Ethics Scholarship Research Articles

Navigating the Ethical Frontier: Graduate Students’ Experiences with Generative AI-Mediated Scholarship

Abstract This qualitative study explores graduate students’ perceptions of using a generative AI-powered research application, COREI, and its impact on their sense of intellectual and scholarly ethics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with graduate students (n = 10), four doctoral and six masters’, from a large research university in Western Canada. Participants were given access to COREI for one month and encouraged to use its features in their research projects. Thematic analysis of the interview data revealed four main themes: (1) academic integrity and generative AI collaboration, (2) agency in the generative AI-assisted research process, (3) authorship and the personalization of AI-generated content, and (4) originality through generative AI-assisted research. Although some participants initially expressed concerns about the potential for AI to compromise academic integrity, many came to view COREI as a collaborative tool that, when used responsibly, could enhance their research without infringing upon their scholarly ethics. Participants emphasized the importance of human agency and decision-making in the AI-assisted research process, and the need for critical evaluation and personalization of AI-generated content to maintain authorship. Originality emerged as a collaborative feat between human expertise and AI’s generative capabilities. The findings suggest a need for reconceptualizing traditional notions of agency, authorship, and originality in the context of AI-assisted research. The study highlights the importance of developing ethical frameworks and institutional policies that prioritize human agency and critical engagement with AI-generated content, while also emphasizing the need for further research on the long-term impacts of generative AI on intellectual and scholarly ethics.

Plato, Republic, Book II, and Antiphon’s on Truth

Abstract Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth. Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth.

Case conference and a para case conference: asking different questions about disability and structural ableism

What might it mean to change the questions we ask during clinical case conferences and to ask different kinds of questions, both in case conferences and more broadly in our...

Artificial Intelligence Creates Plagiarism or Academic Research?

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into academic research has sparked a significant discourse surrounding its ethical implications and potential benefits. This paper explores the complex relationship between AI-generated content and academic integrity, highlighting the challenges of the blurring lines between assistance and academic dishonesty. As educational institutions increasingly adopt AI tools, the necessity for scholars and students to reevaluate the boundaries of originality becomes paramount. The ethical considerations surrounding AI in academic writing encompass property, accuracy, and integrity issues, necessitating a commitment to ethical citation practices to uphold scholarly standards. Moreover, while AI can enhance writing quality and streamline research processes, it also raises concerns about unintentional plagiarism and the authenticity of original thought. The reliance on AI tools may lead to derivative outputs, complicating the distinction between genuine creativity and plagiarism. To address these challenges, educational institutions must implement robust training programs that promote the ethical use of AI, ensuring that students can responsibly integrate AI contributions into their work. Case studies demonstrate that when used effectively, AI can augment academic performance and foster deeper engagement with learning materials, illustrating its potential as a valuable educational resource. Ultimately, this paper advocates for a balanced approach that embraces the benefits of AI while maintaining a strong commitment to ethical scholarship, thereby shaping a future where technology enhances rather than undermines academic integrity.

APA Reference Style Guidelines: Recommendations and Common Errors

Proper formatting of bibliographic references in APA style plays a key role in academic publications by ensuring adherence to standards of scholarly ethics, simplifying the search for sources, and enhancing transparency for readers. This editorial article reviews the main principles of reference formatting and analyzes the most common mistakes made by authors. Special attention is given to the formatting of patents, reference books, standards (GOSTs), reports, and reprinted books. The article provides examples of correct formatting for each type of source and highlights how to avoid misunderstandings

Care ethics and contemporary art: Imagining and practising care

Feminist care ethicshas for some time guided contemporary artists and curators in their search for sustaining and sustainable practices in the current neoliberal backwash and climate crisis. With a focus on current Australian art in the context of recent care ethics scholarship, this article considers what contemporary art – in its processes as well as aesthetic outcomes – can offer in imagining and practising care for the human and more-than-human world. The article focuses on a series of exhibitions that comprised a key exploratory methodology of The Care Project: Feminism and art in neoliberal times (La Trobe University, 2019–2022). The exhibitions featured the work of regionally based artists. This accent on creative practices emerging from the experience of living in regional communities that are often on the frontline of climate change and social inequality offers unique perspectives on care ethics in practice.

Centering Africa as context and driver for Global Health Ethics: incompleteness, conviviality and the limits of Ubuntu

Silences exist in global health ethics scholarship because of the particular caricatures of Africa that abound in the world, and these silences profoundly impact scholarship in this field. In this paper, I outline three such silences. The first concerns the consequences of representations of Africa as a place of theoretical scarcity, where the only theory seemingly worth mentioning is relational ontology. The second issue I highlight is the impact of dehumanization on global health and ethics. The third concerns the expectation that African science should serve the goal of development, which limits not only the scientific imagination but also the range of ethical questions that are engaged with. Finally, I turn to Francis Nyamnjoh’s theory of incompleteness and conviviality to propose a shift in bioethics scholarship towards increased focus on the interconnections, encounters and mutual dependency of people and places elsewhere. Incompleteness requires epistemic humility and a curiosity about the views and experiences of others; conviviality is the predisposition required to allow for meaningful exchanges and mutual learning in global health ethics. As a theoretical framework, incompleteness and conviviality are part of a rich African intellectual tradition to help articulate opportunities for a transformative research agenda that helps us understand our world, and its crises, better.

