Ethical Situations Research Articles

Reflections on the ethics of participatory visual methods to engage communities in global health research

ABSTRACTThere is a growing body of literature describing conceptual frameworks for working with participatory visual methods (PVM). Through a global health lens, this paper examines some key themes within these frameworks. We reflect on our experiences of working with with an array of PVM to engage community members in Vietnam, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa in biomedical research and public health. The participants that we have engaged in these processes live in under-resourced areas with high prevalence of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Our paper describes some of the challenges that we have encountered while using PVM to foster knowledge exchange, build relationships and facilitate change among individuals and families, community members, health workers, biomedical scientists and researchers. We consider multiple ethical situations that have arisen through our work and discuss the ways in which we have navigated and negotiated them. We offer our reflections and learning from facilitating these processes and in doing so we add novel contributions to ethical framework concepts.

Ethics and practice of Trials within Cohorts: An emerging pragmatic trial design.

With increasing emphasis on pragmatic trials, new randomized clinical trial designs are being proposed to enhance the "real world" nature of the data generated. We describe one such design, appropriate for unmasked pragmatic clinical trials in which the control arm receives usual care, called "Trials within Cohorts" that is increasingly used in various countries because of its efficiency in recruitment, advantages in reducing subject burden, and ability to better mimic real-world consent processes. Descriptive, ethical, and US regulatory analysis of the Trials within Cohorts design. Trials within Cohorts design involves, after recruitment into a cohort, randomization of eligible subjects, followed by an asymmetric treatment of the two arms: those selected for the experimental arm provide informed consent for the intervention trial, while the data from the control arm are used based on prior broad permission. Thus, unlike the traditional Zelen post-randomization consent design, the cohort participants are informed about future research within the cohort; however, the extent of this disclosure currently varies among studies. Thus, ethical analysis is provided for two types of situations: when the pre-randomization disclosure and consent regarding the embedded trials are fairly explicit and detailed versus when they consist of only general statements about future data use. These differing ethical situations could have implications for how ethics review committees apply US research rules regarding waivers and alterations of informed consent. Trials within Cohorts is a promising new pragmatic randomized controlled trial design that is being increasingly used in various countries. Although the asymmetric consent procedures for the experimental versus control arm subjects can initially raise ethical concerns, it is ethically superior to previous post-randomization consent designs and can have important advantages over traditional trial designs.

Ethics ≠ Law

There is an ongoing movement towards situated and relational, rather than static and transcendental, understandings of research ethics within Geography. Yet this tendency has not yet succeeded in destabilising a priori judgements of ethnographic engagements with unlawful spatial practices. As such, many socially and politically important projects are either sidelined or eschewed for fear of liability or complicity. In cases where ethnography is deployed, primarily in the field of participatory action research, the tensions between ethics and legality are not often explicitly engaged with. We want to suggest here, in light of increasing interest amongst geographers in “subversive” spatial practices, that ethnographies of illegality raise a range of important ethical concerns for research practices that also inform broader understandings of situated ethical frameworks. In this vein, the authors draw on past and ongoing ethnographic experiences into illicit spatial practices (or what criminologists have termed “edge ethnographies”) to think through the entire process of research engagement – from planning to data retention – with consideration to the incommensurable relationship between ethics and law where we take situated ethics seriously.

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND ENGINEERING INTERNS: THREE CASES FOR DISCUSSION

A key phrase in discipline findings of professional misconduct is "The engineer knew or ought to have known". By virtue of being members of the engineering profession, Engineers are expected to demonstrate both technical competence and professionalism. The three cases in this paper look at professionalism from the standpoint of trust from the perspective of the regulator, the client, and peers.When that trust is broken, complaints against the engineer can ensue and unless the member has worked with the investigation committee or been investigated before, it is unlikely that they would know the disciplinary process and the scope within which they operate.This paper is aimed at fostering classroom discussions about the ethical situations Engineering Interns could find themselves in and offers ideas on how the investigation/discipline process can be brought to the classroom.

Kasus Pernikahan Sejenis dalam Perspektif Hukum Moral John Calvin

ABSTRACT: This article will firstly discuss in brief about the fact of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender), situational ethics as its foundation for justification, and the community which fights for the legalization of the same-sex marriage. In this section, I will explain on the foundation which is used for justification of same-sex marriages legalization. After that, I will give a review on John Calvins moral law to assess whether the foundation which is used for that justification is appropriate. The finding of this article is that same-sex marriages legalization does not have an appropriate foundation according to Calvins moral law. Therefore, this cannot be accepted by the church. KEYWORDS: same-sex marriage, moral law, John Calvin.

Community Power Structure Analysis and the Ethical Considerations of "Studying Up".

