Political identity and social media ethics in nowadays America

The article analyzes the ethics of social networks and its relationship with political identity. Two dimensions of the ethics of social networks are identified – the ethics of users and the ethics of platform owners. Using the example of political communication and the actions of social networks during the US protests in 2020, the transition from a procedural ethics based on ensuring freedom of speech and the equivalence of all types of identity to an ethics of protecting oppressed classes and groups is considered. The trends of different ethical assessments and reactions of users and owners of social networks in the same situations in the same political context, arbitrary denial of equal access to political communication to users and politicians due to disapproval of their political identity are revealed. Such ethics are not universal, are applied selectively and can damage the democratic foundations of any society, especially in the context of the growing unlimited power of the owners of communication platforms.

Unethical governance: capacity legislation and the exclusion of people diagnosed with dementias from research

This paper considers the potential for the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) of England and Wales to incentivise the exclusion of people with dementia from research. The MCA is intended to standardise and safeguard the inclusion of people with cognitive impairments in research. This entails various procedural requirements, which in pressurised research contexts can lead researchers to exclude people with dementia as a means of simplifying bureaucratic constraints. I consider the risks of an ‘unethical ethics’, wherein procedural ethics indirectly causes the exclusion of people with dementia from research, undermining historic successes toward increased inclusivity. I suggest several solutions, including enhanced sensitivity to impairments and shifting the burden of proof from justifying inclusion to justifying exclusion. The paper responds to the ‘ethics creep’ tradition in procedural ethics, and critical appraisals of capacity legislation in dementia research. This approach recognises that institutional research ethics is itself a major ethical concern and can unwittingly beget unethical practices. Dementia researchers must be alert to such unethical ethics.

COVID-19 and Youth Living in Poverty: The Ethical Considerations of Moving From In-Person Interviews to a Photovoice Using Remote Methods

COVID-19 hit and instantaneously research using in-person methods were paused. As feminist and critical social work scholars and researchers, we began to consider the implications of pausing our ongoing project exploring the provisioning and resilience of youth living in low-income, lone mother households. Reflexively, we wondered how the youth, families, and issues we were connected to would be impacted by the pandemic. We were pulled into both ethical and methodological questions. While the procedural ethics of maintaining safety were clear, what became less clear were the relational ethics. What was brought into question were our own social positions and our roles and responsibilities in our relationships with the youth. For both ethical and methodological reasons, we decided to expand the original research scope from in-person interviews to include a photovoice to be executed using online, remote methods. In this article, we discuss those ethical and methodological tensions. In the first part, we discuss the relational ethics that propelled us to commit to expanding our work, while in the second part, we discuss our move to combining photovoice and remote methods.

Refining Value Sensitive Design: A (Capability-Based) Procedural Ethics Approach to Technological Design for Well-Being

Fundamental questions in value sensitive design include whether and how high-tech products/artefacts could embody values and ethical ideals, and how plural and incommensurable values of ethical and social importance could be chosen rationally and objectively at a collective level. By using a humanitarian cargo drone study as a starting point, this paper tackles the challenges that VSD’s lack of commitment to a specific ethical theory generates in practical applications. Besides, it highlights how mainstream ethical approaches usually related to VSD are incapable of solving main ethical dilemmas raised by technological design for well-being in democratic settings. Accordingly, it is argued that VSD’s ethical-democratic import would substantially be enhanced by the espousal of a procedural ethics stance and the deliberative approach to value and welfare entailed by Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Differently from rival ethical–political theories, its normative and meta-ethical foundations better handle human diversity, value-goal pluralism, conflicting vested interests as well as the epistemic-moral disagreements typical of contemporary complex democracies. Particularly, Sen’s capability approach procedural-deliberative tenets result in an “objective-impartial” choice procedure selecting a “hierarchy” of plural incommensurable values and rational goals thus, suitable to validate an applied science such as welfare-oriented technological design in concrete social environments. Conclusions suggest that refining VSD with a capability-based procedural approach to ethics fosters the concern for democracy and social justice while preserving vital scientific-technical standards. Major advantages are at an applied level to delivering ethically and socially justified, but yet highly functional technologies and high-tech products/artefacts.

Ethically important moments as data: reflections from ethnographic fieldwork in prisons

Qualitative researchers often face unpredictable ethical issues during fieldwork. These may be regarded as ethical dilemmas that need to be ‘solved’, but Guillemin and Gillam’s concept of ‘ethically important moments’ provides an alternative framing. Using examples, their concept is developed to suggest that ethical issues in the conduct of research can illuminate and supplement other fieldwork data. Far from being problematic, the dissonance between the procedural ethics of research ethics committees and real-world research can provide opportunities for a more subtle and nuanced understanding of the field.

Situational ethics in a feminist ethnography on commercial surrogacy in Russia: Negotiating access and authority when recruiting participants through institutional gatekeepers

In this article, I discuss methodological and ethical dilemmas when recruiting participants with the help of medical and institutional gatekeepers during my ethnographic fieldwork on commercial surrogacy in St Petersburg, Russia. Based on four case studies, I argue for the use of situational ethics. Solid up-front ethics that are approved by institutional advisory boards are important to ensure that the researcher has done their best to identify potential ethical issues prior to data collection and offer deontological safeguards. However, as empirical researchers, we are familiar with the unanticipated that is bound to happen once we commence data collection. In such cases, when the proposed and approved ethical conduct is no longer suited and researchers must make new ethical choices, situational ethics that take the immediate context into consideration are crucial. I further argue that situational ethics must not only be an extension of procedural ethics when the latter are no longer suited but an alternative to procedural ethics in order to make the research empowering, reciprocal and transformative of existing disadvantaging power relations. With this article, I contribute to the growing literature that argues in favour of situational ethics.

Bioethics and Reason in a Secular Society: Reclaiming Christian Bioethics

Bioethics evolved from traditional physician ethics and theological ethics. It has become important in contemporary discussions of Medicine and ethics. But in contemporary secular societies the foundations of bioethics are minimal in their content and often rely on procedural ethics. The bioethics of particular communities, particularly religious communities, are richer than the procedural ethics of a secular society. Religious bioethics, situated within religious communities, are richer in content in general and in the lived reality.