We concur with Baum and colleagues (2009) on the importance of pandemic planners taking explicit steps to employ public engagement methodologies. Thus far, as Baum and colleagues note, there have b...

In this article we present a new approach to practical artificial intelligence (AI) ethics in heavy industry, which was developed in the context of an EU Horizons 2020 multi partner project. We begin with a review of the concept of Industry 4.0, discussing the limitations of the concept, and of iterative categorization of heavy industry generally, for a practical human centered ethical approach. We then proceed to an overview of actual and potential AI ethics approaches to heavy industry, (...) suggesting that current approaches with their emphasis on broad high-level principles are not well suited to AI ethics for industry. From there we outline our own approach in two sections. The first suggests tailoring ethics to the time and space situation of the shop floor level worker from the ground up, including giving specific and evolving ethical recommendations. The second describes the ethicist’s role as an ethical supervisor immersed in the development process and interpreting between industrial and technological (tech) development partners. In presenting our approach we draw heavily on our own experiences in applying the method in the Use Cases of our project, as examples of what can be done. (shrink)

This article reflects one scholar's attempt to locate herself within emerging ethical methodologies given a specific concern with cross-cultural women's moral praxis. The field of comparative ethics's debt to past debates over methodology is considered through a typology of three waves of methodological invention. The article goes on to describe a specific research focus on U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shii women that initiated a search for a distinct method. This method of comparative ethics, which focuses on the production (...) of ethical knowledge through the interaction of discursive logics of various moral agents, is described. The conclusion turns to how methodological invention can itself become a constructive project through the way it (1) locates the scholar in relation to her subject of study and (2) allows for isolation of tactics within specific moral discourses. (shrink)

This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (such (...) as BETRAYAL). The chapter aims to make vivid and plausible a range of possible answers to these questions, and important forms of argument that can be used to favor certain answers over others. (shrink)

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel (...) Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena. (shrink)

Today local, national and international ethics committees have become an effective means of social regulation in many European countries. Science itself is an important precondition for the development of bioethical knowledge and ethics expertise. Cultural, social, historical and religious preconditions can facilitate different forms and methods of ethics expertise in each country. Ukrainian ethics expertise has some methodological problems connected with its socio-cultural, historical, science and philosophy development particularities. In this context, clarification of some common legitimacies (...) or methodological approaches to ethics committee (EC) phenomena such as globalization, scientization and the prioritization of an ethics paradigm are very important. On the other hand, elaborate study and critical analysis of international experience by Ukraine and other Eastern European countries will provide the integration of their local and national ethics expertises into a world bioethics ethos. (shrink)

Using 94 published empirical articles in academic journals as a data base, this paper provides a critical review of the methodology employed in the study of ethical beliefs and behavior of organizational members. The review revealed that full methodological detail was provided in less than one half of the articles. Further, the majority of empirical research articles expressed no concern for the reliability or validity of measures, were characterized by low response rates, used convenience samples, and did not offer a (...) theoretic framework, hypotheses, or a definition of ethics. Several recommendations, including a reviewer rating form addressing methodological decisions and inclusion of methodologists on the review panel, are offered to improve methodological rigor in published ethics research. (shrink)

Research on sexual violence is fraught with ethical and methodological challenges due to its sensitive nature. This paper describes the ethical and methodological challenges encountered in planning and conducting two exploratory studies on sexual violence that included in-depth interviews of eight female adolescent rape survivors in Ibadan and four married women in Lagos Nigeria who were raped, forced to perform sexual acts and sexually deprived. The first challenge encountered was an Institutional Review Board requirement to obtain parental permission from adolescents, (...) when such a requirement may place the adolescent at risk if a parent was a perpetrator of sexual violence. Using arguments emphasizing the Council for International Organization for Medical Sciences guidelines helped convince the IRB to provide a waiver of parental consent. Second, the privacy required to conduct in-depth interviews for rape survivors was difficult to achieve because five of the rape survivors were apprentices who work in public settings which are typically used to conduct business in the informal sector. To overcome this challenge, interviews were conducted in safe locations, investigator's offices and homes of survivors. The culture of silence associated with sexual violence posed a challenge because it encourages perpetration of violence with impunity causing rape survivors to suffer in silence. None of the affected adolescents had sought judicial redress for rape despite availability of stringent punishment for this behaviour. Referral information was provided on where survivors could seek care. Interviews with the women could not be recorded on audio-tapes because of concerns that their partners might identify their voices from the tapes and punish them for this. Although research on sexual violence poses ethical and methodological challenges, it is not only desirable but also feasible to conduct such research in ways that ensure safety of participants. (shrink)

