Rational Choice and Moral Decision Making in Research

University psychology and sociology researchers rated the likelihood they would engage in misconduct as described in 9 research scenarios, while also making moral judgments and rating the likelihood of discovery and sanctions. Multiple regression revealed significant effects across various scenarios for moral judgment as well as shame and embarrassment on reducing misconduct. The effects on misconduct of the perceived probability of sanctions were conditioned on moral judgments in some scenarios. The results have implications for how universities address the prevention, detection, and sanctioning of research misconduct.     

Confucian Dynamism,the Role of Money and Consumer Ethical Beliefs: An Exploratory Study in Taiwan

Consumer ethics is the moral principles and standards that guide consumers to determine the certain consumption behaviors are ethically right or wrong. Whereas cultural and personal dimensions are crucial constructs affecting individual ethical attitudes and behaviors, few studies consider Confucian dynamism and the role of money in consumer ethics. Confucian dynamism, a cultural dimension based on Confucianism, has played a central role in guiding moral obligations and ethics in human relations in several East Asian countries. Thus, this study tested its hypotheses using a sample of 521 respondents obtained via a systematic random sampling technique. The authors find that individuals with a higher tendency to Confucian dynamism are less tolerant of unethical practices. These findings also show that the role of money partially influences consumer ethical beliefs. Finally, we examine the impact of demographic variables and find age and education affect consideration of ethical values.     

Ethics and practices of re‐presentation: Witnessing self and other

Context: The challenge of producing ethical representational practices is of critical interest to both practitioner‐researchers and research theorists. For practitioners becoming researchers a central ethical question may be how to manage a relational presence in writing their research, in ways that acknowledge participants, the research relationship, and a researcher's own subjectivity. Focus: The article offers examples from practitioner research to illustrate and theorise how researcher subjectivity is managed through the use of witnessing practices as a representational strategy. Witnessing practices – translated into counselling research from narrative therapy – offer researchers a strategy to take up a reflexive, relational presence in research reports. Discussion: Researcher witnessing honours the contributions of research participants as well as making visible the shaping effects of the research on a researcher's life. Through witnessing self and other, and thus declaring presence, privilege and partiality, re‐presentational ethics are made transparent.     

Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention (BCBT-SP) via Video Telehealth: A Case Example During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Although veterans living in remote/rural areas are at elevated risk for suicide, there is very little research specific to treating suicidal veterans who present with barriers to in-person care. The current study aims to examine the delivery of brief cognitive-behavioral therapy for suicide prevention (BCBT-SP) via Clinical Video Telehealth (CVT) to the home of a veteran discharged from the psychiatric inpatient unit after a recent suicide attempt. Preliminary data on acceptability, feasibility, and changes in symptoms were gathered. The veteran received treatment during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak and additional adaptations were made accordingly. The veteran did not engage in any suicidal behavior during the course of treatment, and suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety decreased as treatment progressed. The results provide initial support for the feasibility of BCBT-SP via CVT to the home.     

Reflective,Critical, and Reconstructing Contemporary Chinese Ethics

Contemporary Chinese ethics faces two theoretical tasks: expansion in breadth and exploration in depth. The former refers to the opening of the problem area, and the latter refers to the deepening of ethics itself. To get out of the dilemma that academic results in the area are abundant in quantity but low in quality, contemporary Chinese ethics should expand and deepen in the three dimensions, namely, “no longer,” “being” and “not yet.” Within the framework of “no longer,” efforts should be made to deepen the studies of the history of moral concept and practice, and the ethics of culture from the perspective of genetics; with regard to the perspective of “being,” the ethical reflection on public crisis, system and Lnstitutional ethics, the dilemma of virtue theory and normative theory, and the conflicts and generalization between different moral paradigms will become the difficulties that require in-depth analysis and demonstration. As for the contemporary Chinese ethics towards “not yet,” attention must be paid to the duality of modern technology, the origin of human ethics based on building a community with a shared future for mankind and the moral philosophy that goes deep into people’s minds. To complete the above theoretical tasks, one must have judgment, thinking, and willingness, which can only be cultivated in the experience and thinking of “practical” life.     

Bion's Notes on memory and desire – its initial clinical reception in the United States: A note on archival material

While Bion's 1967 memory and desire paper reflected a crucial episode in his clinical thinking during his epistemological period, it was also central to his evolution as a Kleinian psychoanalyst who worked with seriously disturbed adult patients. The author explicates and contextualizes these claims with a new archival document, the Los Angeles Seminars delivered by Bion in April 1967, and the full‐length version of Notes on memory and desire. Bion here instigated a radical departure from years of theory‐laden work when he made his clinical work and ideas accessible to a new audience of American Freudian analysts. While this new group was keenly interested to hear about Bion's clinical technique with both borderline and psychotic patients, there were varied reactions to Bion's ideas on the technical implications of the analyst's abandonment of memory and desire. Both the Los Angeles Seminars and Notes elicited responses ranging from bewilderment, admiration to skepticism amongst his audience of listeners and readers. These materials also however allow for a more complete and systematic presentation of important ideas about analytic technique – and while his ideas in this domain have been long valued and known by many psychoanalysts, this contribution stresses the crucial aspect of the reception of his ideas about technique in a particular American context. American analysts gained a much more explicit idea of how Bion worked analytically, how he listened, formulated interpretations and factored in the analyst's listening receptivity in the here‐and‐now. The author concludes with a consideration of the importance of Bion's American reception in 1967.     

Nurturing Faith for Action: Theological Education and Global Responsibility

Ghana hopes to parlay the financial promises of oil recovery into a better life for its people. If Ghana succeeds, it would be a model for the developing world. But Ghana's capacity to overcome poverty and support human dignity will be stronger if the rest of us who also hold that value commit more truly to it. As people of faith, as leaders of institutions, as educators, we face substantive questions about how our own actions, business decisions, and consumptive practices contribute to the larger issues of oil, consumerism, and planetary health. A course that asks not just Christian scholars and clergy, but leaders of theological institutions, church bodies, businesses, and others, to consider an ethical, paradigmatic shift toward a whole‐world ethic of well‐being is in order.     

MORTALITY,INTEGRITY, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (WHO ARE YOU TO ME? WHO AM I TO YOU?)

The author narrates her experience of mourning her therapist's sudden death. The profession has neglected implications of the analyst's mortality: what is lost or vulnerable to loss? What is that vulnerability's function? The author's process of mourning included her writing and her becoming an analyst. Both pursuits inspired reflections on mortality in two overlapping senses: bodily (the analyst is mortal and can die) and character (the analyst is mortal and can err). The subject thus expands to include impaired character and ethical violations. Paradoxically, the analyst's human limitations threaten each psychoanalytic situation, but also enable it: human imperfection animates the work. The essay ends with a specific example of integrity.     

Making sense of surveys and censuses: Issues in religious self-identification

Abstract

Censuses and surveys shape decisions, discourse and debates about people and their lived environments. The outcomes, in the case of a census, inform governments about resource distribution but also shape people's self-understanding about who they are and where they may be going. How people self-identify on censuses and surveys produces certain types of knowledge. This introduction emphasises the impact of those instruments on knowledge production and how numbers can be employed, often anecdotally, to further interests and claims. The way academics use and interpret such instruments has ethical and normative dimensions: numbers are not neutral but shape and are shaped by perceptions and identities. This introduction to a thematic issue of Religion introduces the contributing authors' diverse – historical, qualitative and quantitative – approaches that work together to produce their own kind of multi-disciplinary, academically located knowledge.