be created. Therefore, this paper explores which values guide professional deepfake development, how economic and academic pressures and incentives influence developers’ (perception of) agency and ethical views, and how these views do and could impact deepfake design, creation, and dissemination. Thereby, the paper focuses on values derived from debates on AI ethics and on deepfakes’ impact. It is based on ten qualitative in-depth expert interviews with academic and commercial deepfake developers and ethics representatives of synthetic media companies. The paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of AI ethics in relation to audio-visual generative AI. Besides, it empirically informs and enriches the deepfake governance debate by incorporating developers’ voices and highlighting governance measures which directly address deepfake developers and providers and emphasize the potential of ethics to curb the dangers of deepfakes.

Productive Tensions of Corporate Pride Partnerships: Towards a Relational Ethics of Constitutive Impurity

AbstractBased on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here, pinkwashing is understood as a looming risk, and purity as an unrealizable ideal. As such, corporate sponsorships of Pride are conceptualized as inherently impure—and productive because of their very impurity rather than despite it. Analytically, we identify and explore three productive tensions where the first involves emergent normativities for what constitutes good, right, or proper corporate engagement in Pride, the second revolves around queer(ed) practices and products that open normativities, and the third centres on the role of internal LGBTI+ employee-driven networks whose activism pushes organisations to become further involved in Pride, developing aspirational solidarity. Reading across literatures on corporate activism and queer organisation, we introduce Alexis Shotwell’s notion of constitutive impurity to suggest that the potential for ethical corporate Pride partnerships arises when accepting the risk of pinkwashing rather than seeking to overcome it.

Rights-based policies for role-bearing people: Are geo-cultural norms a hindrance to cultivating safer sport?

Many (inter)national governments and sports organisations are implementing standardised Safe Sport policies and guidelines. However, the Western-born, rights-based norm that underlies Safe Sport can collide with pre-existing geo-sociocultural norms of local contexts. Drawing from a case study of South Korea's elite sport pathway where tightened regulations on abuse challenge the long-lasting relational hierarchy based on Confucianism, this paper examines how athletes and coaches manoeuvre within the fast-changing social order shaped by the new safeguarding policies and practices. Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with 48 participants around two Elite Sports Schools, the paper shows that the rights-based norm integral to Safe Sport is sifted through the Confucian hierarchy, generating two main shifts respectively in coaches’ roles (from caring disciplinarians to professional service providers) and senior athletes’ (from potential abusers to benevolent superiors). That is, individual actors re-script their relational template by negotiating between the familiar and new relational ethics. From this, the paper suggests that Safe Sport is not a straightforward process of modernising less advanced practices up to a certain standard; it requires understanding how individuals make sense of the process in their own socio-cultural contexts.

Platforms mediating domestic care work as service gigs in European cities: Reorganisation of social reproduction through marketisation

In European cities, lean labour platforms increasingly mediate domestic service gigs related to social reproduction, such as food delivery and cleaning tasks on-demand. This fast-growing type of platform depends on spatial proximity and the population density of cities, economic relations enabled by digital technologies and embodied gendered and racialised norms. At the same time, platforms are linked to the crisis of social reproduction and to a constant supply of people in precarious positions looking for income. The paper tackles the question how platform-mediated service gigs related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning change caring relationships. This comprises considerations of the dimensions of marketisation and the transformation of reproductive work symbolically, materially, and socially and is presented with a feminist perspective pointing to social reproduction as an essential but devalued part of everyday life. These endeavours are explored with findings from various case studies dealing with food delivery and cleaning platforms in Austria and Germany and are discussed with reference to relational care ethics. Put forward here is a reflection on the ways in which digital mediation of domestic care work relies on gendered and racialised norms – and how this dependence intensifies structural inequalities inherent to social reproduction.

Against capture: notes on recording and the problem of extraction in education research

Against Capture offers a methodological intervention to the current popularization of videomaking in participatory visual research, a genre of arts-based method, with a particular emphasis on the regime of extraction that is ignored in one of its most significant steps: recording. Often rendered as a visual metaphorical substitute or a backdrop, the author discusses how colonial relations to the built and natural environments have set the conditions for extractive practices where audio-visual recording as a form of capture demands a reimagined relational ethics to place. Within this extractive relation, the author observes how built and natural environments are understood as readily available and unlimited aesthetic resources for artmaking. This intervention seeks not to be prescriptive but rather offers a descriptive account of the epistemological and ontological contradictions in the current celebration of innovative approaches to research in education.

Cap a una geografia líquida: Anna Murià i els camins i fluxos de la commemoració

This article sets out to address the presence/absence of female writers in processes of commemoration of literary figures in contemporary Catalan culture, focusing on the case of Anna Murià (1904–2002). Recently included among the ten “classic” writers presented as part of the volume Women Writers in Catalan (Huerga, 2017), the process of her recovery for a possible feminine – let alone feminist – canon has been complicated by the fact that she dedicated the majority of her life, after 1939, to consolidating the “voice” of her husband, the poet Agustí Bartra, in exile in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and the US, and after the couple’s return to Catalonia in 1970. Considering different moments of Murià’s commemorative labour and reception – from the moment of return; through the death of Bartra in 1982; to posthumous reframings after her own death in 2002 – the article explores the debates and ambivalence surrounding her significance, as a figure which, depending on the perspective of the reader, can be employed to represent: Republican memory; the continuity of exile; the experience of being a woman; feminism and feminine creativity; and/or the subordination of her own subjectivity to that of her husband and life partner, Bartra. Rather than attempting to resolve this ambivalence, this article will show how a more attentive, genealogical reading of her work enables us to contrast the inescapably patriarchal politics of monumentalizing associated with national memory cultures with the more fluid and relational ethics that characterise her own commemorative labour and writing of the self: as a call to imagine and begin to formulate alternative practices of memorialization.

Penyuluhan Hukum Etika Pergaulan Remaja Perspektif Islam

The challenges that are most felt by teenagers are not only about mental maturity and quality supplies that are ready to use but also other things such as financial readiness, maturity in thinking, wisdom in making decisions and many more. Of course, preparation and preparedness is needed in learning everything that may be needed for life in the future. Neglecting social ethics by teenagers does not rule out the possibility that most of them will not be able to face the negative influences of friends and the environment, so there will be big problems that violate morals not only for themselves but also their parents, family and the surrounding community. Providing legal counseling held by the Legal Aid Post (POSBAKUM). Aisyiyah Central Kalimantan and Lecturer at Muhamamdiyah University Palangkaraya is a form of concern for young people, especially teenagers, which aims to provide students with an understanding of the dangers of promiscuity and provide students with an understanding of ethics in social relations and the impact of promiscuity according to Islamic law. The methods used in this community service are lecture, discussion and question and answer methods.

Ethics in international relations

Ethics in international relations