Ethics of social consequences as a form of satisficing non-utilitarian consequentialism can be one of the methodological basis of bioethics education. The primary values in ethics of social consequences are humanity, human dignity and moral rights, which are developed and realized in correlation with positive social consequences. Secondary values in ethics of social consequences include justice, responsibility, moral duty and tolerance. The author analyses human dignity and humanity as principles of bioethics education.

This article describes a process of developing, implementing and evaluating a clinical ethics support service intervention with the goal of building up a context-sensitive structure of minimal clinical-ethics in an oncology department without prior clinical ethics structure. Scholars from different disciplines have called for an improvement in the evaluation of clinical ethics support services for different reasons over several decades. However, while a lot has been said about the concepts and methodological challenges of evaluating CESS up (...) to the present time, relatively few empirical studies have been carried out. The aim of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it describes a process of development, modifying and evaluating a CESS intervention as part of the ETHICO research project, using the approach of qualitative-formative evaluation. On the other hand, it provides a methodological analysis which specifies the contribution of qualitative empirical methods to the evaluation of CESS. We conclude with a consideration of the strengths and limitations of qualitative evaluation research with regards to the evaluation and development of context sensitive CESS. We further discuss our own approach in contrast to rather traditional consult or committee models. (shrink)

This book examines the nuanced and situated experiences of self-study researchers. It explores the ways in which ethics are dynamic, idiosyncratic and require an ongoing ethical reflexivity. In addition, the book identifies, documents and collates the collective experiences of self-study researchers and sheds new light on the role and impact of ethics, ethical dilemmas and ensuing decisions for education researchers. The book considers the ethical dilemmas that self-study researchers in teacher education face, their careful ethical considerations while conducting (...) research, and how they form their professional judgment and understanding of what it means to be an ethical self-study researcher. For self-study researchers, there are a number of ethical dilemmas and challenges that cannot be neatly captured by the frameworks and guidelines of an ethics board. For many, this requires researchers to be ever-present and re-engaged with the ethics of their own projects, from the development, through to the dissemination of their work. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of ethics, ethical perspectives and practices in the field of self-study research. (shrink)

This is the first of four papers to be published in Research Ethics Review in 2009 that address methodological issues of relevance to research ethics committees. These will be practical papers, intended to assist ethics committee members to determine whether a research method is both ethically justified and likely to lead to high quality research. This paper prepares the way for the series through a consideration of the relationship between research ethics and methodology.

In an important passage in Kant’s Groundwork, he says: “[W]e cannot do morality a worse service than by seeking to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to see if it is fit to serve as an original example—that is, as a model: it can in no way supply the prime source for the concept of morality”. This is an important methodological pronouncement, and it appears to (...) commit Kant to what might be called a “top-down” procedure for constructing an ethical theory—or at least for defending substantive moral principles. A contrasting method we might call “bottom-up” would attribute to what are commonly called intuitions, especially those concerning concrete cases, a basic epistemological role in such a theoretical normative project. This paper undertakes, first, to clarify both kinds of procedure and to sketch a philosophical methodology that can do justice to certain merits of each procedure; second, to explore, drawing on a methodological analysis the paper will outline, Kant’s actual operative method in much of his ethical writing, particularly but not exclusively the Groundwork; and third, to appraise some aspects of Kant’s actual methods of theory-building as it is seen in his development of his ethical framework. The concluding reflections will show that Kant’s overall achievement in moral philosophy does not depend on certain of his metaphilosophical views. The paper will also indicate some directions of moral inquiry that may be promising for both Kantian and other approaches in moral philosophy. (shrink)