The sweet taste of soil. Gardening with all the senses in Greco-Roman literature

This paper argues that sensory-based methods of gardening have the potential to offer a form of self-awareness, to create memories, and to shape a meaningful relationship with nature. In this way, sensory gardening contributes to human well-being by enriching people’s lives with meaningful moments. Contemporary gardening manuals tend to use explanations of gardening based on purely scientific worldviews, while multi-sensory approaches to gardening are rare. This quantification of the encounter with the environment is criticised by some scholars in environmental ethics debates. They emphasise the importance of experiencing nature with all the senses and based on bodily experience for human well-being. In order to include gardening in this discussion, I present sequences from pre-modern writings on gardening. My guiding question is what feelings, associations, or changes of perspective inspired by ancient literature might enrich the contemporary gardening. Drawing on the phenomenologists Hermann Schmitz and his successor Gernot Böhme, I will analyse Roman texts by Vergil, Dioscorides and Pliny (all first century AD), among others. All of these texts contain descriptions of intense sensory experiences that correspond to the phenomenological philosophies of Schmitz and Böhme. They can therefore serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary garden experiences.

The Provenance of the “Seiyal Collection”

Abstract This article considers the collection history of the so-called “Seiyal Collection,” purchased by the Palestine Archaeological Museum in 1952 and 1953. While the Taʿamireh Bedouin and/or Khalil Iskander Shahin reported the material as coming from Wadi Seiyal, much if not all of the material was actually looted from caves in Nahal Hever. The common claim that the Bedouin misreported the findspot to hide the fact that they had smuggled the material from Israel into then-Jordanian-held East Jerusalem cannot be correct, as the caves along both Wadi Seiyal and Nahal Hever are on the Israeli side of the Green Line. The article considers why the provenance was misreported, whether the scrolls team knew that the material had been smuggled from Israel, and the implications of these issues both for our understanding of the scrolls and for scholarly ethics.

The Business of Stealing Futures: Race, Gender, and the Student Debt Regime

In this paper, we argue that the system of student debt functions as one of the most egregious and yet poorly understood mechanisms by which structural racism is reproduced in the U.S. today. We present evidence that student debt is unevenly distributed across race and gender, show that this pattern arises from policy choices made over time, and demonstrate that these disparities play a significant role in maintaining and exacerbating racial and gender wealth gaps. Our paper contends that the student debt crisis not only erodes the core principles of higher education but also perpetuates a cycle of racial and gender inequality and given the crucial role played by business corporations, urges scholars of business ethics to pay attention to this issue.

Taking Biblical Authors at Their Word: On Scholarly Ethics, Sexual Violence, and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible

Taking Biblical Authors at Their Word: On Scholarly Ethics, Sexual Violence, and Rape Culture in the Hebrew Bible

Setting Expectations for Ethics Theory from the Standpoint of the User.

Ethics theory is highly valued to the point that some commentators have claimed that it has taken on a life of its own, with too much focus on the justification of moral judgment and not enough on the needs of users of such theory. Building from various personal experiences of interdisciplinary ethics collaborative developments and empirical research projects, the wisdom gleaned by others, as well as insights from pragmatist theory, this article offers five (non-exhaustive) expectations for ethics theory from the standpoint of a user. The article is intended to prompt broad reflection on expectations toward ethics theory and why user perspectives should be considered early in the development of ethics scholarship.

Who does Neuroethics Scholarship Address, and What Does it Recommend? A Content Analysis of Selected Abstracts from the International Neuroethics Society Annual Meetings

Much neuroethics literature concludes with a set of normative recommendations. While these recommendations can be a helpful way of summarizing a proposal for a future direction, some have recently argued that ethics scholarship has devoted insufficient attention to considerations of audience and real-world applications. To date, however, while scholars have conducted topic analyses of neuroethics literature, to our knowledge no study has evaluated who neuroethics scholarship addresses and what it recommends. The objective of the present study therefore was to provide a preliminary characterization of recommendations offered in neuroethics scholarship and an assessment of their target audiences. Rather than attempting to demarcate what constitutes “neuroethics scholarship,” we analyzed text that authors’ had self-identified as being neuroethics-related: abstracts presented at the International Neuroethics Society (INS) annual meetings and published as top abstracts in AJOB Neuroscience in the last decade (2011–2020). We found that a majority of abstracts utilized conceptual methods (62.2%) and provided conceptual recommendations (68%). Roughly 77% of all abstracts did not explicitly address a target audience, yet nearly all of these were implicitly directed at other scholars. The remainder specified a target audience of scholars (12.2%), regulators (6.7%), healthcare providers (6.7%) and industry (2.6%). Only a subset of abstracts provided practical or policy recommendations (19.7%). Of those, the majority (61.5%) did not specify a target audience. Among the subset with actionable recommendations, a clarification of target audience may help increase the impact.

