Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and (...) guided by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

This paper deals with the motivation behind Kant’s conception of “religion” as “the recognition of all our duties as divine commands”. It argues that in order to understand this motivation, we must grasp Kant’s conception of radical evil as social in origin, and the response to it as equally social - the creation of a voluntary, universal “ethical community”. Kant's historical model for this community is a religious community (especially the Christian church), though Kant regards traditional churches or religious (...) communities as suitable to their moral vocation only if they undergo Enlightenment reform. The paper concludes with a plea for the Enlightenment view of religion, and an indictment of the common failure to understand it correctly. (shrink)

This commentary on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History will address three points of interpretation related to Kant’s conception of the ethical community/commonwealth. First, I will raise a number of concerns related to Rossi’s use of Kant’s concept of the highest good. Second, I will examine the relevance of the overall project of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to his discussion of the ethical community, a matter that Rossi does not take up. Third, I (...) will challenge the optimism that Rossi assigns to Perpetual Peace in light of its closing “antinomy between politics and morals.”. (shrink)

As the boundaries of health care continually expand, health care ethics are continually challenged and developed. Ethics is a dynamic conversation among people who live and work together in community. As participants in discussions about health care ethics, nurses discover that individual and communities draw upon a variety of ethical concepts and traditions. This book explores three traditions: Rule Based Ethics, Virtue Ethics, and Feminist Ethics. The text presents the historical-cultural contexts from which each emerged, how each theory frames (...) primary questions of ethics, and how each approaches ethical decision making. Chapters present each ethical theory, followed by extended application of each theory to the context of nursing. A concluding chapter provides a comparative analysis of the care for the frail elderly using all three theories. (shrink)

This book introduces students and practitioners to important ethical concepts through the lives of major thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, John Stuart Mill to the Dalai Lama.

‘The political’ is much talked about today, but its invocation in international political theory is all but entirely dismissed. Yet, moral-ethical articulations do impact theorizing about international life, albeit in a most peculiar and often concealed fashion. In this paper I investigate the modernity of sovereignty in political and international theory and explain why invocations of the moral-ethical are so forcefully liquidated from international relations theory. I examine the constitutive effects of the sovereignty imperative and explain how modern (...) notions of ethics, politics and community are delimited by the need to effect what can be made to count as the pre-political ground of will-formation. A peculiar modernist strategy delimits the imagination of the politically possible in international life. I argue that critique must attend and not dispense with a fundamental paradoxicality (which is transfigured as modernity’s very metaphysical embodiment) that structures a distinctively modern manner of reflecting on ethics and community. The paradoxicality is sovereignty. It is accommodated by a liberal politics that works to conceal a restive anxiety of the modern ‘condition’. This anxiety is in turn productive of a politics with which we must grapple as we elaborate governance in global life. (shrink)

In the so-called knowledge society, communication plays a key role in organizations. In traditional societies, the exchange of personal communication was conducted _face to face_. The development of new technologies has expanded the possibilities of transmitting more information within organizations and faster. Technology has brought greater opportunities for collective communication, as well as greater information management. The impact of these factors has led to some very significant changes in the business world. In these processes of change, within (...) organizations, the role of communication is increasingly playing a critical role. This article defends the relevance of ethical communication in 21st Century leadership. It is argued that leaders will find in ethical communication the means of gaining credibility and the confidence of their most immediate collaborators, their teams, the organizations they lead and the society in which the company operates. Taking the fundamental structure between internal and external communication as a starting point, the article describes the necessary conditions for leadership to develop ethical communication. It establishes the general and common characteristics of people-centered ethical communication, both as individuals and teams. Furthermore, it identifies the conditions that must generate ethical external communication through which leaders can convey messages to their target audience. For this purpose, the article is structured into the following sections: 1. The importance of communication within organizations. 2. Two levels of communication. 3. What is required of a leader-communicator in order to communicate well? 4. The basic Q&A of communication. (shrink)