In the article, we elaborate an interdisciplinary methodological framework that enables us to study and prepare the grounds for the development of organizational practices through discourse perspectives. The framework differs from mainstream monological and complexity reducing tendencies within organizational studies in that it argues for an approach that takes in historical, broad, and situational power relations and discourses into consideration when we engage in ethical organizational development. We place the framework within organizational discourse studies (ODS) and discuss how the intersection (...) of Bakhtinian and Foucauldian ideas and concepts, as well as their diverse analytical strategies and focuses, contributes to the field. The combination entails taking a dissensus approach to organizational discursive phenomena that we view as dynamic features that are historically and locally (re)created through battles of unifying (centripetal) and diversifying (centrifugal) force relations. Following similar ideas of Deleuze and Bakhtin, we argue that dialogue and every (organizational) situation is seen as a plurivocal, open-ended, and unique time-space in which subjects have agency to change and transform the power relations and lines of subjectification that they are embedded in. We arrive at a methodological framework that bridges the gulf that often exists between discourse perspectives that tend to either focus on situated or more abstract and historical discursive dimensions. Furthermore, the frame involves an ethics of dispositif and dialogue that insists that organizational discourse scholars engage in organizational discourse activism furthering local change processes. (shrink)

The scope of this essay is to introduce and explain the methodology underlying the Lanza Foundation Protocol for the analysis of clinical cases. The essay is divided in three parts. Part one examines the Protocol's methodology within the whole evolutionary framework of argumentation in bioethics. Particular attention is given to the most significant methodologies developed in European bioethics. Part two describes the system of argumentation which serves as a frame for both approaches, namely, the normative and the hermeneutical. Finally, the (...) third part presents in an analytic fashion the operations which define the Protocol itself. The Protocol is the result of an interdisciplinary effort and it provides a detailed grid for analyzing and tackling the ethical components of clinical cases. The Protocol is primarily directed toward Ethics Committees in their consulting activity, yet it has been proven of considerable importance at an educational level also, particular in continuing education programs for health care professionals. (shrink)

The study examines the research methodology of more than 200 empirical investigations of ethics in personal selling and sales management between 1980 and 2010. The review discusses the sources and authorship of the sales ethics research. To better understand the drivers of empirical sales ethics research, the foundations used in business, marketing, and sales ethics are compared. The use of hypotheses, operationalization, measurement, population and sampling decisions, research design, and statistical analysis techniques were examined as part (...) of theory development and testing. The review establishes a benchmark, assesses the status and direction of the sales ethics research methodology, and helps inform researchers who need to deal with increasing amounts of empirical research. The investigation identified changing sources of publication with the Journal of Business Ethics and the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management maintaining their position as the main conduit of high quality empirical sales ethics research. The results suggest that despite the use of theoretical models for empirical testing, a greater variety of moral frameworks and wider use of marketing exchange theory is needed. The review highlights many sound aspects about the empirical sales ethics research statistical methodology but also raises concerns about several areas. Ways in which these concerns might be addressed and recommendations for researchers are provided. (shrink)

People with dementia have previously not been active participants in research, with ethical difficulties often being cited as the reason for this. A wider inclusion of people with dementia in research raises several ethical and methodological challenges. This article adds to the emerging debate by reflecting on the ethical and methodological issues raised during an interview study involving people with dementia and their spouses. The study sought to explore the impact of living with dementia. We argue that there is support (...) for the inclusion of people with dementia in research and that the benefits of participation usually far outweigh the risks, particularly when a `safe context' has been created. The role of gatekeepers as potentially responsible for excluding people with dementia needs further consideration, with particular reference to the appropriateness of viewing consent as a primarily cognitive, universalistic and exclusionary event as opposed to a more particularistic, inclusive and context relevant process. (shrink)