Business without Management: MacIntyrean Accounting, Management, and Practice-Led Business

Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of managerial capitalism is well known, with some arguing that MacIntyrean thought is antithetical to contemporary capitalist business. Nevertheless, substantial efforts have been taken to demonstrate how different business activities constitute MacIntyrean practices, which points to an incoherence at the heart of MacIntyrean business ethics scholarship. This article proposes a way of bridging these perspectives, suggesting a reimagined MacIntyrean approach to business that is thoroughly ‘practice-led.’ A detailed comparison of accounting and management shows that while neither are practices in ‘good order,’ they differ in significant ways: where management does not meet the criteria for a MacIntyrean practice, accounting is a ‘distorted’ practice. This leads to a categorisation of practice-led business activity, whereby the traditional tasks of management are subsumed, shared or subordinated to practices and practitioners. Insights on how this can be implemented are drawn from the ‘communities of practice’ literature and a consideration of professions.

Towards sustainable management: Exploring the role of internal monitoring in pollution prevention.

Researchers in the field of sustainable management have recently dedicated significant efforts to understand why organizations exhibit diverse responses to environmental responsibilities. Ethical scholars assert that internal management plays a pivotal role in promoting sustainability because of its attitude toward sustainable issues. In alignment with this perspective, our study formulates a framework for internal monitoring that underscores the significance of independent, female, international, and politically connected directors. We investigate how these internal monitors influence a company's commitment to promote sustainable investments for pollution prevention. By employing fixed effect model and generalized method of moments (GMM) on a dataset obtained from the largest emerging market-China over the period 2012 to 2019, our findings indicate that the mentioned monitors demonstrate a stronger commitment to pollution prevention by promoting corporate sustainable investments. In addition, our analysis reveals that when the government withdraws its involvement in enterprises, it has a notable negative impact on the connection between internal monitors and a company's efforts in pollution prevention. Our results imply that implementation of sustainable policies for pollution prevention fundamentally result from not only internal management, but also from powerful stakeholders (like government involvement). Moreover, our study educates the policy makers regarding the social consequences of governmental withdrawal.

Lived experiences of genetic diagnosis for rare disease patients: a qualitative interview study

BackgroundGenetic diagnosis is often understood as a single event within the care pathway of rare disease patients. Legal, policy and ethical scholarship focusing on rare diseases and genetic information discusses questions of how to best deal with the process of genetic diagnosis and the communication of genetic information within a given health system. We co-created a research design with rare disease patients and their families in Austria to explore in-depth the experiences of genetic diagnosis for people affected by rare diseases. Our objective was to trace the whole pathway of genetic testing and understand how rare disease patients experience genetic diagnosis as part of their care pathway in the healthcare system.ResultsData was collected through in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews with 14 patients with a suspected or diagnosed rare disease or their parents, focusing on their perception of the pathway of genetic diagnosis in Austria. This pathway included the initial triggering of genetic diagnosis, the process of testing and its immediate (communication of results, counselling) and long-term, wider aftermath. Patients missed a clear link to already established forms of care such as their primary care/treating physicians. They also advocate for an integrated and interdisciplinary care pathway.ConclusionsOur study underscores the importance of a continuous care and communication pathway spanning from the initial genetic diagnosis process to post-test phases. It further shows the importance of exploring patients’ perspectives through qualitative research methods to understand the intricate workings of public health policies and tools. Integrating genetic diagnosis into a broader care trajectory is crucial for a holistic approach to care for rare disease patients who often rely on regular interactions with the healthcare system. Achieving this holistic approach requires collaboration between experts in specific rare disease areas, primary care physicians, and support networks.

Medical ethics education as translational bioethics.