This article describes a case study in which community consultation was used to assist in the preparation of a research project on viewing self in the mirror after mastectomy. Breast cancer survivors, nurses, and other health care professionals were consulted using a variety of interactive modalities. Over a period of three months, pre-research planning information was obtained from participants. A descriptive qualitative design was used to analyze the data. The ethical goals of community consultation provided the framework for dialogue (...) and the synthesis of information. During this project, the potential benefits of the proposed research study were explored. Possible risks to future participants were discussed, and recommendations for participant protection suggested. Community members provided insight into the legitimacy of the study. Community consultation is a tool that researchers may consider when designing studies. (shrink)

Third World farmers are faced with development projects that foster one-way information flows from the government or organization to the farmers, despite the scholarly and practical interest in participatory development models. This article discusses why development projects do not better support power-sharing and proposes introducing sensemaking methodology into the planning and evaluation stages of agricultural development projects.Participation has been difficult to operationalize for many reasons including that communication models used in development are based on the transmission model of (...) class='Hi'>communication in which information is envisioned as a thing external to people and communication is the movement of that information from the source to the audience. Sense-making methodology, however, is based on a constructing model of communication in which information is conceptualized not as external to people but a result of their observing and communicating activity. Communication is a constructing process. And the “audience” is not the target for messages but active participants in creating information. (shrink)

“Ethical life” is Hegel’s term for the actuality of what Kant calls an “ethical community.” As members of the same ethical community, human beings are related to one another as persons in and only in acting from nothing but respect for the same practical law. Kant and Hegel both take ethical life to be a necessary, nay, the highest, end of pure reason. I argue that this is correct. And I identify the idea of ethical (...) life with the idea of a peculiar form of love. Kant and Hegel disagree—in a curiously reciprocal fashion—about the reach of ethical life and about our capacity to know it to reside within our power: while Kant identifies ethical life with the actuality of the ethical community of all possible human beings, Hegel holds that it is necessarily limited to some particular body politic; and while Hegel thinks that to be a human being is to self-knowingly co-constitute an ethical community, Kant believes that it is to be unable to know oneself to even be apt for this. With Hegel and against Kant, I argue that the only way to have the idea of ethical life is to live it. But with Kant and against a naïve form of Hegelianism, I argue that to be conscious of oneself as a human being, a practically rational animal, is to be conscious of oneself as morally evil, i.e. as actively prone to deeming one’s own particularity the supreme law. I show that this entails Hegelian particularism. And I end by noting that this saddles the Hegelian with the task of demonstrating that ethical particularization belongs to the very idea of pure reason itself, objectively conceived. (shrink)

John Charvet presents an original philosophical theory that transcends the liberal-communitarian debate and justifies universally valid principles of prudential and moral reason. The Idea of an Ethical Community rejects contemporary positions - the liberal theorist's politically neutral stance toward alternative conceptions of good, on the one hand, and the communitarian's moral relativism, on the other. Charvet espouses what he calls an "antirealist" view of shared norms and maintains that although reason cannot be unconditionally authoritative, there can be conditionally definitive (...) rational principles. His book advances a view of the ethical community consistent both with the contractarian idea of John Rawls's early work. A Theory of Justice and with a due emphasis on communitarian values. But he grounds this view of the ethical community in a theory of the autonomous person and a theory of value. (shrink)

Background Ethics communication has been described as a pedagogical form, promoting development of ethical competence among nursing students. The ‘one to five method’ was developed by this research group as a tool for facilitating ethical communication in groups among healthcare professionals but has not yet been evaluated. Aim To explore post-graduate nursing students’ experiences of practicing ethical communication in groups Research design The study design is qualitative. Participants and research context The study comprised 12 (...) nursing students on a post-graduate course for Registered Nurses focusing on palliative care. After education the students engaged as participants and facilitators in ethics communication in groups, with support from the ‘one to five method’. Data were derived from the students written reflections and subjected to thematic analysis. Ethical considerations The study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards in the 2013 Helsinki Declaration and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty at Umeå University Results An overall theme was identified, ‘being supported to achieve a democratic dialogue concerning ethical problems’ and five themes, related to each step of the ‘one to five method’. The themes concerned: putting the experience of an ethical dilemma into words; being confirmed by shared emotions; defining the value conflict using ethical principles; expressing virtues of empathy and raised awareness; jointly finding various action approaches. Discussion Regular ethics communication in groups encourages nursing students to actively seek understanding and clarification of ethically difficult situations. Conclusions The results indicate that ethics communication in groups could be a way of developing virtues during education. Interventions using the ‘one to five method’ need to be further studied among student groups from other healthcare contexts. (shrink)