Currently, many scientific fields such as psychology or biomedicine face a methodological crisis concerning the reproducibility, replicability, and validity of their research. In neuroimaging, similar methodological concerns have taken hold of the field, and researchers are working frantically toward finding solutions for the methodological problems specific to neuroimaging. This article examines some ethical and legal implications of this methodological crisis in neuroimaging. With respect to ethical challenges, the article discusses the impact of flawed methods in neuroimaging research in cognitive and (...) clinical neuroscience, particularly with respect to faulty brain-based models of human cognition, behavior, and personality. Specifically examined is whether such faulty models, when they are applied to neurological or psychiatric diseases, could put patients at risk, and whether this places special obligations on researchers using neuroimaging. In the legal domain, the actual use of neuroimaging as evidence in United States courtrooms is surveyed, followed by an examination of ways that the methodological problems may create challenges for the criminal justice system. Finally, the article reviews and promotes some promising ideas and initiatives from within the neuroimaging community for addressing the methodological problems. (shrink)

Graham Priest claims that Asian philosophy is going to constitute one of the most important aspects in 21st-century philosophical research. Assuming that this statement is true, it leads to a methodological question whether the dominant comparative and contrastive approaches will be supplanted by a more unifying methodology that works across different philosophical traditions. In this article, I concentrate on the use of empirical evidence from nonphilosophical disciplines, which enjoys popularity among many Western philosophers, and examine the application of this approach (...) to early Chinese philosophy. I specifically focus on Confucian ethics and the study of altruism in experimental psychology. (shrink)

Scholars have noted persistent high rates of agricultural health and safety incidents and the need to develop more effective interventions. Participatory research provides an avenue to broaden the prevailing research paradigms and approaches by allowing those most impacted to illuminate and work to solve those aspects of their lives. One such approach is photovoice, an emancipatory visual narrative approach. Yet, despite its broad appeal, photovoice can be hard to implement. In this article, we leverage our experience using photovoice for a (...) farm children safety project to describe and reflect on the ethical and methodological aspects broadly relevant to agricultural health and safety topics. We first contextualize the tensions of navigating between photovoice, the research ethics committees (RECs) regulatory frameworks, and competing views on visual representations in agriculture. We then discuss the sources of risks to participants and researchers, how we addressed these risks, and how these risks unfolded during the research phase of the photovoice activity. We conclude with three lessons we (re)learned: the importance of collaborating with RECs, the need to increase preparation to limit psychological risks to participants and researchers, and avenues to augment the emancipatory power of photovoice in a virtual environment. (shrink)

In the present article, we introduce an ethical evaluation methodology for clinical cases. Although rejecting proceduralism as a system, we develop a procedure that eventually could be formalized as a flow chart to help carry out an ethical evaluation for clinical cases. We clarify the elements that constitute an ethical evaluation: aim, integration, and how the action is performed. We leave aside the aspect of intentions, focusing on the object of a medical action, arguing that the internal aim of a (...) clinical action carries a moral value per se. Our evaluation system takes into account only objects and circumstances and their intrinsic morality, since we are dealing with the evaluation of a clinical case, and not with a personal and complete clinical action. DOI: 10.5294/pebi.2016.20.1.5. (shrink)

