Anonymization
(draft)

Confidentiality is a key principle of institutional ethics along with beneficence and (free, prior and informed) consent. Respecting the privacy rights of participants is a core aspect of ethical research. This may involve ensuring that the identities of participants are kept confidential and that they cannot be identified in research produced with the information that they have provided. In some kinds of scientific and social scientific research information can easily be presented as anonymous – i.e. with no name –  in large data sets for quantitative research, for example. But in other types of research, particularly in the arts and humanities, this may not be possible due to the kind of research practice undertaken, for example, visual work, or even desirable, especially if issues of subjectivity are important and narrative styles are integral to the practice. Certain kinds of research are based on self-identification and require situated and positioned self-reflection, for example autoethnography, and so maintaining confidentiality through anonymity runs counter to the conceptual framework adopted. However, fiction can be used, or if not, other ways for the information to be shared which are not harmful to the participant can be explored.

When working with small groups and communities, or with well-known individuals or institutions, that are ‘famous’ or clearly recognisable, it may not be possible to ensure that particular pieces of information are dis-connected from certain specific identifying features. In these instances, it is vital that researcher make clear to participations the risks of being exposed, especially if the research is in anyway sensitive… click for full text.

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Lee Ann Fujii, ‘Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, PS: Political Science & Politics, (2012), 45 (4): 717–23.

[2] Lee Ann Fujii, ‘Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, PS: Political Science & Politics, (2012), 45 (4): 717–23.

[3] Lee Ann Fujii, ‘Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, PS: Political Science & Politics, (2012), 45 (4): 717–23.

[4] Caitlin Cahill, Farhana Sultana and Rachel Pain, ‘Participatory Ethics: Politics, Practices, Institutions’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies – Special Issue on Participatory Ethics, (2007) 6(3): 304-18, 301.

[5] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/thinkingmethods/2015/07/01/ethics-and-visual-research/

[6] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/thinkingmethods/2015/07/01/ethics-and-visual-research/

[7] Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research, an ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper. See http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/421/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-011.pdf.

[8] Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research, an ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper. See http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/421/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-011.pdf.

[9] Visual Ethics: Ethical Issues in Visual Research, an ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Review Paper. See http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/421/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-011.pdf.

[10] See E. Barrett, B. Martin, J. Koolmatrie, D. Dank, D. Swan. C. Creed. M. Stephens, A. Matthews, B. Webb, L. Solomon, D. Gilson, and D. Toby, ‘Guidelines and principles for pre-ethical approaches to Indigenous Australian research,’ in 2016: Proceedings of the Art Ethics and Indigeneity Symposium, (Melbourne, Vic.: University of Melbourne, 2016), 1–3.

[11] See for example, BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.), paras. 40-51.

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Benefit

Benefit is one of the central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. It is often used along with its synonym ‘minimising harm’, to form the principle of ‘benefit not harm.’[1] For example, the Economic and Social Research Council’s guidelines for ethics state that ‘research should aim to maximise benefit for individuals and society and minimise risk and harm.’[2]  The idea of ‘no harm’ in research ethics is rooted in nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian liberalism. Mill argued that individuals should have the liberty to act as they wish, except if their actions cause harm to others.[3] This stance has influenced some of the central twentieth-century thinking about research ethics.  Thus, avoiding harm was one of the basic ethical principles of the Nuremberg Code, which was written in 1947 following the Nuremberg trials of World War Two war criminals, including medical doctors who had conducted experiments on human subjects. The Nuremberg Code set forth ten ethics principles for research involving human experimentation.[4] The principle of ‘no harm’ was supplemented with an understanding of benefit as an obligation in the 1979 Belmont Report, which was published by the USA’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research.[5] The Belmont Commission’s task was to identify the ethical principles that should underlie the conduct of research involving human subjects, and to develop guidelines. The Belmont Report defined benefit as ‘something of positive value related to health or welfare,’[6] and clarified that benefit is not an act of kindness, but rather an obligation. Researchers, and particularly medical researchers, are required ‘to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks.’[7]

The definition of benefit as potentially justifying certain risks or harm, such as in the case of medical experimentation in which research subjects may suffer harm in the name of the ‘greater good’ of the public, has been widely criticised. Many researchers and research participants have argued that since researchers derive a range of benefits from conducting research, benefits should also be ensured for their research participants.[8]  The meaning of benefit and the complex relationships and ethical problems that could result from expectations for benefits have also been questioned. For example, researchers have noted that research participants may expect tangible benefits other than monetary payments, such as assistance in legal matters, in dealing with authorities or in finding work.[9] In this context, defining ‘benefit’ should be part of planning specific research projects, including questions such as who will benefit from this particular research, in what way, and how to ensure that the research will be beneficial to all stakeholders.[10]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] See for instance the webpage of University College London’s Research Ethics Committee: Accepted Ethical Standards ‘which all researchers and ethical committees are expected to comply with.’ The standards are: Informed Consent, Confidentiality, and Benefit not Harm. The principle of Benefit not Harm means: ‘Research involving human participants must have a benefit to society and the risks involved to participants must be balanced against the potential benefit to the overall community.’ https://ethics.grad.ucl.ac.uk/accepted-ethical-standards.php. Accessed 5 August 2020.

[2] This is the first of the core principles for ethical research on the Economic and Social Research Council’s website. https://esrc.ukri.org/funding/guidance-for-applicants/research-ethics/our-core-principles/ accessed 4 August 2020.

[3] Clifford G Christians, 'Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,' in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Nrman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Second edi (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 142.

[4] Evelyne Shuster, 'Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code,' New England Journal of Medicine 337, no. 20 (November 13, 1997): 1436–40, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

[5] Kenneth John Ryan et al., 'The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research,' Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, USA, 1979, https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00780a005.

[6] Ryan et al., 'The Belmont Report.’

[7] Ryan et al., 'The Belmont Report.’

[8] See for example A. B. Zwi et al., 'Placing Ethics in the Centre: Negotiating New Spaces for Ethical Research in Conflict Situations,' Global Public Health 1, no. 3 (2006): 268, https://doi.org/10.1080/17441690600673866.

[9] Lee Ann Fujii, 'Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,' PS - Political Science and Politics 45, no. 4 (2012): 719, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096512000819.

[10] Emmanuel Osuteye et al., 'Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Equality,' KNOW Working Paper Series 1, no. 1 (2019): 9.

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Care

The term ‘care’ relates to dependencies and relationships between human beings. The ethics of care have been generally defined by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher as 

a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.[1]

 Tronto identifies four types of care: ‘caring about, i.e. recognizing a need for care; caring for, i.e. taking responsibility to meet that need; care giving, i.e. the actual physical work of providing care; and, finally, care receiving, i.e. the evaluation of how well the care provided had met the caring need.’[2]

Care ethics offer potential alternative ways of looking at liberal human rights theory, which is based on universal principles such as egalitarianism, justice and autonomy. Virginia Held argues that the ethics of care is a distinct moral theory, which is both a practice and a value. She points out that care is characterized by its focus on relationships, but these are often situated within contexts of power and control. Held therefore stresses the significance of care ethics in social, political and global contexts.[3] Relationships and responsibilities which extend beyond national borders to the global scale, involves power inequalities, colonial legacies and global politics.[4] Care ethics is useful in understanding and recognising harm, often caused unintentionally by individuals through their participation in various institutions such as the global policies of states or the economic interests of commercial corporations. Global ‘relationships of responsibility’ allow for understanding various levels of accountability as relationships of care and commitments.[5] Such an understanding differs from an altruistic approach, because it is based on a sense of solidarity,[6] that can be understood relationally rather than as a commitment which grows out of legal obligations or universal abstract moral principles. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Joan B. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), 103.

[2] Joan C. Tronto, 'Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose,' Ethics and Social Welfare 4, no. 2 (2010): 160, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2010.484259.