We suggest that in the particular context of medical education, ethics can be considered in a similar way to other kinds of knowledge that are categorised and shaped by academics in the context of wider society. Moreover, the study of medical ethics education is translational in a manner loosely analogous to the study of medical education as adjunct to translational medicine. Some have suggested there is merit in the idea that much as translational research attempts to connect the laboratory scientist's work to its implications for patient care, translational ethics focuses on bringing ethics scholarship into the sphere of personal and public action. We distinguish the term 'translational ethics' (the study of ethics being translated between academy, classroom and clinic) from other prominent definitions in the bioethics literature. To do this, we build off a notion of knowledge translation that focuses on the nonlinear movement of information that comes to professionals through multiple competing sources. We suggest that this knowledge, and particularly knowledge about ethics, becomes embodied by the individual. It is through a reflective practice that internally embedded ethics knowledge might be modified, and this work might be best carried out with a moral community that maintains a sense of practical wisdom. Applying this translational approach to the study of medical ethics education can be both academically relevant and practically useful. This view of translation can help bridge the evident, multidirectional relationships between research, education and performance. It might also create further opportunities to develop medical ethics education theory.

Types and Definitions of Plagiarism: An Overview

Plagiarism, the act of using someone else's work without proper attribution, is a pervasive issue in academia, professional fields, and creative endeavors. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the various types and definitions of plagiarism, shedding light on its nuanced manifestations and implications. By categorizing plagiarism into distinct forms such as verbatim plagiarism, paraphrasing plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and idea plagiarism, this study aims to offer clarity and insight into the complexity of this ethical transgression. Additionally, it explores the evolving nature of plagiarism in the digital age, considering factors such as the ease of access to information, the proliferation of online content, and the challenges posed by emerging technologies. Through an examination of case studies and scholarly perspectives, this paper highlights the importance of promoting academic integrity and fostering a culture of originality and ethical scholarship. Moreover, it discusses strategies for plagiarism prevention and detection, emphasizing the role of education, awareness, and robust citation practices in addressing this critical issue

The Power and Limits of Political Philosophy in Analyzing Healthcare Markets.

Bioethics is taking an institutional turn, where organizations are being taken seriously as moral agents. Within US healthcare, this is difficult to do without confronting "the market" as a highly influential context for organizational behavior. In the 1990s, pioneering thinkers such as David Mechanic,1 Brad Gray, and Mark Schlesinger2 undertook a first round of organizational ethics scholarship focused on how market forces influence health insurer behavior - motivated by a particular concern for health maintenance organizations (HMOs).3 And more recently, owing partly to a transfer of financial risk4 to healthcare delivery organizations,5 rapid consolidation within health system markets,6 and the pronounced uptick in physician employment,7 the behavior of healthcare delivery organizations is also being assessed in relation to market forces.

Addressing Contract Cheating in Pakistani Higher Education: Strategies for Upholding Academic Integrity

Contract cheating has strained the higher education system worldwide, Pakistan is no exception. However, unlike Canada, UK, USA, Pakistan has limited research related to the issue under discussion. The presence of contract cheating has undermined the academic integrity and academic credibility of higher education in Pakistan. This paper sheds light on the role of Quality Assurance Cells in higher educational institutions including University of Management and Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore College for Women University and Minhaaj University in addressing this issue and proposes recommendations to foster academic integrity. This paper tries to investigate this complex issue, offering strategies to the institutions for addressing it and fostering a culture of academic integrity. In a pursuit to comprehend contract cheating and devise strategies to eradicate it, this study draws upon Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory. The main assumption of this theory is that behavior is learned through observational learning, personal agency, and self-regulation, influenced by both individual and environmental factors. Applying Social Cognitive Theory to the context of contract cheating allows for a comprehensive understanding of the issue, the factors contributing to it, and the strategies that universities can utilize to mitigate its occurrence. The current study was qualitative in nature. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews of Directors of Quality Assurance s of the universities mentioned above. The responses were thematically analyzed. The participants were asked about the various reasons that compelled the students to engage in contract cheating and how universities can combat it. As per the majority, to combat contract cheating, institutions must adopt a comprehensive framework. This paper recommends five pivotal areas for Pakistani higher education institutions to anticipate when devising strategies against contract cheating. Institutions must design a policy that prevents, detects, and intervenes in contract cheating. This strategy should align with Pakistan's unique cultural and academic landscape. Existing policies/guidelines need to be reviewed to clearly tackle contract cheating. Policies should highlight the consequences of such actions and strengthen institutional commitment to maintain academic integrity. Comprehending students' motivations for contract cheating is very important. Institutions should create platforms for open discussions and offer support services that address academic pressures, fostering ethical behaviors. Assessment methods must evaluate students' understanding and critical thinking instead of simple information replication. Applying various assessment formats like presentations and group work can discourage contract cheating. Educators significantly influence academic integrity. Offering professional development opportunities equips them to detect and prevent contract cheating, cultivating a culture of academic integrity. The issue of contract cheating necessitates collaborative efforts from Pakistani higher education institutions to inculcate a culture of academic integrity. Moreover, approval and implementation of HEC’s draft policy concerning the prevailing issues are proved to be a turning point in Higher Education. By concentrating on multidimensional strategies, institutions can not only address contract cheating concerns but also nurture ethical scholars and professionals.