High ethical standards have always been at the core of the Afghan culture throughout the country. Unfortunately, over the past few years in Afghanistan, bribery and corruption have become more widespread throughout the government offices as employees attempt to serve their customers. This quantitative study of 98 male and 116 female Afghan-American respondents analyzes their perceptions regarding the recognition of dilemmas related to ethics and bribery. The 214Afghan-American responses are compared with the average scores of 602 American respondents from the (...) retail industry. The groups’ scores are significantly different with the later reporting less tolerance for unethical behavior. It appears that there are no differences in the responses of Afghan males and females. The younger generation seems to be as ethically mature as the older Afghans. Finally, higher education levels among the Afghan respondents demonstrated a statistically significant and positive correlation toward ethical maturity. Results and implications are presented. (shrink)

In most socialised health systems there are formal processes that manage resource scarcity and determine the allocation of funds to health services in accordance with their priority. In this analysis, part of a larger qualitative study examining the ethical issues entailed in doctors’ participation as technical experts in priority setting, we describe the values and ethical commitments of doctors who engage in priority setting and make an empirically derived contribution towards the identification of an ethical framework for doctors’ macroallocation work. (...) We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 doctors, each of whom participated in macroallocation at one or more levels of the Australian health system. Our sampling, data-collection, and analysis strategies were closely modelled on grounded moral analysis, an iterative empirical bioethics methodology that employs contemporaneous interchange between the ethical and empirical to support normative claims grounded in practice. The values held in common by the doctors in our sample related to the domains of personal ethics, justice, and practices of argumentation. Applying the principles of grounded moral analysis, we identified that our participants’ ideas of the good in macroallocation and their normative insights into the practice were strongly aligned with the three levels of Paul Ricoeur’s ‘little ethics’: ‘aiming at the “good life” lived with and for others in just institutions’. Our findings suggest new ways of understanding how doctors’ values might have procedural and substantive impacts on macroallocation, and challenge the prevailing assumption that doctors in this milieu are motivated primarily by deontological considerations. Our empirical bioethics approach enabled us to identify an ethical framework for medical work in macroallocation that was grounded in the values and ethical intuitions of doctors engaged in actions of distributive justice. The concordance between Ricoeur’s ‘little ethics’ and macroallocation practitioners’ experiences, and its embrace of mutuality, suggest that it has the potential to guide practice, support ethical reflection, and harmonise deliberative practices amongst actors in macroallocation generally. (shrink)

Using insights from two of the major proponents of the hermeneutical approach, Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt—who both recognized the ethicopolitical importance of narrative and acknowledged some of the dangers associated with it—I will flesh out the worry that “narrativity” in political theory has been overly attentive to story telling and not heedful enough of story listening. More specifically, even if, as Ricoeur says, “narrative intelligence” is crucial for self-understanding, that does not mean, as he invites us to, that we (...) should always seek to develop a “narrative identity” or become, as he says, “the narrator of our own life story.” I offer that, perhaps inadvertently, such an injunction might turn out to be detrimental to the “art of listening.” This, however, must also be cultivated if we want to do justice to our narrative character and expect narrative to have the political role that both Ricoeur and Arendt envisaged. Thus, although there certainly is a “redemptive power” in narrative, when the latter is understood primarily as the act of narration or as the telling of stories, there is a danger to it as well. Such a danger, I think, intensifies at a time like ours, when, as some scholars have noted, “communicative abundance” or the “ceaseless production of redundancy” in traditional and social media has often led to the impoverishment of the public conversation. (shrink)