This paper explores the connection between supererogation and the integrity of ethical agents. It argues two theses: there is a generally unrecognized but crucial social dimension to the moral integrity of individuals which challenges individual ideals and encourages supererogation; the social dimension of integrity, however, must have limits that preserve the individuals's integrity. The concept of integrity is explored through recent works by Christine Korsgaard, Charles Taylor, and Susan Babbitt. A life of integrity is in part a life whereby (...) one 'lives up to' one's own deeply held values. Yet, as one seeks to transcend the realm of the morally customary or the dutiful, one must check one's progress not only against one's own ideals but against the ideals and behavior of the ethical community. To answer affirmatively to one's own ideals is to hear the call of integrity both from within oneself and from without. However, by being free to hear, the freedom to close one's ears inevitably will arise. Only actions displaying such freedom can be actions of moral integrity. Since supererogatory actions are always left to an agent's discretion-that is, are fully optional-they show in paradigmatic fashion the integrity of moral agents. While an ethic of integrity and supererogation provides challenges to members of an ethical community by encouraging them continually to reevaluate their actions and character in reference to postulated ideals, it also leads us to be quite wary of judging individual's moral motives from the outside. A passage by Jonathan Kozol is cited that suggests our society routinely demands supererogatory action from its poorest members. This is illegitimate since they live in conditions that alienate rather than integrate them both with themselves and with the rest of the community. (shrink)

The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised a global concern and calls for an urgent response. During this perpetual time of epidemic crisis, philosophy has to stand on trial and provide a responsible justification for how it is still relevant and can be of used during this global crisis. In such a time of crisis like that of COVID-19, this paper offers a philosophical reflection from within the possibility/impossibility of community thinking in India, and the demand for an ethical responsivity (...) and response-ability to act ethically towards the Other (autrui) to show that philosophy always already emerges from within the context of crisis. As an alternative outlook to the thinking of totalitarian singularity and individualism, community—in its possible and impossible making—can offer more meaningful engagement with the other human being by being responsible and extending care towards the Other. The thinking of a shared community life is the facticity of one’s own being-together-in-common without the dismissal of individual differences as can be seen in the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, and there is an ethical demand that comes from the face-to-face ethical relationship with the Other as argued by Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

Governmental reactions to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as ethics communication. Governments can contain the disease and thereby mitigate the detrimental public health impact; allow the virus to spread to reach herd immunity; test, track, isolate, and treat; and suppress the disease regionally. An observation of Sweden and Finland showed a difference in feasible ways to communicate the chosen policy to the citizenry. Sweden assumed the herd immunity strategy and backed it up with health utilitarian arguments. (...) This was easy to communicate to the Swedish people, who appreciated the voluntary restrictions approach and trusted their decision makers. Finland chose the contain and mitigate strategy and was towards the end of the observation period apparently hesitating between suppression and the test, track, isolate, and treat approach. Both are difficult to communicate to the general public accurately, truthfully, and acceptably. Apart from health utilitarian argumentation, something like the republican political philosophy or selective truth telling are needed. The application of republicanism to the issue, however, is problematic, and hiding the truth seems to go against the basic tenets of liberal democracy. (shrink)

