The character lens: A person-centered perspective on moral recognition and ethical decision-making

We introduce the character lens perspective to account for stable patterns in the way that individuals make sense of and construct the ethical choices and situations they face. We propose that the way that individuals make sense of their present experience is an enduring feature of their broader moral character, and that differences between people in ethical decision-making are traceable to upstream differences in the way that people disambiguate and give meaning to their present context. In three studies, we found that individuals with higher standing on moral character (operationalized as a combination of Honesty-Humility, Guilt Proneness, and Moral Identity Centrality) tended to construe their present context in more moral or ethical terms, and this difference in moral recognition accounted for differences in the ethical choices they made. Moreover, individuals with higher levels of moral character maintained high levels of moral recognition even as pressure to ignore moral considerations increased. Accordingly, this work unifies research on moral character, moral recognition, sensemaking, and judgment and decision-making into a person-centered account of ethical decision-making, highlighting the way decision-makers actively and directly shape the choice contexts to which they must respond.

Eetilised valikud COVID-19 pandeemia tingimustes

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented interest in ethics, as societies are confronted with difficult ethical choices: life versus economic well-being, individual freedom versus health, free movement of people versus public health. All democratic societies have witnessed disagreements concerning restrictions to the free movement of people, vaccination policies, and distribution of healthcare resources. The adopted policies and formulated guidelines showed that different countries prioritized values differently. Amongst the most challenging ethical debates during the COVID-19 pandemic were attempts to formulate clinical ethical guidelines on how limited medical resources and services ought to be allocated should the need exceed availability. This article provides an overview of the process of compiling the clinical ethics recommendations for Estonian hospitals concerning the allocation of limited healthcare resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article describes the stakeholder involvement, engagements with comparable international documents, main internal debates and lessons learned for the future.

Theorizing ethical questioning for applied theatre practice

This article examines ethical questioning as an inquiry process germane to making ethical choices in applied theatre research. Focusing on reflexivity through reflection before, in and on action, I consider ethical questioning as a framework to amplify resistance, promote participation and strengthen decolonization in the research process. I situate ethical questioning within critical pedagogy for applied theatre practice and construct an ethical questioning framework that rests on both individualism and collective processes. I conclude by briefly examining some processes in my doctoral research and reflecting on the implications of ethical questioning on applied theatre and the call to turn from a morality debate about ethics to a political act rooted in the awareness of oneself in relation to the other.

Analysis of Humbert’s Ethical Choices

Humbert’s mumbling in prison shows the readers his true inner world and his tragic fate. Throughout Lolita, it is evidently clear that Humbert’s ethical choice is inextricably linked with his depressed heart and tragic fate. Based on ethical literary criticism proposed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao, this paper analyzes Humbert’s life, which is a life full of ethical choices. This article, based on Humbert’s ethical choice of Charlotte Haze, Lolita and Quilty, and his ultimate ethical redemption, reveals his ethical dilemma in ethical choice, his Sphinx Factors, the interweaving of his free will and rational will, and his ultimate ethical choice. Humbert’s ethical choices eventually led to his tragic fate.

The Anthropocene, Cli-Fi and Food: Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam

This article examines Margaret Atwood’s climate fiction novel MaddAddam (2013), a dystopian cautionary text in which food production and eating become ethical choices related to individual agency and linked to sustainability. In the novel, both mainstream environmentalism and deep ecologism are shown to be insufficient and fundamentally irrelevant in the face of a submissive population, in a state of passivity that environmental studies scholar Stacy Alaimo relates to a scientific and masculinist interpretation of the Anthropocene. The article focuses on edibility as a key element in negotiating identity, belonging, cohabitation and the frontiers of the new MaddAddam postapocalyptic community.

Moral Music Management: Ethical Decision-Making After Avicii

Following the tragic suicide of Avicii (Tim Bergling) in 2018, many in the popular media, and reportedly the musician’s own family, were seen to question the ethics of decisions taken by his manager (Williams, 2018; Ralston, 2018). By applying a moral intensity test (Jones, 1991) in the form of a scenario-based questionnaire to six music managers based in London (UK), this article interrogates how and why music managers make the moral and ethical choices they do. The findings suggest that music managers are aware of ethical challenges emanating from their work, but that the relatively informal, loosely regulated nature of the music workplace complicates the negotiation of ethical and moral tensions. However, music managers’ close awareness of the ‘social consensus’ and ‘proximity’ of moral intensity suggests that cultural (as opposed to regulatory) change can help guide and inform managerial decision-making.

Animal Harms and Food Production: Informing Ethical Choices

Ethical food choices have become an important societal theme in post-industrial countries. Many consumers are particularly interested in the animal welfare implications of the various foods they may choose to consume. However, concepts in animal welfare are rapidly evolving towards consideration of all animals (including wildlife) in contemporary approaches such as “One Welfare”. This approach requires recognition that negative impacts (harms) may be intentional and obvious (e.g., slaughter of livestock) but also include the under-appreciated indirect or unintentional harms that often impact wildlife (e.g., land clearing). This is especially true in the Anthropocene, where impacts on non-human life are almost ubiquitous across all human activities. We applied the “harms” model of animal welfare assessment to several common food production systems and provide a framework for assessing the breadth (not intensity) of harms imposed. We considered all harms caused to wild as well as domestic animals, both direct effects and indirect effects. We described 21 forms of harm and considered how they applied to 16 forms of food production. Our analysis suggests that all food production systems harm animals to some degree and that the majority of these harms affect wildlife, not livestock. We conclude that the food production systems likely to impose the greatest overall breadth of harms to animals are intensive animal agriculture industries (e.g., dairy) that rely on a secondary food production system (e.g., cropping), while harvesting of locally available wild plants, mushrooms or seaweed is likely to impose the least harms. We present this conceptual analysis as a resource for those who want to begin considering the complex animal welfare trade-offs involved in their food choices.