Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears: A Matter of Gender and Fate

This paper offers an in-depth review of the Soviet hit film Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1979). Focusing on its female characters, it analyses the gender dynamics that prevailed in the Soviet Union at that time and the narrative impact it had on the plot. The article is divided into three subsections: a brief historical and political context, a depiction of the state of gender equality in the Soviet Union, as well as the power dynamics that existed both in the professional and domestic sphere, and a summary of the different femininities portrayed by the characters, along with the role morality and fate played in the film.

Individual Roles and Conflicting Moral Obligations: Examples from Corporate and Professional New Zealand

<p>This paper is concerned with the notion of role morality. It attempts to answer the question of how individuals deal with conflicts between role morality and personal convictions. Based upon the answer to this question the paper further attempts to answer the question of how institutions that establish role morality need to proceed in order to ensure that the rules and principles issued by them are actually followed. Finally, the paper takes a look at the situation in professional and corporate societies in New Zealand and the way professional associations and business corporations in New Zealand deal with the fact that obligations under professional and corporate ethics may conflict with the personal convictions of professionals and employees.</p>

Individual Roles and Conflicting Moral Obligations: Examples from Corporate and Professional New Zealand

<p>This paper is concerned with the notion of role morality. It attempts to answer the question of how individuals deal with conflicts between role morality and personal convictions. Based upon the answer to this question the paper further attempts to answer the question of how institutions that establish role morality need to proceed in order to ensure that the rules and principles issued by them are actually followed. Finally, the paper takes a look at the situation in professional and corporate societies in New Zealand and the way professional associations and business corporations in New Zealand deal with the fact that obligations under professional and corporate ethics may conflict with the personal convictions of professionals and employees.</p>

Humanitarian Communication Through the Lens of Feminist Ethics of Care

Ethics are the driving force of the humanitarian field, a domain that has been governed by general and universal ethical principles. Researchers have largely focused on studying the organizational commitment to these principles, paying less attention to the role-specific ethics of this field. Moreover, researchers who consider the humanitarian field from a media studies lens have often focused on media representation, while questions about communication as practice are sidelined. In this paper, I approach humanitarian ethics with a particular focus on role morality and communication practices. With a particular focus on the role of a humanitarian communications specialist, I argue, in this paper, that the feminist ethics of care is a useful ethical framework that can guide communication specialists to better practices when they are in the field of operation. I also answer the following research questions: What are the main ethical principles that humanitarian communication specialists are expected to observe as humanitarians? Why are these principles insufficient? How might feminist ethics of care fill the gap left by current humanitarian principles and what would be the added value of this framework for practicing humanitarian communication? To answer, I ground my approach in an experiential understanding built from my personal experience as a humanitarian communications specialist. Second, I offer a literature review to highlight the common ground between humanitarian ethics and the feminist ethics of care and the added value of the feminist ethics of care why applied by humanitarian communication specialists. Third, I provide some examples of communications practices that may follow the feminist ethics of care model.

Checking the Other and Checking the Self: Role Morality and the Separation of Powers

The concepts of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and checks and balances are related in complicated ways. Jacob T Levy brings this to light in his thought-provoking McDonald Lecture, “The Separation of Powers and the Challenge to Constitutional Democracy.”1 In this response to Levy’s paper I want to further explore the relationship between these three ideas. I will argue that, when thinking about the rule of law, we must consider the idea of “role morality” and its place in constraining power. We should think of the constraints on power that stem from role morality as “internal” as opposed to “external” checks on power. I also suggest that we would do well to broaden our understanding of what the rule of law requires, and to think of it not just as a matter of ensuring impartiality and formal legal equality in the sense that the law applies to all actors within the system. We might benefit from thinking of the rule of law as a weightier moral concept that demands that decision-makers comply with moral ideals, and not just with the rules as laid out.

Legal ethics

Legal ethics can be considered from at least three related viewpoints. First, as ‘professional ethics’, it is a corpus of rules, principles and standards, often embodied in a written code and disseminated, applied and enforced by appropriate governing bodies as a guide to the professional conduct of lawyers. Legal professions set up specific institutions and officers to monitor and assist practitioners and to accumulate experience and expertise in applying detailed provisions in morally complex situations. For some commentators this is primarily regulation or administration and not ethics at all, but for others it is ethics in action or ‘applied ethics’. ‘Applied ethics’ is the second aspect of legal ethics, distinguished from ethics in general by the focus on ethical issues in the context of legal practice, including confidentiality, conflict of interest or acting for a morally disreputable client. Interesting though such questions may be in themselves, some writers do not acknowledge that they are truly questions of ethics, because the duties and privileges of specialist functional groups generally and lawyers in particular are not universalizable. For others, including some feminist ethicists, the ‘agent as such’ does not exist and we all encounter moral difficulties and problems, if we encounter them at all, only in the context of some specific relationship or role, for example in the role of a lawyer. Legal ethics thus requires an analysis of role morality. The third aspect of legal ethics is as an integral element in general philosophical and legal education.