This narrative outlines our challenges in studying power and power structures within an individual-level ethical framework. Taking a social ethics perspective, we share the story of our "sticky situation" (Campbell, ) that transpired during a multi-year community partnership. We were asked, by our community partners, to help collect interview data without informed consent. As a team of community-engaged university researchers, we were faced with a seemingly easy ethical situation (no consent, no research) that had unexpectedly complicated and long-lasting consequences. This experience revealed to us how community-engaged research and action, under a traditional ethics framework, can often work to protect those in positions of power and offer little to disrupt the status quo. Reflecting on the tension between individual and social ethics, we discuss the limitations of an individual-level framework, including the definitions for respect for persons, justice, and beneficence, on our ability as a field to understand, critique, and contribute to the dismantling of oppressive power structures.

Relationship between ethical ideology and moral judgment: Academic nurse educators' perception.

Ascertaining the relationship between ethical ideology, moral judgment, and ethical decision among academic nurse educators at work appears to be a challenge particularly in situations when they are faced with a need to solve an ethical problem and make a moral decision. This study aims to investigate the relationship between ethical ideology, moral judgment, and ethical decision as perceived by academic nurse educators. A descriptive correlational research design was conducted at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. All academic nurse educators were included in the study (N = 220). Ethical Position Questionnaire and Questionnaire of Moral Judgment and Ethical Decisions were proved reliable to measure study variables. Approval was obtained from Ethics Committee at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. Privacy and confidentiality of data were maintained and assured by obtaining subjects' informed consent. This study reveals a significant positive moderate correlation between idealism construct of ethical ideology and moral judgment in terms of recognition of the behavior as an ethical issue and the magnitude of emotional consequences of the ethical situation (p < 0.001; p = 0.031) respectively. Also, there is a positive significant moderate correlation between relativism construct of ethical ideology and overall moral judgment (p = 0.010). Approximately 3.5% of the explained variance of overall moral judgment is predicted by idealism together with relativism. The findings suggest that variations in ethical position and ideology are associated with moral judgment and ethical decision. Organizations of academic nursing education should provide a supportive work environment to help their academic staff to develop their self-awareness and knowledge of their ethical position and promoting their ethical ideologies and, in turn, enhance their moral judgment as well as develop ethical reasoning and decision-making capability of nursing students. More emphasis in nursing curricula is needed on ethical concepts for developing nursing competencies.

Empathy as an Antecedent of Social Justice Attitudes and Perceptions

At the same time that social justice concerns are on the rise on college campuses, empathy levels among US college students are falling (Konrath et al. 2016). Social injustice resulting from organizational decisions and actions causes profound and unnecessary human suffering, and research to understand antecedents to these decisions and actions lacks attention. Empathy represents a potential tool and critical skill for organizational decision-makers, with empirical evidence linking empathy to moral recognition of ethical situations and greater breadth of understanding of stakeholder impact and improved financial success. This study explores the potential relationship between empathy and social justice, using a multifaceted operationalization of social justice, which includes management actions (corporate social responsibility and socially responsible attitudes) and social sympathies (distributive justice in US society and agreement with the goals of Occupy Wall Street). Results broadly support the positive empathy and social justice relationship and suggest higher education interventions to develop empathy in college business students.

Assessment of student pharmacists’ ethical decision-making

IntroductionIn previous research, investigators have expressed concern about the ethical ambivalence of pharmacists in decision-making. The objectives of this study were to examine student pharmacists’: 1) attitudes and responses regarding specific common ethical situations and 2) perceived level of difficulty in making ethical decisions. MethodsA self-administered 38-item survey was given to second and third year student pharmacists at Purdue University. The survey comprised five sections, including: 1) attitudes towards common ethical situations, 2) responses to specific ethical scenarios, 3) emergency lending, 4) perceived level of difficulty in resolving ethical dilemmas, and 5) demographics. ResultsOver 90% of students agreed or strongly agreed that pharmacists have the right to refuse to dispense a medication for clinical reasons, while 45.3% agreed or strongly agreed that pharmacists had the right to refuse to dispense for moral or religious reasons. Greater than 20% of students were undecided about dispensing syringes without a prescription, pseudoephedrine tablets to a frequent purchaser, and lethal doses of narcotics. In eight out of nine cases involving ethical decision-making, over 70% of students perceived the decision to be somewhat problematic. Discussion and conclusionsExploration of student pharmacists’ perceptions of specific ethical situations assists in identifying areas of uncertainty in decision-making and informing educational interventions that may foster ethical development of future pharmacy professionals.