Background On a daily basis, healthcare professionals deal with various ethical issues and it can be difficult to determine how to act best. Clinical ethics support (CES) has been developed to provide support for healthcare professionals dealing with complex ethical issues. A long-term perspective of participating in inter-professional dialogue and reflective-based CES sessions is seemingly sparse in the literature. Research aim The aim was to describe experiences of impact of Inter-professional Ethics Communication in groups (IEC) based on (...) Habermas’ theory of communicative actions, after 6 months from the perspective of an inter-professional team. Research design A qualitative inductive approach was chosen, and individual interviews ( n = 13) were conducted. Interview data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Participants The participants, 10 females and two males, represented assistant nurses, registered nurses, physicians, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, welfare officers and psychologists. Each had attended at least four IEC sessions. Ethical considerations The study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board in Umeå, Sweden, and it has been undertaken in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration. Findings Overall, the descriptions expressed a perceived achievement of a deepened and integrated ethical awareness that increased the participants’ awareness of ethically difficult situations as well as their own ethical thinking, actions and approaches in daily work. Perspectives were shared and the team become more welded. They carried the memories of the reflections within them, which was perceived as supportive when encountered new ethically situations. Discussion Putting words to unarticulated thoughts may stimulate repeated reflections, leading to new insights and alternative thoughts. Conclusion The outcome of IEC sessions 6 months following the last session can be described as an incorporated knowledge that enables actions in ethically difficult situations based on an ethical awareness both at a ‘We-level’ and an ‘I-level’. (shrink)

Charvet’s arguments revolve around very recent discussions in Anglo-American analytical ethics and political philosophy. He considers and rejects, for example, arguments in favor of both Thomas Nagel’s version of ethical realism and the view that value is constituted by fulfillment of our strongest desires. Both suffer from the inadequate “shared assumption as to the fundamental independence of desire and value, and hence desire and reason”. Instead, we should see both as “interdependent”; value “comes into the world through the medium (...) of the interacting desire and the belief systems of the organism as these articulate and project onto the environment the organism’s needs”. He likewise rejects Nagel’s and Parfit’s views on prudential rationality and personal identity, arguing that no “attempt to establish [personal identity] purely in impersonal terms” can succeed, that “the self is a basic primitive concept that is presupposed in all experience”. (shrink)

There is a broad recognition that moral norms are most usefully justified not as mere transcriptions of biblical rules, or even as sophisticated references to key narrative themes, but rather as coherent social embodiments of a community formed by Scripture.

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity (...) and that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community. (shrink)

Liberal democracy has been experiencing a crisis of representation over the last decade, as a disconnect has emerged from some of the foundational principles of liberalism such as personal freedom and equality. In this article, I argue that in the third part of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason we can find resources to better understand and counteract this crisis of liberal democracy. Kant gives a powerful argument to include an invisible ethical community under a political community, (...) and this ethical community has to take the form of a church. Kant argues then that any political system, and so also liberal democracy, requires religion to ally citizens in a foundational way with the general principles of that system. This would commit liberal nations to having their foundational principles buoyed by religion. Towards the close of the essay, I attend to how this might impact on liberalism’s commitment to religious and ideological pluralism. (shrink)

Communication is crucial to the fulfillment of organizational members'' responsibilities. Bavelas et al. (1990) describe equivocation as nonstraightforward communication. It appears ambiguous, contradictory, obscure or even evasive. In their view, equivocation is a form of information control for the purpose of maintaining social relationships. It is avoidance; a response chosen when all other communication choices in the situation would lead to negative consequences.A critical role of accountants and other organizational members is the communication of results and (...) activities to management. Professional standards require that accountants be objective and unbiased reporters. If results are clearly reported to management, then costs associated with failed projects have the potential of being contained or minimized. The ethical communication choice for a failed project is a clear and fair representation. However, organizational members may choose to equivocate in order to maintain social relationships in the organizational environment. (shrink)

It has been proposed that the social networking site Facebook is suitable for building communities and strengthening customer relationships, and also many organizations that promote ethical consumption have established online communities there. However, because of the newness of ethical online communities, little is known about the extent to which consumer participation in them produces positive outcomes. The present study aims at exploring such outcomes: first, we identify consumer-perceived benefits from ethical community participation, and second, we explore whether (...) these benefits influence the activity promoted, as well as consumer loyalty toward the ethical Facebook community. The results of an online survey of ethical community participants reveal that informational benefits reinforce consumers’ ethical consumption behavior. Social and entertainment benefits, in turn, have a positive influence on loyalty to the community. The present study further reveals that the consumers’ prior commitment to ethical consumption influences the perceived benefits: the affective commitment to ethical consumption has a positive, and the continuance commitment a negative influence on the benefits. Thus, the more consumers feel they engage in ethical consumption because of an emotional attachment, the higher the perceived benefits from online community participation are. The more consumers perceive that their ethical consumption is driven by lack of choice, the fewer the benefits. Overall, the perceived benefits were at a relatively low level, which is somewhat alarming and highlights the need to manage the communities more efficiently. (shrink)

