This paper offers four contrasting perspectives on the role of the nurse ethicist from authors based in different areas of world, with different professional backgrounds and at different career ...stages. Each author raises questions about how to understand the role of the nurse ethicist. The first author reflects upon their career, the scope and purpose of their work, ultimately arguing that the distinction between ‘nurse ethicist’ and ‘clinical ethicist’ is largely irrelevant. The second author describes the impact and value that a nurse in an ethics role plays, highlighting the ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘lived experience’ they bring to clinical ethics consultation. However, the second author also warns that the ‘nurse ethicist’ must be cautious in their approach to avoid being viewed as a resource only for nurses. The third author questions the introduction of additional professional distinctions such as ‘nurse ethicist’ on the basis that distinctions threaten the creation of egalitarian healthcare systems, while also acknowledging that clinical ethicists ought not strive for objective attachment in their work. In direct contrast, the final author suggests that the nurse ethicist can play a pivotal role in highlighting and addressing ethical challenges that are specific to nurses. These four short pieces raise questions and point to concepts that will be expanded upon and debated throughout this special issue of Nursing Ethics.
Since the 1960s, it has been recognized that “medical ethics,” the area of inquiry about the obligations of practitioners of medicine, is inadequate for capturing and addressing the complexities ...associated with modern medicine, human health, and wellbeing. Subsequently, a new specialty emerged which involved scholars and professionals from a variety of disciplines who had an interest in healthcare ethics. The name adopted is variously biomedical ethics or bioethics. The practice of bioethics in clinical settings is clinical ethics and its primary aim is to resolve patient care issues and conflicts. Nurses are among these clinical ethicists. They are drawn to the study and practice of bioethics and its applications as way to address the problems encountered in practice. A significant number are among the ranks of clinical ethicists. However, in the role of bio- or clinical ethicist, some retained the title of their original profession, calling themselves nurse ethicists, and some did not. In this article, we explore under which conditions it is permissible or preferable that one retains one’s prior profession’s nomenclature as a prefix to “ethicist,” under which conditions it is not, and why. We emphasize the need for transparency of purpose related to titles and their possible influence on individual and social good.
COVID-19 presents new challenges for psychiatry as clinical management, ethical dilemmas and administrative complications need to be addressed. The psychiatrist should protect the needs and rights of ...the mentally ill while maximising population health and ensuring solidarity, reciprocity and community well-being for all.
In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic ...backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in their attempts to prevent a further erosion of democracy, transgress democratic norms. But the argument advanced in the article is not merely about the ethics of resistance. It begins, perhaps unconventionally, by addressing the affective dimension of resistance to democratic regressions, looking in particular at the powerful feelings of anger and despair that pro-democratic citizens living under a regressive government are likely to experience. As the article argues, these feelings have not only motivational but also epistemic potential, which must be adequately theorized in order to understand how resisters can respond to the ethical challenges facing them.
The Southern Mediterranean border has in the past decade become one of the most deeply contested political spaces in Europe and has been described as a site of the border spectacle. Drawing on ...textual and visual analysis of Twitter messages by two of the most prominent actors in the field, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, and the humanitarian and medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, the article examines the split nature of the Mediterranean border which is, among others, visible in radically different narratives about migrants’ journeys, border deaths and living conditions. The findings challenge previous scholarship about convergence of humanitarianism and policing. The two actors are waging a fierce media battle for moral authority, where they use widely diverging strategies of claiming authority, each of which carries a particular set of ethical dilemmas.
The present study analyses the responses of supply chain professionals facing certain ethical situations while performing their strategic tasks. The objective of this empirical investigation is to ...link the six dimensions of moral intensity (magnitude of consequences, proximity, probability of effect, social consensus, temporal immediacy, and concertation of effect) and two dimensions of ethical ideology (idealism and relativism) with three sequential phases of EDM (Ethical Decision Making), i.e. recognition, judgement, and intention, while purchasers are exposed to ethical dilemmas in B2B context. A mixed experimental research methodology was employed to analyse the responses of 289 purchasing professionals from a developing country. Six dimensions of moral intensity were manipulated into three conditions (Low, High, and Control) using 18 originally constructed purchase scenarios. The study's findings reveal that idealism, relativism, and moral intensity are associated mainly with ethical decision-making stages. Among four sets of ethical ideologies, absolutists were found to be more ethical. The study concludes by giving future research directions and implications for practitioners.
This article explores the nature and dynamics of criminal violence in central Mexico through the lived experience of internally displaced persons (IDPs) over the past ten years. First, the issue of ...internal displacement and the context of violence and drug‐trafficking in Mexico is addressed, then reflections are made on the methodological, security and ethical challenges of doing fieldwork in contexts of violence. Three case studies are drawn upon to illustrate the complexities of violence, organised crime and state (in)action leading to forced displacement. Findings are analysed and framed as grey zones, uncertain and at times indecipherable and terrifying.
Deciding which climate policies to enact, and where and when to enact them, requires weighing their costs against the expected benefits. A key challenge in climate policy is how to value health ...impacts, which are likely to be large and varied, considering that they will accrue over long time horizons (centuries), will occur throughout the world, and will be distributed unevenly within countries depending in part on socioeconomic status. These features raise a number of important economic and ethical issues including how to value human life in different countries at different levels of development, how to value future people, and how much priority to give the poor and disadvantaged. In this article we review each of these issues, describe different approaches for addressing them in quantitative climate policy analysis, and show how their treatment can dramatically change what should be done about climate change. Finally, we use the social cost of carbon, which reflects the cost of adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere, as an example of how analysis of climate impacts is sensitive to ethical assumptions. We consider $20 a reasonable lower bound for the social cost of carbon, but we show that a much higher value is warranted given a strong concern for equity within and across generations.
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