The Ethical Interface between the University and Nontraditional President: Consulting Opportunities

Throughout the United States, colleges are facing major financial and leadership concerns. As a result, some universities are seeking to make changes in the long and short-term operations of their institutions. For some, this means streamlining budgets and implementing efficiencies, but for others, it means selecting a totally different type of leader, namely, a nontraditional, more business-oriented university president. This research-based paper provides a focus on ethical issues in higher education leadership and provides implications for the consulting arena. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of the nontraditional university president and at the interface, the “perfect storm” when the new nontraditional president, working within an older existing university system generates a potential ethical situation. A content analysis from 96 studies of leadership in higher education provides data indicating success and non-success with university presidents. Then, a further analysis explores four specific illustrations of unique nontraditional U.S. university presidential failures. Findings provide evidence indicating that at the interface of nontraditional presidential hires and traditional university cultures, that ethical challenges of cultural misfit, military autocracy in lieu of shared governance, insensitivity to social/local issues, and misalignment with faculty/student values, contributed to presidential failures. The ethical implications of hiring a culturally unfit nontraditional president welcomes the potential pre-, present-, and post-consulting opportunities.

Making the hard decisions: Ethical care decisions in wartime nursing practice

BackgroundCodes of ethics set forth standards of ethical conduct for nurses. However, nurses involved in wartime operations, or disasters, may often have their moral compass challenged by the patient care decisions necessary under adverse conditions. Reverse triage, resource allocation, and promotion of patient autonomy present multiple challenges to meeting commonly applied ethical principles. PurposeThe purpose of this study was to use the International Council of Nursing code of ethics as a framework to organize the ethical issues emerging from wartime nursing. MethodsThis article represents a secondary analysis of two studies using thematic analysis to identify ethical issues encountered by military nurses during the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Data were collected from nurses deployed from 2002 to 2015 and from 111 military nurses during focused interviews. DiscussionAcross both studies, issues such as resource allocation, patient triage, cultural differences, and equitable treatment for all emerged as challenges within the wartime environment. Nurses were at a loss at times as to how best to manage the situations and recommended that more education is needed in ethical decision making before, during, and after deployment as a debriefing strategy. Similar issues have been documented in military and disaster literature indicating that such challenges are not limited to the recent conflicts but cross time and location. ConclusionBy better understanding how nurses define, assess, and manage the ethical situations they encounter in wartime nursing practice, military nurses can better prepare for future conflicts, provide mentorship and targeted education to hopefully reducing any feelings of moral distress, and promote ethical decision making that will best promote outcomes in accordance with nursing's ethical codes.

Beyond Martha Nussbaum's Cognitive-Evaluative Approach to the Emotions: Separating Reader and Narrative Affective Experience from Ethical Judgments inLolita

AbstractMartha Nussbaum has famously argued that narrative fiction can expand readers' capacity to make appropriate ethical judgments because it requires readers' discernment of nuanced ethical situations, and because the emotional dynamics of engaging with the particulars of a fiction aids that discernment. In this essay, I argue that Nabokov's Lolita pushes Martha Nussbaum's philosophy of emotions and ethics to its limits by creating the audience position of “lyrical addressee,” which, in contrast with two other central audience positions, encourages affective participation and thus temporarily sidesteps concerns over ethical judgments against Humbert. Accounting for the critical tendency to ignore the power of emotions, I first describe how Lolita invokes the lyrical addressee only after Humbert establishes two other narratee positions, both of which devalue emotional experience and make it easy to ignore the lyrical addressee position. I argue that in the audience position of “lyrical addressee,” a reader can notice two important features that emphasize affective experience and feeling with Humbert: (1) the breakdown of the communicative situation, indicating the power of Humbert's emotions; and (2) the establishment of a “fuzzy” mood that transcends character and setting boundaries to involve even a reader who wishes to sympathize with Dolores's pain. Ultimately, in passages aimed at the lyrical addressee, there is a significant loss of the specificity that Nussbaum claims aids ethical decisions. In these moments, the move to generality, which appears in the form of a breakdown of communication and the permeable boundaries between characters and settings, renders ethical decisions temporarily irrelevant.

Situational ethics in photojournalism: Moving beyond doing good or doing right

Abstract Readers have different views on a photojournalist’s ethical situation when confronting the dilemma of whether to continue portraying a tragedy or intervening to help those in distress. Using an online experimental design with multiple stimuli, four situational characteristics were tested. Results showed that citizens (N=100) generally adopted a situational ethics rationale rather than an absolutist or utilitarian rationale. These findings substantiate an earlier study showing that readers do not universally condemn photojournalists who perform their professional duty instead of assisting persons in distress. However, readers would not object to photojournalists pursuing different actions according to specific situational circumstances.

Special Ethical Considerations for Planners in Private Practice

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Planners must constantly consider the ethics of their professional behavior, yet few studies have specifically investigated the ethical landscape for those planners working in private practice, assuming that all members of the profession are subject to similar ethical considerations. We investigate the particular ethical considerations faced by planners in private practice by interviewing owners of 10 planning consulting firms. Our sample size is very small and limited to three states, which limits the generalizability of the study. We find that private practice planners routinely experience ethical conflicts related to disclosure of information, balancing uneven benefits among stakeholders, interests of the client, and ethics of firm competition. Alhough planners mostly navigate everyday ethical concerns with confidence, they face ethical challenges in managing client relationships when values conflict, and in competing with other firms.Takeaway for practice: We find that challenging ethical situations arise for private sector planners on a routine basis. The planners we interview feel that they are able to identify ethical pitfalls and choose the correct course of action, but more research is needed to understand the scope and nature of private practice ethical challenges, and to determine whether more education or enforcement would be effective solutions to between-firm conflicts.