At the outset of this chapter, I want to echo the praise offered by all of the contributors to this volume for Finder’s outstanding, thoughtful and self-critical narrative of the case of 83 year old Mrs. Hamadani and her fiercely devoted children. The brocade account is carefully woven, like a fine Persian tapestry, to convey the rich complexity of an actual ethics consultation as it transpires not over hours, but rather over days, weeks, months and even, as in this (...) case, years. Mrs. Hamadani’s narrative so told is replete with questions worthy of critical reflection. What is an appropriate role for ethics consultation in healthcare? How can an autonomy-centric culture accommodate community-centric cultural difference? How can or should the voice of the patient be heard when she cannot speak for herself and the much louder and anguished voices of others demand to be heard? What are the bounds of acceptable medical treatment and how should care teams respond when patient or family demands threaten to push care givers to cross those bounds? What is an appropriate response for ethics consultants when they are asked to take over a case or prevent a colleague from interacting with an unwilling family? Do the motivations of patients, family, or members of the care team in calling ethics consultants necessarily shape the consultant’s role? And so the list goes on, as the variety of commentaries which comprise the majority of this volume, as well as the multitude of discussions that you, the readers, will inevitably have with colleagues, students, and friends make abundantly clear. (shrink)

Background: The right of children to have their voice heard has been accepted by researchers, and there are increasing numbers of qualitative health studies involving children. The ethical and methodological issues of including children in research have caused worldwide concerns, and many researchers have published articles sharing their own experiences. Objectives: To systematically review and synthesise experts’ opinions and experiences about ethical and methodological issues of including children in research, as well as related solution strategies. Research design: The research design (...) was a systematic review of opinion-based evidence, based on the guidelines by Joanna Briggs Institute. Methods: A search of five computerised databases has been conducted in April 2014 and 2271 articles were found. After screening the titles, abstracts, full texts and appraising the quality, 30 articles were finally included in the review. A meta-aggregative approach was applied in the data analysis and synthesis process. Ethical considerations: Ethical approval is not needed as it is a systematic review of published literature. Results: Six themes were identified, including evaluating potential risks and benefits, gaining access, obtaining informed consent/assent, protecting confidentiality and privacy, building rapport and collecting rich data. The similarities and differences between research involving children and that involving adults were indicated. Conclusion: All potential incentives should be justified when designing the study. Further studies need to research how to evaluate individual capacity of children and how to balance protecting children’s right to participate and their interests in the research. Cultural differences related to researching children in different regions should also be studied. (shrink)

Saunkeah et al. analyze the aptness of extending the Belmont Principles of Respect for Persons, Beneficence and Justice to AI/AN tribal communities as a whole. They argue that to protect AI/...

In computer ethics, as in other branches of applied ethics, the problem of the justification of moral judgment is still unresolved. I argue that the method which is referred to as “The Method of Wide Reflective Equilibrium” (WRE) offers the best solution to it. It does not fall victim to the false dilemma of having to choose either case‐based particularist or principle‐based universalist approaches to the problem of moral justification. I claim that WRE also provides the best model (...) of practical moral reasoning available for computer ethics. It does not pretend to provide quasi‐algorithmic procedures for moral decision‐making, but neither does it abandon the regulative ideal of communicative transparency in discursive public justification. (shrink)

We take kelp as material entities immersed in a multitude of relations with other creatures (for whom kelp serves as both nourishment and shelter) and inorganic elements of the milieu it resides in, on the one hand, and as a figuration: a material-semiotic “map of contestable worlds” that encompasses entangled threads of “knowledge, practice and power” (Haraway 1997, 11) in its local and global sense, on the other. While drawing on our field notes from the congress and feminist posthumanities and (...) environmental humanities literatures (e.g. Alaimo 2016; Åsberg & Braidotti 2018; Sandilands & Erickson 2010; Iovino & Opperman 2014) – with a special focus on the so-called blue humanities/oceanic humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019) – that unpack human/nonhuman relations in the context of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), we mobilise a reflection on and make a proposal for “thinking with kelp” as a multi-faceted methodology of transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge production and practices: situated (Haraway 1988), enfleshed, transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010), collaborative, and committed to an ethics of multispecies response-ability (Haraway 2008). (shrink)

This study uses best–worst scaling experiments to examine differences across six countries in the attitudes of consumers towards social and ethical issues that included both product related issues (such as recycled packaging) and general social factors (such as human rights). The experiments were conducted using over 600 respondents from Germany, Spain, Turkey, USA, India, and Korea. The results show that there is indeed some variation in the attitudes towards social and ethical issues across these six countries. However, what is more (...) telling are the similarities seen and the extent to which individual variation dominates observable demographics and country-based variables. (shrink)