[3] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.

[4] See for example Fiona Robinson, 'The Ethics of Care,' The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195325911.003.0020; Carol C. Gould, “Transnational Solidarities,' Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 148–64, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00371.x; Iris Marion Young, 'Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,' Justice and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2006): 102–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550744.005; Joan C. Tronto, 'Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,' Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 303–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[5] Tronto, 'Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics.'

[6] Anjali Dutt and Danielle Kohfeldt, 'Towards a Liberatory Ethics of Care Framework for Organizing Social Change,' Journal of Social and Political Psychology 6, no. 2 (2018): 584, https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v6i2.909.

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Co-production

Co-production in relation to research refers to a method of collaborating with partners to jointly define research questions and generate new knowledge, projects or products. The process of co-production involves collaborating with different stakeholders in order to deliver an outcome or process that is grounded in a relevant social, cultural, and political context. Co-production incorporates various ways that different stakeholders use in order to approach, understand and deal with the research questions. Co-produced knowledge or products are not only integrated but can also be transformational and become agents of change which can affect different stakeholders.[1] In this way, knowledge enables social learning that can challenge existing assumptions which prevent transformative change.[2]The societal effects of knowledge co-production therefore include not only gaining new knowledge, but also other possible impacts such as encouraging network building, increasing public involvement, developing a wider understanding of different perspectives, and enhancing decision making capacities.[3]

Since co-produced research is performed by multiple stakeholders, interactions and communication between partners stand at the core of this method. This highlights the centrality of recognition and respect for the knowledge and value systems of the various stakeholders,[4] and the need to carefully define common goals and purposes, agree about the details of working together, and make sure that all partners gain something out of the project.[5]

Differences can lead to tensions, for example around issues of power relations between partners, balancing different expectations and interests, allocation of time and resources, and ways of working through disagreements, misunderstandings or conflicts. Problematic attitudes may surface, such as competition, ethnocentrism or paternalism.[6] In such contexts, even attempts to discuss ethical issues could run the risk of re-embedding colonial ideas about relationship, respect, and responsibility.[7] While institutional ethics principles and procedures are important starting points for thinking about research ethics, they offer no tools for dealing with such issues. There is a need for partners involved in co-producing research to reflect on their relational responsibilities, in order to open up possibilities for positive interaction and transformation. Such a process can contribute to the development of understandings of research ethics, not only personally but also from an institutional perspective.  

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] H. Z. Schuttenberg and Heidi K. Guth, 'Seeking Our Shared Wisdom: A Framework for Understanding Knowledge Coproduction and Coproductive Capacities,' Ecology and Society 20, no. 1 (2015): 14; Susanne C. Moser, 'Can Science on Transformation Transform Science? Lessons from Co-Design,' Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 20 (2016): 107.

[2] Emmanuel Osuteye et al., “Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Equality,” KNOW Working Paper Series 1, no. 1 (2019): 11.

[3] Alexander Walter et al., 'Measuring Societal Effects of Transdisciplinary Research Projects: Design and Application of an Evaluation Method,' Evaluation and Program Planning 30, no. 4 (2007): 332–33.

[4] Emma Visman et al., 'Learning to Support Co-Production Learning between at-Risk Groups , Humanitarian and Development Practitioners, Policymakers, Scientists and Academics,' BRACED Learning Papers, no. 3 (2016): 2, http://www.braced.org/resources/i/?id=f69880ae-f10f-4a51-adb5-fb2a9696b44d.

[5] Osuteye et al., 'Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Equality,' 9.

[6] Richie Howitt and Stan Stevens, 'Cross-Cultural Research: Ethics, Methods, and Relationships,' in Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography, ed. Iain Hay, 2nd Editio (Oxford University Press, 2008), 35; Schuttenberg and Guth, 'Seeking Our Shared Wisdom: A Framework for Understanding Knowledge Coproduction and Coproductive Capacities.' 

[7] Sarah Wakefield and Madeline Whetung, 'Colonial Conventions,' in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, ed. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang (New York: Routledge, 2015), 149.

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Confidentiality

Confidentiality in research ethics is often equated with privacy protection, as a measure taken to ensure that the identities of research subjects are protected from the potential harm that could result from their naming. Confidentiality and privacy protection are central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. Privacy protection refers to the collecting and handling of personal data, defined in the UK Data Protection Act 1998  as information which relates to a living individual who can be identified. Under this Act, personal data consists of information as to:

(a) the racial or ethnic origin of the data subject, (b) his/her political opinions, (c) his/her religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature, (d) whether he/she is a member of a trade union […] (e) his/her physical or mental health or condition, (f) his/her sexual life, (g) the commission or alleged commission by him/her of any offence, or (h) any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been committed by him/her, the disposal of such proceedings or the sentence of any court in such proceedings.[1]

In 2019, the European Union issued the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that builds on the current Data Protection Act to address modern forms of communication.[2]

The concepts of privacy and confidentiality have been criticised as resulting from a western perception of autonomy, which is rooted in a utilitarian moral approach to individuals as ‘autonomous human beings,’ and in deontological ethics which are based on a universal moral code. This approach has dictated the current understanding of confidentiality, which as noted by Clifford Christians, views the invasion of people’s ‘fragile but distinctive privacy’ as intolerable.[3]

However, the precedence granted by this approach to the individual over the communal has also been widely criticised as a western-centric approach. For example, some African scholars refer to a different and far more complex view of the role of the community in relation to the individual.[4] The debates around notions of personhood and relations of individual and communal highlight the questionable relevance of western individually-based ethics principles, such as confidentiality and privacy protection, in different cultural contexts. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] “ESRC Framework for Research Ethics,” Economics and Social Research Council, 2015, 43, http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/about-esrc/information/framework-for-research-ethics/index.aspx.

[2] Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO): Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/, accessed 5 Oct. 2020

[3] Clifford G Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Nrman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Second edi (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 139. See also David Spataro, “Reframing Structure and Agency in Participatory Action Research PAR as a Politics of Scale,” International Review of Qualitative Research 3, no. 4 (2011): 469, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/irqr.2011.3.4.455.

[4] See for example K. Wiredu, “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality,” Research in African Literatures 40(1) (2009): 8–18; I. Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought,” in African Philosophy: An Introduction, ed. R.A. Wright (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1984), 171–181; John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969); Leonard Tumaini Chuwa, “African Indigenous Ethics in Global Bioethics,” vol. 1, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8625-6; Kwame Gyekye, “Person and Community: In Defense of Moderate Communitarianism,” in Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (Oxford Scholarship Online, 1997), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof; Yusef Waghid, “Knowledge(s), Culture and African Philosophy,” Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 11–17.; Joseph Jinja Divala, “Re-Imaging a Conception of Ubuntu that Can Recreate Relevant Knowledge Cultures in Africa and African Universities.,” Knowledge Cultures 4, no. 4 (2016): 90–103, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=117150804&site=ehost-live.

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Consent

Consent is one of the central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. It is one of the basic principles listed in the Nuremberg Code, which was written following World War Two and put forth a set of ten ethics principles for research involving human experimentation. One of them was the obligation to gain the voluntary consent of the human subject (other principles include avoidance of all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury, the right of the human subject to to withdraw from the research, and the protection of privacy).[1] The principle of informed consent means that

the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension [...] to make an understanding and enlightened decision.[2]

Informed consent, like privacy protection, is rooted in deontological ethics, which follow a universal moral code. This perception of informed consent has been criticised as problematic because it assumes that participants are in relatively equal positions of power with researchers.[3] Furthermore, like other institutional research principles it also reflects a culture of individual rights of an ‘autonomous individual’.  However, as argued by Wynn and Israel, the signing of written consent forms is a ‘ritual,’ based on the western legalistic view of the contract and authenticity of the signature as culturally and politically neutral.[4] Other researchers have pointed out that such procedures could causesuspicion and work against building trust relations with research participants.[5] In order to achieve genuine agreement to participation, researchers have suggested instead that consent should not be limited to a point in time at which a form is signed. Rather, an interpersonal process should take place in which interactions and negotiations will lead to a meaningful informed consent.[6]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Evelyne Shuster, “Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code,” New England Journal of Medicine 337, no. 20 (November 13, 1997): 1436–40, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

[2] Shuster, 1436.