Litigation and mediation offer substantive and important approaches toward resolving environmental disputes. Yet as currently practiced both approaches have shortcomings. For example, litigation often promotes divisive, adversarial relationships. Mediation often yields untenable ground given the seriousness of many environmental problems. This paper offers a reconception of both approaches. It is argued that both litigation and mediation need to be embedded within a more ethically comprehensive context, one of 'courting ethical community'. Discussion focuses on what it means in this sense (...) to court, on what defines and bounds the ethical, and how courting depends on understanding not only differences but commonalities in people's environmental views and values. (shrink)

This paper seeks to answer the question how environmental ethics is approached in Latin America. I begin by discussing a suitable method for interpreting the question of whether there is a culturally based ethics, given that one may focus either on theory or on actually existing moral practices. Next, I consider some of the possible sources of Latin America's distinctiveness, namely its professional, cultural, and economic-historical particularities, followed by a discussion of the practice and theory of environmental ethics extant in (...) the area. I claim that there is a concrete environmental ethics in Latin America, which can be described by the notions of community, resistance and autonomy, and suggest that this concrete ethic may be assessed both from a culture-internal and from a culture-external point of view. I close by proposing that Latin American environmental ethics may provide illuminating models for appropriate ways of acting in hybrid communities made up of human beings and nature. (shrink)

As technology redefines relationships, new assumptions are emerging about the ethics of persuasion. In an increasingly global economy, technology is forcing greater transparency onto businesses and governments as the moral context of their communications is inseparable from the competitive nature of the business world. This article suggests that moral boundaries will be set naturally, that consumers have a moral obligation to excercise "due diligence" in their acceptance of messages, and that no one is in charge of the global economy's conventions (...) and morality. The system ultimately depends on participants to keep their own self-interested boat in the race. (shrink)

A psychiatric advance directive (PAD) is a communication tool that promotes patients’ autonomy and gives capacitated adults who live with serious mental illnesses the ability to record their preferences for care and designate a proxy decision maker before a healthcare crisis. Despite a high degree of interest by patients and previous studies that recommend that clinicians facilitate the completion of PADs, the rate of implementation of PADs remains low. Research indicates that many clinicians lack the necessary experience to facilitate (...) the completion of PADs and to use them, and, as a consequence, do not effectively engage patients about PADs. This study developed practical recommendations for clinicians to improve their ability to communicate and facilitate PADs. We (1) thematically analyze definitions of PADs published in 118 articles across disciplines, and (2) present our recommendations for enhanced communication in clinical practice that emphasize patient-centeredness, usefulness, and clarity, aligned with evidence-based practices that put patients’ autonomy and understanding first. While there is no one-sizefits- all script to engage patients in complex conversations, our recommended strategies include an emphasis on patients’ autonomy, the adaptation of word choices, the use of metaphor not simile, and checking for patients’ understanding as effective methods of clinical communication. (shrink)

This essay begins a conversation between Bernard Williams and Confucius (of the Analects ) in response to the general question of whether individuals are internally motivated in adopting role-specific reasons for action. It is argued that certain social roles such as Father, Son, Husband, Wife, Minister or Ruler, and Citizen or Subject are thick ethical concepts operative in Confucian ethical communities, such that the application of these thick ethical concepts results in role-specific internal reasons for action. If (...) so, the Confucian emphasis on li 禮 constitutes ethical knowledge regarding the applicability of these thick ethical concepts, the practice of which actively offers individuals reasons to apply their social roles. This expands Williams' ethical theorizing to account for the ethical significance of social roles and relationships within Confucian ethical communities, as the collective practice of li within a Confucian ethical community serves as a background to the sort of ethical theorizing favored by Williams. (shrink)