Reflections on Ethics and Humanity in Pediatric Neurology: the Value of Recognizing Ethical Issues in Common Clinical Practice.

Our goals in this reflection are to (i) identify the ethical dimensions inherent in any clinical encounter and (ii) bring to the forefront of our pediatric neurology practice the myriad of opportunities to explore and learn from these ethical questions. We highlight specifically Beauchamp and Childress's principles of biomedical ethics. We use the terms ethics in common clinical practice and an ethical lens to remind people of the ubiquity of ethical situations and the usefulness of using existing ethical principles to analyze and resolve difficult situations in clinical practice. We start with a few common situations with which many of us tend to struggle. We describe what we understand as ethics and how and why developments in technology, novel potential interventions, policies, and societal perspectives challenge us to think about and debate ethical issues. Individual patients are not a singular population; each patient has their own unique life situations, culture, goals, and expectations that need to be considered with a good dose of humanity and humility. We believe that using an ethical lens-by which we mean making an explicit effort to identify and consider these issues openly-will help us to achieve this goal in practice, education, and research.

Teaching Empathy and Ethical Decision Making in Business Schools

Researchers in behavioral ethics seek to understand how individuals respond to the ethical dilemmas in their lives. In any given situation, multiple social and psychological variables interact to influence ethical decision making. The purpose of this article is to explore how one such variable, empathy, affects the ethical decision-making process and to identify specific instructional strategies that both increase empathy and challenge students to consider the role that empathy plays in their own decisions. Two learning activities are described. The first requires students to recommend median salaries for several positions in a fictitious company and then use those salaries to create two family budgets, one for an entry-level position and another for the CEO. The second activity measures students’ empathic concern and encourages students to consider the relationship between empathic concern and decision making in business. Increased awareness of self and others prompts a more deliberate, thoughtful decision-making process when assessing ethical situations.

The Correlation between Ethical Climate and Job Satisfaction of the Nurses in Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

The Correlation between Ethical Climate and Job Satisfaction of the Nurses in Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

Perception of College Professors on Ethics

Teaching is one of the noblest jobs and the responsibility of grooming up responsible future citizens of India is in the hands of Professors. Usually they engage in teaching, research and other institutional activities all through their career. It is expected that they should hold high standards of ethics in performing their duties. It is also an inbound duty of professors to supervise wards, teach them the content of the course curriculum, direct them in their studies and evaluate them periodically based on their performance and promptly rectify their mistakes in the case violation of generally accepted norms. The reputation of an academic institution largely depends on the significant behavior of the Professors. Previous studies have shown that teaching norms are informally defined and poorly observed in the colleges. Increase in violation of Code of Ethics to be followed is due to lack of awareness and improper understanding of ethics. Earlier researches also proved that professors are one of the keen factors that influence the moral standards and ethical behavior of students. In other words, the quality of academicians must improve to achieve the aim of producing responsible citizens in India. One way to address the quality of Professors is by discussing their perceptions on ethical behavior situational questions. This paper discusses the results of samples collected in 9 main institutions in Puducherry only (covering 170 samples). The focus is on certain ethical situations cum behavior and professors’ perceptions about the same. The results reveal that most of the situations discussed are unethical from the professors’ point of view and there is generally NO demographic association between questions on ethical situations and related professors’ perceptions. It is also evident that both ‘institutions’ and ‘individuals’ have a binding influence on one another.

Cult books revisited

This is the first article of new series for Theology on ‘Cult books revisited’. Written in this instance by the Editor, it re-evaluates Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, setting it into context and assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

The effect of spiritual capital of individuals on independent auditor’s opinion: evidences from Iranian auditors

The importance of spiritual capital of individuals (SpCis) can be traced back to the resistance of independent auditors in the face of client manager power in ethical dilemma situations. This capital which is defined as a component of intellectual capital is integrated to auditors’ livelihood. This research found some related individual factors in auditing area and classified them under SpCi. Morals, ethics, personal values, and culture are the four most related factors which are applied as dimensions of SpCi in auditing area. Hence, this paper attempts to investigate into the effect of SpCi and its four dimensions on an independent auditor’s opinion. The respondents of this research were 321 Iranian audit managers and partners. The data were collected through questionnaires, and multiple regressions were applied to analyze the data. The results showed that the SpCi and its dimensions affect an independent auditor’s opinion.