[3] Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, 'Beyond "Do No Harm": The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,' Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 302, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.

[4] L. L. Wynn and Mark Israel, 'The Fetishes of Consent: Signatures, Paper, and Writing in Research Ethics Review,' American Anthropologist 120, no. 4 (2018): 797, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13148.

[5] Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” 306.

[6] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, 'Ethics, Reflexivity, and "Ethically Important Moments" in Research,' Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2004): 272, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403262360.

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Equality
(draft)

The term ‘equality’ has been widely considered, defined and debated over the years from diverse disciplinary angles. The KNOW programme focuses on urban equality, adopting a view of equality as “justice or fair treatment” rather than “sameness or homogeneity” [1]. Building on the work of Iris Marion Young [2] and Nancy Fraser [3], distributional aspects of inequality as well as institutional recognition and participation are central strands of inquiry in the KNOW programme. Four broad and inter-related dimensions of urban equality provide a working definition: equitable distribution and access to income and basic services; reciprocal recognition of different social identities; mutual care and solidarity; and parity political participation [4].

Within this framework, we focus here on a related but different aspect of equality, that of the research work itself. We look at the ways in which (in)equality is experienced in the process of knowledge co-production. As noted by Joan Tronto, unequal relations “are, ultimately, probably a majority of the relations in which people find themselves” [5], making this aspect central to research ethics. 

A core principle of work within KNOW is the creation and maintenance of “partnerships with equivalence”. Here the idea of equality as “sameness” is relevant, without the assumption of homogeneity. For example, while acknowledging differences, Keguro Macharia advises researchers from the global north to consider their African partners as equals: “Don’t turn us into native informants. Respect us as intellectual equals. Ask us the same kinds of questions you’d ask people you consider intellectual equals. Be rigorous. We can take it. Expect the same.”[6]. This piece of advice highlights the point that as well as material elements of distribution and access to resources in research, other aspects such as recognition, respect, attentiveness and sensitivity are necessary for establishing and maintaining partnerships of equivalence. 

Many researchers co-producing knowledge do so with awareness and reflexivity, but the difficulty remains. Grace Musila talks about “the labour of speaking up again, and again, and again, about unequal power relations, to people who build entire careers off writing about inequality” [7]. Why are scholars who write about inequality still prone to treat their partners or research participants unequally? This question is articulated by Iris Marion Young, who looks at ingrained ways of interacting that are often not part of the discussion about ethics: “Much moral theorizing is devoted to discussion of dilemmas and hard cases, where alternatives are explicit, and the question is which one to choose. Within this paradigm it is often regarded as inappropriate to submit habits, feelings or unconscious reactions to normative judgement.” [8] 

In considering this question, it is useful to think about the differences and contradictions between “formal equality” and interpersonal equality. Formal equality characterises many western capitalist societies, providing structural recognition of various groups, that is both rights-based and duties-based. It is expressed verbally in public law and other institutionalised policies and frameworks that acknowledge multiculturalism and the need for sharing power. The critique of formal equality highlights that within contemporary highly diverse societies, aspects of relations between people of different backgrounds are taken for granted. For example, researchers in the field of migration studies have engaged in a debate about multiculturalism, as a formal approach to equality, and interculturalism, that emphasises contact, relations and interactions as the basis for creating policy interventions [9]. Interculturalism builds on Allport’s contact hypothesis, which states that “contact and sharing promote mutual acceptance under conditions of equality, and initiate a process of prejudice reduction and knowledge formation”[10].  

The contradiction between formal equality and the actual prevalence of relations of privilege and oppression, is highly relevant for research ethics, because institutional equality and multiculturalism do not guarantee that daily interactions will be conducted on an equal basis [11]. Young considers manifestations of oppression that that are denied and silenced, using Anthony Giddens’ theory of subjectivity for understanding social relations [12]. Giddens terms verbalised utterances as discursive consciousness, and differentiates them from a second level of reactions, termed practical consciousness. Unlike discursive consciousness, practical consciousness relates to "all the things which actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression” [13]. Young suggests that actions and reactions on the level of practical consciousness involve “often complex reflexive monitoring of the relation of the subject’s body to those of other subjects and the surrounding environment, but which are on the fringe of consciousness… Practical consciousness is the habitual, routinized background awareness” [14].

This level of background awareness, involving tacit knowledge and emotions, also has political dimensions, as suggested by Klaver, van Elst and Baart, who point to its close connections to existing hierarchic epistemological structures [15]. In this context Levrau emphasises the need of formulating an “interpersonal ethos” based on empathy and concern [16]. This approach resonates with care ethics, that examines care not only as a moral but also a political concept that relates to existing structures of power and inequality [17]. However, despite its awareness of vulnerability and its emphasis on sensitivity, attentiveness and responsiveness, the notion of care nevertheless exposes not only connections but also disconnections [18], which stand in the way of equality within research practice. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] C.D. Lummis, ‘Equality’, in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power., ed. by W. Sachs (Witwatersrand University Press: Johannesburg and Zed Books Ltd: London and New Jersey, 1993), pp. 38–52 (p. 38).

[2] I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

[3] N. Fraser, ‘A Rejoinder to Iris Young’, in Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate., ed. by C. Willett (Maldon and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), pp. 68–72.

[4] Caren Levy, Yael Padan, and Chris Yap, ‘Glossary of Terms’, Development Workshop, Part II: COVID-19 and Post-Pandemic Responses: Laying the Foundations for Pathways to Urban Equality, 2020.

[5] Joan C. Tronto, ‘Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 6.3 (2012), 303–16 (p. 310).

[6] Keguro Macharia, ‘Visiting Africa: A Short Guide for Researchers’, Pambazooka News, 2015.

[7] Grace A. Musila, ‘Against Collaboration–or the Native Who Wanders Off’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31.3 (2019), 286–93 (p. 287).

[8] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 150.

[9] Ricard Zapata-Barrero, ‘Interculturalism in the Post-Multicultural Debate: A Defence’, Comparative Migration Studies, 5.1 (2017); W. Kymlicka, ‘The Essentialist Critique of Multiculturalism: Theories, Policies, Ethos.’, in Multiculturalism Rethought: Interpretations, Dilemmas and New Directions, ed. by V. Uberoi and T. Modood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 209–249; Tariq Modood, ‘Multiculturalism, Interculturalisms and the Majority’, in Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: Debating the Dividing Lines, ed. by N. Meer, T. Modood, and T. Zapata-Barrero (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 246–265.

[10] (Allport 1954, quoted in Zapata-Barrero 2017)

[11] François Levrau, ‘Towards a New Way of Interacting? Pondering the Role of an Interpersonal Ethos’, Comparative Migration Studies, 6.1 (2018).

[12] Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984)

[13] Giddens, xxiii.

[14] Young, Justice Polit. Differ., 131.

[15] Klaartje Klaver, Eric van Elst, and Andries J. Baart, ‘Demarcation of the Ethics of Care as a Discipline: Discussion Article’, Nursing Ethics, 21.7 (2014), 755–65 (p. 762).

[16] Levrau, “Towards a New Way of Interacting? Pondering the Role of an Interpersonal Ethos.”

[17] Joan B. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. (New York, London: Routledge, 1993), p. 21.

[18] Parvati Raghuram, ‘Locating Care Ethics beyond the Global North’, Acme, 15.3 (2016), 511–13 (p. 526).

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Ethics
(draft)

Ethics is often regarded as a matter of the rules of conduct in professional life. While it is certainly the case that such rules form a part of the field of ethics, it is important to recognize that ethics is much more than this. Although concerns with specific statements about conduct follow from ethical discussion, the main purpose of ethics is to have such a discussion in the first place. In this sense, ethics can be seen as ‘the conscious reflection on our moral beliefs’.[1]

Ethics is understood to be the branch of knowledge or field of study with morality as its subject matter; ethics deals with moral principles, social or personal values, and so ethics can be understood as ‘equivalent to moral philosophy’,[2] and more broadly speaking, ‘the way that we think through how best to live our lives’.[3] Raymond Williams discusses how the earliest meaning of ethics is ‘a study of, or treatise on, moral principles’, reflecting the Greek and Latin title of Aristotle’s Ethica. This use of ethics, in his view, gives rise to an important core meaning of ethics: ‘the academic study of morality’, or, ‘morality as a topic for systematic analysis’ or a ‘conception of morality as something that can be studied and defined’. For Williams, the meaning of ethics is reflected in some of the most frequent ‘collocations’ of ethical in contemporary English: 'ethical system, ethical principles, ethical standards, ethical code,' and for Williams, 'although they have been in existence for centuries', they have all 'increased markedly in relative frequency since lC19', whether they are moral principles or systems associated with a school of thought, a particular individual, or profession or sphere of activity.[4]

One way of categorizing the field of ethics (as a study of morality) is by distinguishing between its three branches: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.[5] Metaethics deals with whether morality exists, the nature of right or wrong, and the justification of ethical claims. Normative ethics, sometimes referred to as ethical theory, is concerned with principles of morality, and the standards used to determine whether something is right or wrong, and can be divided into various sub-branches: consequentialist theories, deontological theories, and virtue-based theories. 

Consequentialist normative principles require balancing the good and bad consequences of an action, and if the good consequences exceed the bad, then the action is considered to be morally proper. Consequentialist theories are sometimes called teleological theories, from the Greek word telos, or end, since the end result of the action is what determines its morality.[6]

Deontological theories or duty theories from the Greek word deon, or duty, place rights, duties and obligations as fundamental to morality. They are also sometimes called nonconsequentialist since these principles are based on obligations rather than on the consequences of actions. Some of these duties are:  

·      Fidelity: the duty to keep promises

·      Reparation: the duty to compensate others when we harm them

·      Gratitude: the duty to thank those who help us

·      Justice: the duty to recognize merit

·      Beneficence: the duty to improve the conditions of others

·      Self-improvement: the duty to improve our virtue and intelligence

·      Nonmaleficence: the duty to not injure others[7]

 Virtue-based, sometimes called agent-centred theories, are less concerned with identifying the morality of particular actions and more concerned with the overall ethical status of individuals or agents.[8] Virtue ethics focus on the whole of a person’s life, rather than the specific actions a person may perform in any given situation, and thus take into account processes of education for training in engaging in ethical deliberation, as well as the importance of role models for understanding how to act ethically.  

Feminist thinkers have recently revised virtue ethics to foreground the principle of care as a legitimate and primary ethical concern, often in opposition to the more impersonal approach of justice. Feminist ethics are concerned with how life experience influences the ways in which we make ethical decisions.[9] Michel Foucault’s thinking on ethics is important for distinguishing ‘the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code,’ and what he calls the ‘determination of the ethical substance; that is, the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct’ and ‘the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement); that is, with the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice’.[10] According to Carolyn Culbertson, Judith Butler explores the way a subject positions him or herself in relation to norms as a process of self-crafting, for her an ethical endeavour, which involves accountability and recognition, and takes place in relation to others and in the context of social norms. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler emphasizes that those that matter most are encounters with another person or group, those requiring ethical recognition. [11]

 Applied ethics deals with the actual application of ethical principles to a particular situation, and analyses specific issues, actions and practices, for an issue to be considered an ‘applied ethics issue’ it needs to have significant groups of people for and against it, and it needs to concern a moral issue.[12] But the following principles are considered ones most often used in discussions of applied ethics:

Personal benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for the individual in question.

Social benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for society.

Principle of benevolence: help those in need.

Principle of paternalism: assist others in pursuing their best interests when they cannot do so themselves.

Principle of harm: do not harm others.

Principle of honesty: do not deceive others.

Principle of lawfulness: do not violate the law.

Principle of autonomy: acknowledge a person’s freedom over his/her actions or physical body.

Principle of justice: acknowledge a person’s right to due process, fair compensation for harm done, and fair distribution of benefits.

Rights: acknowledge a person’s rights to life, information, privacy, free expression, and safety.[13]

The Markula Centre for Applied Ethics, [14] is a good example of an institution which explores the ethical aspects of current issues and provides a good resource for making ethical decisions.[15] It follows five approaches to ethics – utilitarian, rights, fairness, common good, virtue and sets out a process to ethical decision-making which involves a number of stages: recognising an ethical issue, gathering facts, evaluating alternative actions, making a decision and testing it, and acting and reflecting on the outcomes.[16] While ‘The Framework for Making Ethical Decisions’ based in Science and Technology Studies at Brown University, evaluates the three kinds of normative ethical theories – consequentialist, duty and virtue – by assessing each one against the following four categories of analysis – deliberative process, focus, definition of ethical conduct, and motivation.[17]

Following the work of Amira De Le Garza (also known as Maria Cristina Gonzalez), the ethnographer D. Sonyini Madison, puts forward four principles for An Ethics of Postcolonial Ethnography. The first ethic is accountability or the ability to give an account or tell a story. The second ethic is context, or ‘an ethic of open-eyed mindfulness to one’s surroundings’ which draws attention to the ‘political, social, environmental, physical, and emotional soundings of one’s story.’ The third ethic is truthfulness, or ‘to see that which is on the surface but is not visible,’ this points to the need to manifest courage, to open one’s heart and expose ‘one’s purposes and issues in life.’ The fourth ethics is community, which ‘implies that once we step forward with an ethnographic tale,’ and ‘no longer feign separation from those with whom we have shared that story.’ The ethic of community is a challenge to ‘open ourselves that we might better be seen and understood’ in order to explores misunderstandings or oppositions.[18]

From Angela Last’s three strategies for attempting decolonial practices – caring, revaluing and refusing to Carli Coetzee’s discussion of how, in a conference panel convened to examine the framing of North–South academic collaborations and generate ethical protocols, ‘the keywords ‘ethical’ and ‘collaboration’ were in fact hot spots of contestation, disillusionment and complaint,’ as well as Keguro Macharia's 'Visiting Africa, A Short Field Guide For Researchers', offer a deep set of ethical challenges to north-south research collaborations.[19]  The political project of decolonisation also seeks to undo structures, specifically of colonisation as a process of physical and mental invasion and subjugation, which operating in combination with resource extraction, enslaves and dispossesses existing inhabitants. As Achilles Mbembe writes, decolonial practices might, on the one hand, aim to ‘recentre Africa’, following Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and, on the other, seek ‘self-ownership’, following Franz Fanon.[20] Following Ngugi’s arguments in Decolonising the Mind, it is clear that discussions of ethics will need to take place in languages other than English.[21]

The decolonial approach to ethics, as advocated by Robin Dunford, posits pluriversalism as an alternative to moral cosmopolitanism. Dunford argues that decolonial ethics rejects both ‘universality’ and ‘individualism’. ‘Inter-cultural dialogue amongst multiple people(s), including peoples who deem collective and non-human entities to be of fundamental moral importance’, are favoured over abstract principles that Dunford notes are developed from within particular Western traditions, and ‘pluriversality’ is favoured over universality. Dunford defines the importance of pluriversal values for a decolonial global ethics:

A value is pluriversal in a first, procedural sense, if it is constructed not through the universalisation of a particular perspective, but through dialogue across plural cultures and cosmovisions. In a second sense, pluriversality connotes a substantive value itself – the value of a world in which other worlds are possible. This value binds together equality and difference – people(s) have a right to inhabit their different worlds because they are equal.[22]

Kimberly Hutchings explains that although ‘Decolonial thinking shares the postcolonial concern with the material and epistemological hegemony of Western colonial modernity,’ but stresses the ‘radical distinction between Western colonial modernity and other ways of being’, pluriversal arguments call for a ‘“relational ontology,” in which worlds external to one another can nevertheless coexist, without one subsuming the others.’[23] If the point of global ethics is to ‘address ethical questions inherent in relations, situations, and contexts at the international, transnational, and global level’ and address issues of global justice, sustainable development, women’s human rights, or the ethics of war, across various geopolitical and ideational boundaries, then, as Hutchings points out, that since much contemporary work in international and global ethics aims to generate values and principles with global reach, but at the same time takes for granted the universality of a Euromodern ontology, it is bound to reach an impasse where ‘the outcomes of ethical judgment are either unintelligible or unworkable in the terms of the worlds to which they are being applied.’ [24] Or worse – ‘global ethics becomes part of a fundamentally colonial project in which other worlds are forced to take on a Euromodern world that is alien to them, which again would contradict the explicit ambitions of most arguments in global ethics.’ [25] So for Hutchings, ‘taking pluriversality seriously would seem to put global ethics in an impossible position’. [26]  

Hutchings believes that the ‘ethical issues raised by the pluriversal critique of colonial modernity’ are not ‘to do with either procedure or the institutionalization of a new categorical imperative for ethical theory and practice.’ [27]  So ‘rather than leave in place the notion that answers to questions about the right and the good are in some sense knowable, as long as we have the right standards and procedures’, [28] Hutchings argues that ‘pluriversality pushes us away from the possibility of specifying what the attainment of global justice might mean, and toward the importance of the cultivation of particular kinds of virtue in the context of ethical practices of coexistence and collaboration,’ she points in particular to two concepts of what pluriversality might mean for global ethics: ‘dissonance’ and ‘negotiation’:[29]

Pluriversal ethics is not about finding new ways of sorting out the meaning of justice but rather about finding new ways of relating to ourselves and to each other in our pursuit of whatever we may think of as justice. [30]

A pluriversal approach includes different ethical worldviews and values such as ma’at, ubuntu and buen viver. 

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Richard Hugman, A-Z of Professional Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. xiii, quoting L. H. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory. 5th edn. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 5.

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy

[3] Carolyn Culbertson, ‘The ethics of relationality: Judith Butler and social critique’, Continental Philosophical Review 46, 449–463 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9271-z

[4] https://keywords.pitt.edu/williams_keywords.html

[5] https://www.brown.edu/academics/science-and-technology-studies/framework-making-ethical-decisions

[6] https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H3

[7] https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H3

[8] https://www.brown.edu/academics/science-and-technology-studies/framework-making-ethical-decisions

[9] https://www.brown.edu/academics/science-and-technology-studies/framework-making-ethical-decisions

[10] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, [1985] translated by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 26.

[11] Carolyn Culbertson, ‘The ethics of relationality: Judith Butler and social critique’, Continental Philosophical Review 46, 449–463 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9271-z

[12] https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H1

[13] https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H3

[14] https://www.scu.edu/ethics/

[15] https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/.

[16] https://www.scu.edu/media/ethics-center/ethical-decision-making/A-Framework-for-Ethical-Decision-Making.pdf

[17] https://www.brown.edu/academics/science-and-technology-studies/framework-making-ethical-decisions

[18] D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, third edition, (London; Sage, 2020) pp. 6-7.

[19] Angela Last, ‘Internationalisation and Interdisciplinarity: Sharing across Boundaries?’, G.K. Bhambra, K Nisancioglu and D Gebrial (eds) Decolonising the University: Context and Practice, London: Pluto, 2018) and Carli Coetzee ‘Ethical?! Collaboration?! Keywords for our contradictory times’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, (2019). My PhD student, Thandi Loewenson sent me with readings that have required me to re-enter this discomfort. See also Keguro Macharia, 'Visiting Africa, A Short Field Guide for Researchers', published on Pambazuka News, referred to by colleagues as part of KNOW discussions at our 2019 annual conference in Havana.

[20] See for example, Achilles Mbembe, ‘Decolonizing Knowledge and the Archive’.

[21] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann Educational, 1986).

[22] Robin Dunford, ‘Toward a decolonial global ethics,’ Journal of Global Ethics, (2017) 13(3): 380-397.

[23] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 116.

[24] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 118

[25] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 118

[26] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 118.

[27] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 121.

[28] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 121.

[29] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 121.

[30] Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse’, Ethics and International Affairs, (2019), 33 (2): 115-25, 121.

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Harm

Minimising harm is one of the central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. It can be traced back to nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian liberalism. Mill argued that individuals should have the liberty to act as they wish, except if their actions cause harm to others.[1] This stance has influenced some of the central twentieth-century thinking about research ethics.  Thus, avoiding harm was one of the basic ethical principles of the Nuremberg Code, which was written in 1947 following the Nuremberg trials of World War Two war criminals, including medical doctors who had conducted experiments on human subjects. The Nuremberg Code set forth ten ethics principles for research involving human experimentation.[2] In the Code, harm is equated with causing suffering and injury.[3]

The principle of ‘no harm’ is often connected with the principle of benefit, and phrased as ‘benefit not harm.’[4]The importance of this phrasing lies in the balance that it suggests between the benefit of research, which could potentially positively affect ‘society’, at the expense of causing harm to specific individuals or communities participating in the research. This approach suggests that at times, it may be worth causing some harm to research subjects in the name of the ‘greater good’. Hence the Belmont Report, published in 1979 by the USA’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research,[5] requires researchers ‘to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks.’[6] This requirement is problematic because it raises serious ethical questions as to who determines the greater good, a concept that is in itself criticised as a product of ideology, as well as who are the researchers that can weigh benefit against harm, and how are such justifications made.[7]

The principle of ‘no harm’ has also been widely criticised as laconic and insufficient.[8] Critical scholars have pointed out that this conceptualisation of risk and harm represents liberal and western assumptions of moral superiority and domination, and prioritises formal and abstract concepts while ignoring power relations of race, class and gender.[9] They stress the need to move beyond ‘minimising harm’ to ensure reciprocal benefits come out of research projects.[10] Alternative approaches of care ethics use relational responsibility on a personal as well as global scale,[11] and employ notions such as empathy,[12] positive involvement,[13] and solidarity[14] in order to offer other readings of the ‘no harm’ principle, and to decolonise research ethics.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Clifford G. Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Nrman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Second edi (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 142.

[2] Evelyne Shuster, “Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code,” New England Journal of Medicine 337, no. 20 (November 13, 1997): 1436–40, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

[3] The fourth point in the Code states: ‘The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.’ Shuster, 1436.

[4] See for instance the webpage of University College London’s Research Ethics Committee: Accepted Ethical Standards ‘which all researchers and ethical committees are expected to comply with.’ The standards are: Informed Consent, Confidentiality, and Benefit not Harm. The principle of Benefit not Harm means: ‘Research involving human participants must have a benefit to society and the risks involved to participants must be balanced against the potential benefit to the overall community.’ https://ethics.grad.ucl.ac.uk/accepted-ethical-standards.php. Accessed 5 August 2020.

[5] Kenneth John Ryan et al., “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research,” Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, USA, 1979, https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00780a005.

[6] Ryan et al., ‘The Belmont Report.’

[7] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), 2.

[8] See for example Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research,” 148; Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 300, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.

[9] Eve Tuck and Monique Guishard, 'Uncollapsing Ethics: Racialized Sciencism, Settler Coloniality, and an Ethical Framework of Decolonial Participatory Action Research,' in Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment: New Directions in Critical Research, ed. Tricia M. Kress, Curry Malott, and Brad Porfilio (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2013), 7–8.

[10] Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” 300–301.

[11] Joan C. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,” Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 304, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[12] Liz Bondi, 'Empathy and Identification : Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork 1,' ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2, no. 1 (2003): 64–76.

[13] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 25.

[14] Samuel J Ujewe, “Ought-Onomy and Mental Health Ethics From ‘Respect for Personal Autonomy’ to ‘Preservation of Person-in-Community’ in African Ethics,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology Volume 25, no. 4 (2018): E-58.

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Justice
(draft)

Justice … is a central part of ethics and should be given due consideration in our moral lives. In evaluating any moral decision, we must ask whether our actions treat all persons equally. If not, we must determine whether the difference in treatment is justified: are the criteria we are using relevant to the situation at hand? But justice is not the only principle to consider in making ethical decisions. Sometimes principles of justice may need to be overridden in favor of other kinds of moral claims such as rights or society's welfare. Nevertheless, justice is an expression of our mutual recognition of each other's basic dignity, and an acknowledgement that if we are to live together in an interdependent community we must treat each other as equals.[1]

 The concept of justice is central to ethics, legal and political philosophy, and can be applied to laws, individual actions, and public policies, and so is a property of the law, of individuals and of institutions.[2] Justice can be associated with rightness, fairness, virtue, and morality, and its application differs in every culture. According to Richard Hugman’s reading of Hinman and his interpretation of the ancient Greek view of justice, which underpinned the teachings of Socrates and Plato:

Justice is harmony both within the person and between people in a society. In this way of looking at the notion, justice both a virtue and a principle that together form two parts of a whole.[3]

Different theories of justice exist, for example: distributive justice, retributive justice, compensatory justice, and restorative justice. Distributive justice refers to the extent to which society's institutions ensure that benefits and burdens are distributed among society's members in ways that are fair and just; retributive justice to the extent to which punishments are fair and just; compensatory justice to the extent to which people are fairly compensated for their injuries by those who have injured them; just compensation is proportional to the loss inflicted on a person; and restorative justice, aims, in response to a crime, for the victim and the offender to share their experience of what happened, and create a consensus for what the offender can do to repair the harm from the offense. 

According to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics:

The most fundamental principle of justice – one that has been widely accepted since it was first defined by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago – is the principle that ‘equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.’ In its contemporary form, this principle is sometimes expressed as follows: ‘Individuals should be treated the same, unless they differ in ways that are relevant to the situation in which they are involved.’ For example, if Jack and Jill both do the same work, and there are no relevant differences between them or the work they are doing, then in justice they should be paid the same wages. And if Jack is paid more than Jill simply because he is a man, or because he is white, then we have an injustice – a form of discrimination – because race and sex are not relevant to normal work situations.[4]

In western philosophy early theories were set out by Ancient Greek philiosophers Plato in his work The Republic and Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Other western philosophers argue that justice issues from God, from natural law, in the case of John Locke, and from the mutual agreement of everyone, according to social contract theory. Classically justice was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues, and in modern times, John Rawls described it as ‘the first virtue of social institutions’.[5]

In Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), Iris Marion Young presented a relational approach to the question of justice, based upon a group theory of oppression. From her readings of feminist, queer, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of marxism, Young argued at there were least five distinct types of oppression – exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural domination and violence – and that these could not be collapsed into more fundamental causes or reduced to dimensions of distributive justice.[6] In a later collection of her work, published after her death, Responsibility for Justice, she contributes the ‘concepts of structural injustice and its associated approach to responsibility: the social connection model.’ She contrasts this with a 'liability for harm' model of responsibility, which is more focused on finding guilt, blame or fault for a particular harm, as it demands that agents and institutions think of themselves in relation to structural injustice, and consider how we all implicated at some level in contributing to structural injustice.[7]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer, ‘Justice and Fairness’, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. See https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/justice-and-fairness/ This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics 3, 2 (Spring 1990). It was updated in August 2018.

[2] See The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online.

[3] Richard Hugman, A-Z of Professional Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 84, quoting L. H. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory. 5th edn. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012), p. 221.

[4] https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/justice-and-fairness/#:~:text=The%20most%20fundamental%20principle%20of,sometimes%20expressed%20as%20follows%3A%20%22Individuals

[5] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/#:~:text=Classically%2C%20justice%20was%20counted%20as,'%20(Rawls%201971%2C%20p.

[6] Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1990).

 [7] Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice, (Oxford University Press, 2011).

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Positionality
(draft)

In theorising subjectivity, identity and experience, feminists suggest positioning is integral to knowing and relating, and have used spatial concepts, such as Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledge’, Jane Flax’s ‘standpoint theory’, as well as Elspeth Probyn’s notion of ‘locality’ to negotiate ongoing theoretical disputes such as the essentialism/constructionism debate.[1] Despite the differences of opinion held regarding standpoint theory, and its relation to Marxist politics and historical materialism, Susan Hekman has argued that:

feminist stand-point theorists’ quest for truth and politics has been shaped by two central understandings: that knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple standpoints from which knowledge is produced. As the theory has developed, feminist standpoint theorists have explored, first, how knowledge can be situated yet ‘true,’ and, second, how we can acknowledge difference without obviating the possibility of critique and thus a viable feminist politics … Recently there has been much discussion among feminists of the parameters of a ‘politics of difference.’ I believe that feminist standpoint theory has laid the groundwork for such a politics by initiating the discussion of situated knowledge.[2]

The positioning of female subjectivity at the crossing point of capitalist and patriarchal systems of power required both feminist and Marxist critiques and a theory for relating them, something debated extensively in feminism.[3]Intersectional feminism extends this to include the dominating  effects of racialised power, explored through the Combahee River Collective ‘s recognition of ‘interlocking systems of oppression’; [4] Deborah King’s understanding of how individuals with multiple minority statuses experience interlocking systems of inequality or ‘multiple jeopardy,’ and so develop a ‘multiple consciousness’, [5]  or as Catherine E. Harnois summarises: ‘an awareness of multiple systems of inequality working with and through one another’,[6] and the later work of legal scholar Kimberley Crenshaw articulating the implications of race, class and gender intersections.[7]

In the social sciences, in particular geography and anthropology, the understanding that women are ‘differently positioned in the webs of power relations that structure our identities,’[8] has had profound implications on the developments of feminist research methodologies, in terms of the ways in which researching and researched subjects are positioned (and take positions) through gendered, classed, and raced identities, and life experiences.[9] There is also the degree to which one’s positionality can be reflected upon.

W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd summarise positionality in research as follows:

We all have experiences that shape our perspectives. Therefore, we each bring unique life experiences to our work. Positionality is based on situating, locating, and positioning self. Our position is a political point of departure. It is not fixed, but relational.[10]

We have varied positionalities. Delineating our positions supports the notion that our position may influence facets of our teaching and our research, such as what we incorporate into our lessons or what types of information we gather in our inquiry and how we interpret it. [11]

Knight and Keifer-Boyd refer to Linda Alcoff who defines positionality as the ‘knower’s specific position within any given context, a position always defined by gender, race, class, and other socially significant dimensions’.[12] Alcoff draws out how positionality is not fixed but rather a process for the interpretation and construction of values:

… the concept of positionality includes two points: first … that the concept of woman is a relational term identifiable only within a (constantly moving) con- text; but, second, that the position that women find themselves in can be actively utilized (rather than transcended) as a location for the construction of meaning, a place from where meaning is con- structed, rather than simply the place where a meaning can be discovered (the meaning of femaleness). The concept of woman as positionality shows how women use their positional perspective as a place from which values are interpreted and constructed rather than as a locus of an already determined set of values.[13]

Feminist theories of standpoint and developing out of these positionality have been vital in producing critiques of normative research methods in the social sciences, as well as new research practices which reflect upon their own methodologies from ethical perspectives. In a paper exploring connections between positionality and reflectivity, feminist geography Gillian Rose starts by considering how ‘I should situate myself and my interpretations of those interviews by reflexively examining my positionality.’ She turns to the work of fellow feminist geographer, Linda McDowell and quotes how she argues that: ‘we must recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants, and write this into our research practice.’[14]

Rose draws on McDowell’s work to focus on how being conscious of ‘position’ needs to acknowledge the powerful position academics may hold within institutions and the impact of this upon the production of knowledge. [15]  

Feminists of many kinds have elaborated their own role in the complex relations of power by exploring their `position’ and frequently ascribe the politics of knowledge production to a geography of `positionality'. Facets of the self – institutional privilege, for example, as well as aspects of social identity – are articulated as `positions' in a multidimensional geography of power relations. [16]  

With reference to the work of Donna Haraway, on the theorisation of position, Rose elaborates on how ‘ “position” indicates the kind of power that enabled a certain kind of knowledge. Knowledge thus positioned, or situated, can no longer claim universality.’ [17]

W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd emphasise the importance of taking into account the specific experience of the individual, as well as more general social characteristics and fixed categories of identity. They highlight, with reference to the work of Robertson and Takacs, the importance of both reflecting on our own positions, and also recognising the limitations of our experience. [18] They note how reflection produces feelings of both empowerment, recognising that ‘we have unique claims to knowledge that others do not,’ but also disempowerment, as others ‘can lay claims to knowledge that we do not have,’ and that this can produce a questioning of a researcher’s position as an expert and thus the ‘correctness’ of a view underscored through the position s/he holds. [19] They focus on how any understanding of positionality needs to refer ‘to the stance or positioning of the researcher in relation to the social and political context of the study – the community, the organization or the participant group.’[20] They suggest that the researcher start instead with the position of the researched, and highlight the relational aspects of positionality: 

Only by listening to the researched can we gain a deep awareness of our positionality and biased filters concerning the experiences that have shaped the identities of those we research. [21]

W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd underscore how positionality affects every phase of the research process, right from the initial posing of a question or a problem, to the processes of carrying out the research and involving others, right through to the design of the outcomes and the ways in which research is made public.[22]

Discussing positionality in terms of action research, Wendy E. Rowe has explored how the positionality of the researcher can be understood in relation to insider and outsider roles and dynamics.[23] Rowe discusses how Kathryn Herr and Gary Anderson define an insider as ‘a researcher or participant who works for or is a member of the participant community’, and an outsider or academic researcher) as a non-member. For Herr and Anderson there are six positions for inside-outside relations along a continuum: from insider (researcher studies own practice), to insider in collaboration with other insiders, to insider(s) in collaboration with outsider(s), to reciprocal collaboration (equal insider and outsider teams), to outsider(s) in collaboration with insider(s) (non-equivalent relationships), to outsider(s) studies.[24]  For Rowe, the ‘first five ‘positions' fit with the core principles of action research – as a ‘participatory and reflexive practice that involves researchers and participants in a process of co-inquiry to address identified problems, create change or explore opportunities’, whereas in the sixth position is more typical of ‘traditional research’, where the researcher is positioned as outside ‘gathering data about others as objectified research subjects.’ [25]  

Rowe notes how the ‘degrees of relatedness’ a researcher has to participants in terms of culture, race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, may influence their insider-outsider role, [26] with insider researchers often having more in common with participants than outsider researchers. She also discusses the importance of positionality in action research not only in terms of how research is conducted, but also how it can determine outcomes and influence ‘whose voice(s) will be represented in the final reports or decisions’. Positionality can also determine the impact of the research, Rowe argues, following S. Ospina, J. Dodge, E. G. Foldy, and A. Hofmann-Pinilla, that a funder's power can elevate ‘the position and perspective of the outsiders while minimizing or ignoring the interests of some community participants.’[27]

… researchers must be acutely conscious of the positionality issues and how they will influence the course and reported outcomes of an action research project, continually bringing them to the forefront for discussion with participants and seeking to redress power imbalances that disenfranchise or minimize the voice of key participant groups.[28]  

Importantly Rowe notes that positionality can change over the time of the research.[29]

Given the importance of long-term field work, and ‘deep hanging out’, as a research practice, ethnography as a discipline has been highly attentive to questions of positionality. The Handbook of Ethnography notes how while positionalities (D. Wolf, 1996b), in terms of race, class, nationality, gender, education etc., may according to Patai (1991) ‘render participants vulnerable to exploitation’, they still have ‘substantial capacity for exerting power over ethnographers (Hammersley, 1992a; Wong, 1998).’[30] Soyini Madison, devotes a substantial part of her influential book, Critical Ethnography, to an exploration of positionality with respect to ethics:

Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we denounce the power structures that surround our subjects. A concern for positionality is a reflexive ethnography; it is a turning back on ourselves. When we turn back on ourselves, we examine our intentions, our methods, and our possible effects. We are accountable for our research paradigms, our authority, and our moral responsibility relative to representation and interpretation.[31]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 232; and Elspeth Probyn, “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local,” ed. Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), 176–89, 178. 

[2] Susan Hekman, ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’, Signs , (Winter 1997) 22 (2): 341–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175275.

[3] Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution, (Boston: South End Press, 1980).

[4] Combahee River Collective, ‘A Black Feminist Statement (1977),’ in Cherrie Moraga and Glora Anzaldua (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1988).

[5] Deborah K. King, ‘Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,’ Signs (1988) 14(2): 42–72.

[6] Catherine E. Harnois, ‘Jeopardy, Consciousness, and Multiple Discrimination: Intersecting Inequalities in Contemporary Western Europe,’ (28 September 2015) https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12204

[7] Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,’ in Katharine T. Barlett and Rosanne Kennedy (eds.), Feminist Legal Theory: Readings in Law and Gender, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), and Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review, (1991) 43(6): 1241–99.

[8] Lynn A. Staeheli & Victoria A. Lawson (1994) A Discussion of “Women in the Field”: The Politics of Feminist Fieldwork, The Professional Geographer, 46(1): 96-102, DOI: 10.1111/j.0033-0124.1994.00096.x

[9] Kim V. L. England (1994) Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research , The Professional Geographer, 46:1, 80-89, DOI: 10.1111/ j.0033-0124.1994.00080.x 

[10] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, ‘Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception,’ in Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[11] Knight, W. B., & Keifer-Boyd, K. (2019). Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception. Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing. DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[12] Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,’ Signs, (Spring, 1988), 13 (3): 405–36, referred to Knight, W. B., & Keifer-Boyd, K. (2019). Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception. Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing. DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07. 

[13] Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,’ Signs, (Spring, 1988), 13 (3): 405–36, p. 434.

[14] Linda McDowell, ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in human geography,’ Transactions, Institute of British Geographers(1992), 17: 399–416, quoted in Gillian Rose, ‘Positionality, Reflexivities and other tactics,’  Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21(3): 305–20, 305.

[15] Gillian Rose, ‘Positionality, Reflexivities and other tactics,’  Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21(3): 305–20, 307-8.

[16] Gillian Rose, ‘Positionality, Reflexivities and other tactics,’  Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21(3): 305–20, 307-8.

[17] Gillian Rose, ‘Positionality, Reflexivities and other tactics,’  Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21(3): 305–20, 307-8.

[18] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, ‘Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception,’ Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[19] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, ‘Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception,’ Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[20] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, ‘Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception,’ Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[21] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, ‘Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception,’ Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[22] W. B. Knight and K. Keifer-Boyd, ‘Revealing researcher’s positionality and perception,’ Transdisciplinary Inquiry, Practice, and Possibilities in Art Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries Open Publishing, 2019). DOI: 10.26209/arted50-07

[23] Wendy E. Rowe, ‘Positionality’, David Coghlan & Mary Brydon-Miller (eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277. 

[24] Wendy E. Rowe, ‘Positionality’, David Coghlan & Mary Brydon-Miller (eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research.http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277.

[25] Wendy E. Rowe, ‘Positionality’, David Coghlan & Mary Brydon-Miller (eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research.http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277.

[26] Wendy E. Rowe, ‘Positionality’, David Coghlan & Mary Brydon-Miller (eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research.http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277 

[27] S. Ospina, J. Dodge, E. G. Foldy, and A. Hofmann-Pinilla, ‘Taking the action turn: Lessons from bringing participation to qualitative research,’ in P. Reason and R. Bradbury (rds.), Action research: Participative inquiry and practice, (London, England: Sage, 2008). pp. 420–438).

[28] Wendy E. Rowe, ‘Positionality’, David Coghlan & Mary Brydon-Miller (eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277.

[29] Wendy E. Rowe, ‘Positionality’, David Coghlan & Mary Brydon-Miller (eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n277.

[30] ‘The Ethics of Ethnography’, The Handbook of Ethnography, p. 344.

[31] D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance, third edition, (London; Sage, 2020) pp. 6-7.

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Reciprocity

Reciprocity in research ethics refers to mutuality and equality in the exchanges between the different stakeholders. It is often considered in relation to benefits which are accrued from research projects by researchers and research participants. Negotiating mutual benefits from research raises questions of how to define mutuality, and how to ensure that exchanges, either tangible or abstract, are understood as having relatively equal value.[1] The complexity of reciprocal benefits is highlighted by some scholars who have raised concerns about benefits being potentially coercive, contributing to unrealistic expectations, or providing incentives that may undermine voluntary participation.  [2] However, such issues can be raised and negotiated openly, enabling stakeholders to build reciprocal relations by acknowledging each other’s limitations and what they are able to deliver, making informed decisions and developing realistic expectations.[3]

There are other lenses through which to view reciprocity, beyond the sharing of benefits of research projects. One of them refers to the positionality of researchers, but also highlights the need to examine the positionality which shapes the identities and experiences of their research participants. This means that in a reciprocal research process, researchers need to ascribe the same subjectivity to their research participants as they do to themselves.[4]Another lens examines the connections between reciprocity and solidarity as expressions of relations of mutual careand commitment. Despite the fact that solidarity, and particularly solidarity on a global scale, is not necessarily mutual, Carol Gould points out that ‘to the extent that everyone can find themselves at some time or other in a situation of oppression or suffering, the need for support from others and expressions or actions of solidarity from them is a standing possibility’,[5] suggesting that such reciprocity could be mobilised under conditions of need.

These two lenses also highlight the problematics of reciprocity in situations of unequal power relations, and question the possibility of non-hierarchical mutual communication and action.[6] Furthermore, in the context of research, developing meaningful reciprocal relations is a dynamic process which begins with acknowledging that communities or groups that participate in any research are far from being homogenous. Power relations within groups and different needs and interests complicate and question the achievement of egalitarian research relationships and fully symmetrical exchanges.[7]

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] A. B. Zwi et al., “Placing Ethics in the Centre: Negotiating New Spaces for Ethical Research in Conflict Situations.,” Global Public Health 1, no. 3 (2006): 267, https://doi.org/10.1080/17441690600673866.

[2] Catriona Mackenzie, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway, “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 311, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.

[3] Scott D. Neufeld et al., 'Research 101: A Process for Developing Local Guidelines for Ethical Research in Heavily Researched Communities,' Harm Reduction Journal 16, no. 1 (2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-019-0315-5; Mackenzie, McDowell, and Pittaway, 311.

[4] Mona Domosh, 'Toward a More Fully Reciprocal Feminist Inquiry,' Acme 2, no. 1 (2003): 110.

[5] Carol C. Gould, “Transnational Solidarities,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 160, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00371.x.

[6] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 'Intercultural Translation,' in Epistemologies of the South : Justice against Epistemicide (New York: Routledge, 2014), 214.

[7] Sarah Maiter et al., 'Reciprocity: An Ethic for Community-Based Participatory Action Research,' Action Research 6, no. 3 (2008): 313, https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750307083720.

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Recognition
(draft)

Recognition as an organizing idea may be thought of in two ways: first, as a psychic position in which we know the other’s mind as an equal source of intention and agency, affecting and being affected; and second as a process of action, the essence of responsiveness in interaction.[1]

Recognition is an interpersonal or a relational practice and as such vital to ethical practice, which can operates at different scales, at the level of the nation, institution or person. The disciplines to explore recognition theoretically are politics, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis. 

According to the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, recognition in philosophy can be understood in four ways. First as elementary recognition, following Hegel, that we gain ‘self-consciousness only through a process of mutual recognition’, and that ‘Only mutual recognition that grants others the status of an epistemic authority allows us to construct a normative space of reasons: I know that the truth of my judgment depends on you being able to share it.’ Second, respect, following the modernist idea of universal human rights, that a central dimension of recognition is the assignment of equal dignity or respect, through this modernist ideal has been critiqued, by feminists and others, for its lack of attention to difference. Third, esteem, where recognition is understood within the context of identity politics – so a politics of recognition – where equal respect and rights are understood in terms of the specific identities denigrated by dominant value systems, and as fought for, for example, by the women’s and civil rights movements in the US. Fourth, love and friendship, where recognition is understood in terms of human experience and focused within psychological and psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity and interaction.[2]

Perhaps the most important psychoanalytic thinker to theorise recognition is the psychoanalytic practitioner Jessica Benjamin, who understands recognition in terms of intersubjective processes between: 

two knowing and not-knowing subjects in the room — each one potentially engaged in recognition of the other’ s alterity, the other’ s different center of perspective, or perhaps equally unsettled and engaged in avoiding that recognition. [3]

Benjamin understands the oscillation between experiencing the other as ‘a responsive agent who can reciprocate’ a desire for recognition, or, ‘an object of need’ to be ‘managed within our own mental web’ as corresponding to two psychic dimensions, intersubjective and intrapsychic theories, which she sees not as exclusive options but interrelated ‘phenomenologies of psychic life’. 

Indeed the oscillations between them correspond to our shifts in relational states between feelings of self being with an other self, and self being in complementary relation to an object. [4]

Benjamin sees this as a process of reciprocating – whether according to the same terms, a struggle to find our terms, or mismatching on different terms – in short whether our mental gears are ‘meshing or jamming’. 

In short, the question is whether doing is with or to: doing to me implies that complementary two ness of opposing doer and done to, while doing with suggests that shared state of fitting in, coordination, or purposeful negotiation of difference that will be called thirdness.[5]

The concept of the third is vital in Benjamin’s work as it takes us from the ethics of the dyad to wider collective conceptions of the ‘we’. Thirding involves processes of matching and mis-matching, which are not about mirroring, symmetry or synchrony, but rather non-linear and related to attunement and reciprocrity in interaction. In theorising recognition, Benjamin, moves beyond the Kleinein view of ambivalence, or holding opposites in tension, to shifts between intra- and inter-subjective relating, conceptualised, following Winnicott, not as a ‘static condition but a continual oscillation between relating to an outside other and an inner object’.[6]

Anna Yeatman describes how Benjamin’s notion of inter-subjectivity is able to offer a two-person concept of freedom which ