scholarly journals The Anvil of Neglect and the Hammer of Exploitation

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-114
Author(s):  
Alex John London
Keyword(s):  
Research Ethics ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
Moral Requirements ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores tensions in research ethics between three moral pitfalls: sanctioning wrongdoing, avoiding the ravages of neglect, and not saddling a narrow range of actors with overly demanding moral requirements. These tensions are illustrated by the way an argument from Alan Wertheimer repurposes core commitments of the field to argue that research ethics should avert the harms of widespread neglect by weakening some of the protectionist demands of morality and permitting the violation of norms against exploitation, unfairness, and injustice. Although Wertheimer’s proposal is likely to be met with skepticism in the field, the problems it raises reflect shortcomings in research ethics and, most importantly, the failure of the field to connect this activity to social institutions that serve a larger moral purpose.

Standing Out and Blending In: Contact-Based Research, Ethics, and Positionality

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Carolyn E. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Research Ethics ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Ethical Training ◽  
Research Outcomes ◽  
Different Populations ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethical difficulties that arise because of the interaction between fieldwork practitioners and their sites, in terms of the positionality of the researcher. What are the ethics of blending in or of standing out? This question stems from my experience of 12 months of fieldwork in South Africa in two distinct locales and among two different populations, one in which I could “pass” and another in which I was marked as various degrees of “outsider.” Drawing on this fieldwork, as well as an overview of the literature in political science on positionality, I argue that our discipline—because of the way it shapes interactions and research outcomes—must take positionality seriously in ethical training and practice.

Desert and merit

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Way ◽  
Good Deeds

The ideas of desert and merit are fundamental to the way we normally think about our personal relationships and our social institutions. We believe that people who perform good deeds and display admirable qualities deserve praise, honours and rewards, whereas people whose behaviour is anti-social deserve blame and punishment. We also think that justice is in large part a matter of people receiving the treatment that they deserve. But many philosophers have found these ways of thinking hard to justify. Why should people’s past deeds determine how we should treat them in the future? Since we cannot see inside their heads, how can we ever know what people really deserve? How can we reconcile our belief that people must be responsible for their actions in order to deserve credit or blame with the determinist claim that all actions are in principle capable of being explained by causes over which we have no control?

Social science ethics: the changing context for research

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Webster
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Research Ethics ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Science Ethics ◽  
Ethics Framework ◽  
Ethical Content ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Way

This article looks at recent developments that have had an impact upon the way in which the ethical content of research is judged. It then goes on to look in some detail at the guidance offered to social science researchers in the Economic and Social Science Research Council's new Research Ethics Framework.

The Categorical Imperative and Not Being Unworthy of the Event: Ethics in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Leonard Lawlor
Keyword(s):  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
The Third ◽  
Intensive Quantities ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Way

This essay starts from a consideration of Deleuze's theory of time. It begins with the empty form of time. But the essay's aim is to understand Deleuze's reversal of Platonism in his 1968 Difference and Repetition. There is no question that the stakes of the reversal of Platonism are ontological. But I argue that what is really at stake is a movement of demoralisation. The essay proceeds in three steps. First, we determine what sufficient reason or grounding is, for Deleuze. Sufficient reason is struck with an irreducible ambiguity. It is this ambiguity in sufficient reason that allows it to be taken advantage of, to be used by representation and good sense for a moral purpose. The second part of the essay will therefore concern ‘the moralisation of sufficient reason’. Its focus will be good sense. But then, third, we must understand Deleuze's ‘demoralisation of sufficient reason’, which necessarily passes through others. Like sufficient reason, others are ambiguous, at once lending themselves to what cancels differences, and opening the way towards difference and intensity. The third step focuses on what Deleuze calls ‘the ethics of intensive quantities’. In the Conclusion, I examine Deleuze's famous, almost cliché, definition of ethics as not being unworthy of the event and, through the empty form of time, I connect it to Kant's formalistic ethics.

The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
The Third ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Cultural Rules ◽  
The Way

Traditional treatments of marriage among indigenous people focus on what people say about whom one should marry and on rules that anthropologists induce from those statements. This volume is a cultural and social anthropological examination of the ways the indigenous peoples of lowland South America/Amazonia actually choose whom they marry. Detailed ethnography shows that they select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their emotional desires, and their social aspirations, as well as to honor their commitments to exogamic prescriptions and the exchange of women. These decisions often require playing fast and loose with what the anthropologist and the peoples themselves declare to be the regulations they obey. Inevitably then, this volume is about agency and individual choice in the context of social institutions and cultural rules. There is another theme running through this book—the way in which globalization is subverting traditional hierarchies, altering identities, and eroding ancestral marital norms and values—how the forces of modernization alter both structure and practice. The main body of the book is given over to eleven chapters based on previously unpublished ethnographic material collected by the contributors. It is divided into three sections. The first collects essays that describe the motives behind breaking the marriage rules, the second describes how the marriage rules are bent or broken, and the third gathers chapters on the effects of globalization and recent changes on the marriage rules.

New perspectives on ancient science

1994 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Ancient China ◽  
Ancient Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

Did science develop differently in different ancient civilisations, and if so, why? This article compares the development of medicine, mathematics and astronomy in ancient Greece and ancient China. It identifies certain significant differences in the way in which the problems were formulated and the aims and methods used to resolve them, and it relates these to the social institutions and values of the society within which the scientists work.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Alex John London
Keyword(s):  
Research Ethics ◽  
Social Order ◽  
International Research ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Moral Claim ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
Community Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Managing Risk

This chapter provides an overview of the main arguments in the book. It outlines eight problematic commitments that cause fault lines in the foundations of research ethics and that are rejected in subsequent chapters. It then shows how a conception of the common good connects research to the ability of key social institutions to safeguard the basic interests of community members. The resulting view grounds an imperative to promote research of a certain kind, while requiring that those efforts be organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors’ moral claim to be treated as free and equal. A framework for assessing and managing risk is proposed that can reconcile these goals and it is argued that connecting research to larger requirements of a just social order expands the issues and actors that fall under the purview of the field while providing a more coherent and unified foundation for domestic and international research.

scholarly journals The digital economy and society: a preliminary commentary

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gluckman
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Fourth Industrial Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Virtually all technologies that humans have invented or will invent present both benefits and risks. The history of humankind is that of invention, development and exploitation of technologies while managing their downsides. However, it is the speed, scope and pervasiveness of digital technological change across virtually every aspect of human endeavour that generate an enormous array of possible implications. Such characteristics undoubtedly set the digital revolution (sometimes called the fourth industrial revolution) apart from past technological revolutions in the way they challenge aspects of human behaviour and social institutions.

Culture and Economics

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
Kaushik Basu
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Contract Enforcement ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Way

Culture is often treated as the decoration on the economy, something that is of no consequence for the economy. This chapter takes a contrary line. Through tales and accounts of real-life encounters, the chapter illustrates the important role that culture and social institutions play in the functioning of an economy, at times paving the way for development prosperity, at times blocking growth and economic progress. Trust and trustworthiness are often as important as having a robust legal system for contract enforcement. They can make or break an economy.

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