This paper suggests that lessons from the field of environmental ethics and sociological perspectives on knowledge are important tools for rethinking what type of ethical analysis is needed for building up further the field of development ethics and, more generally, for addressing some of the most fundamental ethical problems related to global poverty and development. The paper argues for a methodologically pragmatist approach to development ethics that focuses on the interplay between facts, values, concepts and practices. It (...) views development ethics as a hybrid between a public moral?political philosophy and a public conception of social science. Ethical analyses of poverty and development must lead to fundamental changes in the ways knowledge is produced and justified and must challenge the dominance of global institutions and orthodox economics as the single sources of expert knowledge for development. Two of the main tasks of ethical analysis is to provide tools for the formulation of alternative knowledge for development centred on the equal moral worth of all human beings, and to influence global policy making as well as multilateral institutions' goals and policies. The last section of the paper argues that Amartya Sen's version of the Capability Approach is already methodologically pragmatist and points to some convergence between Sen's work and John Dewey's. Further sociological and methodologically pragmatist analysis of the approach is needed to assess the ways in which it is influencing debates on human development and leading to policy changes, and the possible distortions it suffers when adopted by multilateral agencies and policy makers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference on Ethics and Development at Michigan State University, East Landing (USA) 8?15 April 2005. The section on methodological pragmatism draws from an unpublished paper written with Andrew Light called ?A Pragmatist Methodology for Development Ethics,? presented at the American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting in New York, December 1999. I have updated, transformed and used some parts and insights developed with Light in a way he may not recognize. (shrink)

Objectives—To assess the relationship between the approval of trials by a research ethics committee and the fact that informed consent from participants was obtained, with the quality of study design and methods.Design—Systematic review using a standardised checklist.Main measures—Methodological and ethical issues of all trials published between 1993 and 1995 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal were studied. In addition, clinical trials conducted in Spain and (...) published by at least one Spanish author during the same period in any other journal were also included.Results—We studied the published articles of 767 trials and found the following indicators of lower methodological quality to be independent predictors for failure to disclose REC approval or ICP: absence of concealment of allocation, lack of justification for unblinded trials, not using a treatment for the patients in the control group, absent information on statistical methods, not including sample size estimation, not establishing the rules to stop the trial, and omitting the presentation of a baseline comparison of groupsConclusion—Trials of higher methodological and scientific quality were more likely to provide information about their ethical aspects. (shrink)

The use of placebo controls in clinical trials remains controversial. Ethical analysis and international ethical guidance permit the use of placebo controls in randomized trials when scientifically indicated in four cases: (1) when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition under study; (2) when withholding treatment poses negligible risks to participants; (3) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and withholding treatment does not pose a risk of serious harm to participants; and, more controversially, (4) when (...) there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and the research is intended to develop interventions that can be implemented in the population from which trial participants are drawn, and the trial does not require participants to forgo treatment they would otherwise receive. The concept of methodological reasons is essential to assessing the ethics of placebo controls in these controversial last two cases. This article sets out key considerations relevant to considering whether methodological reasons for a placebo control are compelling. (shrink)

The empirical turn in bioethics and the deliberative turn in democracy theory occurred at around the same time, one at the intersection of bioethics and social science,1 2 the other at the intersection of political philosophy and political science.3–5 Empirical bioethics and deliberative democratic approaches both engage with immediate problems in policy and practice with normative intent, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would eventually find one another,6–8 and that deliberative research would become more common in bioethics.9 This commentary (...) responds to a paper by Ford et al, who ran a single jury of 18 people in Brighton in the UK in June 2018.10 The jury were asked to consider whether secondary research use of non-structured, free-text data from medical records should be permitted. I will consider three issues: the effort required in deliberative work, the challenge of sampling and selection of jurors and the basis for drawing normative conclusions from deliberative research. First: this report makes clear the effort involved in running a jury. These researchers contracted an external agency experienced in the method, established an oversight committee of policy-makers with power to act, developed expert witness briefs, selected witnesses and coordinated their testimony, and created a questionnaire to measure participants’ views, activities to support their understanding, and a scenario for consideration. …. (shrink)

Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This ‘empirical turn’ has provoked extensive debate over how such ‘descriptive’ research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by developing a practical research methodology for the inclusion of data from social science studies into ethical deliberation. This methodology will be based on a (...) naturalistic conception of ethical theory that sees practice as informing theory just as theory informs practice – the two are symbiotically related. From this engagement with practice, the ways that such theories need to be extended and developed can be determined. This is a practical methodology for integrating theory and practice that can be used in empirical studies, one that uses ethical theory both to explore the data and to draw normative conclusions. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the discussion on methodological decolonisation in business ethics research by illustrating how local epistemologies can shape methodology. Historically, business ethics research has been dominated by Western methodologies, which have been argued to be restrictive and limit contextually relevant theorising in non-Western contexts. Over the past decade, scholarship has called for more diversity in research methods and epistemologies. This paper regards arguments founded along neatly divided universalist versus contextualised methodologies as a false dilemma. Instead, we (...) explore how _ubuntu_, a sub-Saharan African epistemology, can contribute as a complementary epistemology and methodology to interpretivism when conducting business ethics research in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper discusses four aspects—research agenda, access, power relations, and context-sensitive methods—that highlight practical ways in which _ubuntu_ epistemology, with its communitarian and relational underpinnings, can enhance business ethics research. We illustrate that methodological decolonisation can be achieved by fusing relevant elements of local epistemologies and methodologies and conventional methodologies to generate context-relevant research approaches. (shrink)

Statisticians in medicine can disagree on appropriate methodology applicable to the design and analysis of clinical trials. So called Bayesians and frequentists both claim ethical superiority. This paper, by defining and then linking together various dichotomies, argues there is a place for both statistical camps. The choice between them depends on the phase of clinical trial, disease prevalence and severity, but supremely on the ethics underlying the particular trial. There is always a tension present between physicians primarily obligated to (...) their own patients (the weight of 'individual ethics') and ethical committees responsible for the scientific merit of the trial and its long-term implications ('collective ethics'). Individual ethics, it is proposed, favour the Bayesian approach; collective ethics, the frequentist. Though in some situations the choice appears clear-cut, there remain other where both methodologies can be appropriate. (shrink)

Two disciplines claim to provide justification of action. Ethics gives you moral reasons to act upon, whereas economics exploits the concept of rationality. The paper discusses two theories of interdisciplinarity of ethics and economics in order to clarify the relationship. The traditional view of a hierarchical ordering of ethics and economics is rejected, and it is claimed that there are substantial economic contributions to ethical justification.

In The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph Carens’ builds a sophisticated account of justice in immigration based on an interpretation of liberal states’ democratic principles and practices. I dispute Carens’ contention that his hermeneutic methodology supports a broadly liberal egalitarian consensus; instead, the consensus he detects on principles and practices appears because his interpretation presupposes liberal egalitarianism. Carens’ methodology would benefit by engaging with a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that explores the ideological and exclusionary facets of liberal egalitarian principles when applied (...) to immigration. This would contribute to an account of the ethics of immigration that gives more attention to power and interest, mediated through structures of gender, race, and class. (shrink)

The pluralism of methodologies and severe time constraints pose important challenges to pedagogy in clinical ethics. We designed a step-by-step student handbook to operate within such constraints and to respect the methodological pluralism of bioethics and clinical ethics. The handbook comprises six steps: Step 1: What are the facts of the case?; Step 2: What are your obligations to your patient?; Step 3: What are your obligations to third parties to your relationship with the patient?; Step 4: Do (...) your obligations converge or conflict?; Step 5: What is the strongest objection that could be made to the identification of convergence in step 4 or the arguments in step 4? How can this objection be effectively countered?; and Step 6: How could the ethical conflict, or perceived ethical conflict, have been prevented? (shrink)

Despite the fundamental and administrative difficulties associated with cross-cultural research the rewards are significant and, given an increasing trend toward globalisation, the move away from singular location studies to more comparative research is to be encouraged. In order to facilitate this research process it is imperative, however, that considerable attention is given to the methodological issues that can beset cross-cultural research, specifically as these issues relate to the primary domain or discipline of investigation, which in this instance is research on (...) business ethics. Utilising the experience of a four country comparative study of both Asian and Western cultures in the field of business ethics, the following presents a discussion of methodological concerns under the three broad areas of operationalising culture, operationalising business ethics, and data interpretation. (shrink)

Our society is being shaped in a non-negligible way by the technological advances of recent years, especially in information and communications technologies. The pervasiveness and democratization of ICTs have allowed people from all backgrounds to access and use them, which has resulted in new information-based assets. At the same time, this phenomenon has brought a new class of problems, in the form of activists, criminals and state actors that target the new assets to achieve their goals, legitimate or not. Cybersecurity (...) includes the research, tools and techniques to protect information assets. However, some cybersecurity measures may clash with the ethical values of citizens. We analyze the synergies and tensions between some of these values, namely security, privacy, fairness and autonomy. From this analysis, we derive a value graph, and then we set out to identify those paths in the graph that lead to satisfying all four aforementioned values in the cybersecurity setting, by taking advantage of their synergies and avoiding their tensions. We illustrate our conceptual discussion with examples of enabling technologies. We also sketch how our methodology can be generalized to any setting where several potentially conflicting values have to be satisfied. (shrink)

Ethics isn’t a conversation exclusive to philosophers. There is value, then, in not only understanding how laypeople think about issues in ethics, but also bringing their judgments into dialogue with those of philosophers in order to make sense of agreement, disagreement, and the consequences of each. Experimental philosophers facilitate this dialogue uniquely by capturing laypeople’s judgments and analyzing them in light of philosophical theory. They have done so almost exclusively by using face valid quantitative surveys about philosophically interesting (...) thought experiments. Based on high participant support for this or that response, researchers conclude that a given theory is more or less intuitive, and in some cases that it is or isn’t true. However, such conclusions can only be drawn from quantitative survey data if one assumes those data accurately reflect laypeople’s thinking on the issues of interest, an assumption that can’t be justified by the quantitative data itself since they are potentially opaque. This is the methodological problem of experimental philosophy: experimental philosophers who use quantitative methods alone can’t sufficiently demonstrate their data to be reflective of relevant judgments/intuitions. To better explore people’s judgments on issues in ethics and to determine whether experimental philosophers are or aren’t getting what they take themselves to be getting in surveys, I recreated part of an experiment by Chituc, Henne, Sinnott-Armstrong, and De Brigard on the Kantian principle that “ought implies can”, or that whenever an agent ought to do something then it is the case that she can, and added a layer of qualitative data to it by having participants think aloud while completing the surveys and conduct a follow-up interview. With similar quantitative results to those from Chituc et al., I argue that my qualitative results 1) cast doubt on Chituc et al.’s data being reflective of many people’s judgments, especially on the more interesting questions relating to moral obligation; 2) reveal unique insights into how people think about OIC; 3) generally speak to the value of experimental philosophers using triangulation of methods in better understanding laypeople’s complex and varied thinking about questions important to ethics and beyond. Supplemental documents: Appendices A, B, C, D, and E are surveys I used in my study. Appendices C and D are derived from Chituc et al.’s publication “Blame, Not Ability, Impacts Moral ‘Ought’ Judgments for Impossible Actions: Toward an Empirical Refutation of ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can.’” Appendix F is the recruitment flyer I distributed for my study. Appendix H is the quantitative data from my study. (shrink)