Ethics in criminological research of online communities

The aim of this paper is to outline and critically analyse the ethical dilemmas faced by criminologists tasked with online community research. Online communities and online content serve as a valuable sources of criminological knowledge about online crime and deviance as well as formal and informal norm-making and means of social control. From discussion forum texts and blogs to multimedia posts in open and closed social networking groups, from visual and video materials on Instagram, Youtube, or Tiktok to organized crime group data exchanges in publicly inaccessible communication channels, there is great diversity and variety of the contents and forms of online communication enacted by online communities. Correspondingly, research projects are different – some focusing on the content as a linguistic object, others focusing on social relations, social network structure, and its ethnographic characteristics, while many fall in between. In addition, depending on the research goals and sensitivity of the research questions, researchers may opt for active interaction or passive (and sometimes covert) observation. Therefore there is no one-size-fits-all ethical solution for approaching online communities in criminology. Based on an in-depth analysis of methodological literature, the paper suggests that online community research is largely a matter of situational ethics, wherein researchers must make situation-aware ethical decisions about several key issues. In particular, they should aim to choose and provide arguments regarding: 1) expectations of publicity or privacy in publicly accessible information; 2) the need for informed consent or absence of such need; 3) ensuring balance between anonymity and authorship attribution; 4) securing collected data; and 5) correctly assessing risks to the researched individuals and communities, and the researchers themselves.

An ethical conundrum: the estimation of event attendance

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine issues of ethical corporate social responsibility related to the estimation of event attendance, scrutinize the philosophy of situational ethics as justification for reporting inflated figures and present a potential solution to the dilemma. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual approach is applied. First, the importance of attendance as a primary evaluation variable for economic, social and environmental impact studies, as well as for event stakeholder return on investment in general, is clarified. A brief review follows on the subject of event attendance estimation as reported in both popular and academic literature, before moving into a content analysis of this literature to investigate if there are existing concerns of ethical corporate social responsibility. Findings Attendance at events as reported by popular media remains controversial. Methods for arriving at accurate figures have been investigated and reported upon in academic literature, but there remains no consensus on how to best estimate event crowd size. Inflated attendance numbers reported are too often justified by situational ethics, a non-logical philosophy that has been previously debunked. A content analysis of popular media and academic literature revealed a lack of concern for ethical corporate social responsibility when it comes to the accurate estimation of event attendance. Practical implications The failure to accept ethical corporate social responsibility when estimating attendance harms event stakeholders and leads to misleading and unreliable impact data. Originality/value This subject has not been previously addressed and is important to advancing the professionalism of event management.

Situational ethics in a feminist ethnography on commercial surrogacy in Russia: Negotiating access and authority when recruiting participants through institutional gatekeepers

In this article, I discuss methodological and ethical dilemmas when recruiting participants with the help of medical and institutional gatekeepers during my ethnographic fieldwork on commercial surrogacy in St Petersburg, Russia. Based on four case studies, I argue for the use of situational ethics. Solid up-front ethics that are approved by institutional advisory boards are important to ensure that the researcher has done their best to identify potential ethical issues prior to data collection and offer deontological safeguards. However, as empirical researchers, we are familiar with the unanticipated that is bound to happen once we commence data collection. In such cases, when the proposed and approved ethical conduct is no longer suited and researchers must make new ethical choices, situational ethics that take the immediate context into consideration are crucial. I further argue that situational ethics must not only be an extension of procedural ethics when the latter are no longer suited but an alternative to procedural ethics in order to make the research empowering, reciprocal and transformative of existing disadvantaging power relations. With this article, I contribute to the growing literature that argues in favour of situational ethics.

Can semiotics be used to drive paradigm changes in medical education?

This essay sets out to explain how educational semiotics as a discipline can be used to reform medical education and assessment. This is in response to an ongoing paradigm shift in medical education and assessment that seeks to integrate more qualitative, ethical and professional aspects of medicine into curricula, and develop ways to assess them. This paper suggests that a method to drive this paradigm change might be found in the Peircean idea of suprasubjectivity. This semiotic concept is rooted in the scholastic philosophy of John of St Thomas, but has been reintroduced to modern semiotics through the works of John Deely, Alin Olteanu and, most notably, Charles Sanders Peirce. I approach this task as both a medical educator and a semiotician. In this paper, I provide background information about medical education, paradigm shifts, and the concept of suprasubjectivity in relation to modern educational semiotic literature. I conclude by giving examples of what a suprasubjective approach to medical education and assessment might look like. I do this by drawing an equivalence between the notion of threshold concepts and suprasubjectivity, demonstrating the similarities between their positions. Fundamentally, medical education suffers from tensions of teaching trainee doctors the correct balance of biological science and situational ethics/ judgement. In the transcendence of mind-dependent and mind-independent being the scholastic philosophy of John of St Thomas may be exactly the solution medicine needs to overcome this dichotomy.

KRITIK TERHADAP ETIKA SITUASI JOSEPH FLETCHER

Joseph Fletcher’s theory of situational ethics is so influential since the 20th century until this day. The fruits of his thoughts have spread to all aspects including medical ethics and medical law. Fletcher claimed that the situational ethics that he presented had its source from Lord Jesus’ and Apostle Paul’s teachings. But the theory of situational ethics is not agreed upon by all streams in Christianity including the Reformed stream. In this article, many points of Joseph Fletcher’s situational ethics in his book ‘Situation Ethics: The New Morality’ are discussed and analyzed according to Reformed perspective. KEYWORDS: situational ethics; Joseph Fletcher; love; Reformed.

The micropolitics of posthuman early years leadership assemblages: Exploring more-than-human relationality

Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership. However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing, quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.

INTERPRETATION, UNDERSTANDING, VIRTUE: THE HERMENEUTIC ASPECTS OF K.-O. APEL’S DISCURSIVE ETHICS

The rapid development of the modern world multiplies the debate on ethical issues. Since the twentieth century, disputes over the choice between ethical “universalism” and “situational” ethics have been active. Thus, practical philosophy is one area that needs serious theoretical work to solve its problems. In this regard, it becomes necessary to combine ethical research with other philosophical directions (including hermeneutics). However, today it is also necessary to look for theoretical and methodological models within which traditional hermeneutics would find a reliable theoretical foundation. This is necessary because traditional hermeneutics must sustain the pace of modern scientific development and at the same time maintain its own disciplinary specificity. This requirement is fully met the theory of K.-O. Apel. In difficult modern historical conditions, the discursive ethics of K.-O. Apel is unique and effective due to the fact that it provides universal ethical guidelines based on reasonable principles of mutual understanding and dialogue. In the course of our research, it was shown that the philosophical development of discursive problematics in Germany mainly takes the form of a “hermeneutic-linguistic” study of cognitive processes. Therefore, the presence of elements of hermeneutical knowledge in the framework of the K.-O. Apel’s philosophy is an objective fact. We also found out that transcendental pragmatics is called upon to resolve the issue of the normative structure of discourse, that is, the underlying principles of the functioning of a common communicative-language field. We found that inside his own theory, K-O. Apel skillfully combines various theoretical and methodological approaches. We also showed that discursive ethics, based on the principles of transcendental pragmatics, incorporates certain hermeneutic “elements”. We found out that K.-O. Apel defines his own approach as “transcendental-hermeneutic” and retains a place for interpretative practice at two “levels” of the communicative act. The analysis showed that the interpretation is present in the language interaction, firstly, as the perception and evaluation of the addressee’s “communicative position” of the utterance (we are talking about taking into account the possible communicative competencies of the interlocutor). Secondly, the interpretation is “built-in” in the process of obtaining and “deciphering” the interlocutor’s linguistic expression (meaning the consideration of possible communicative competencies of the interlocutor and an assessment of the context of the utterance). At the same time, we found that, in the opinion of K.-O. Apel, the need for this “transcendental-pragmatic” interpretative work is due to the game (or “transcendental-game”) nature of language interaction. That is, this interaction requires from the subjects of communication active and creative appeal to the context in which this communication takes place.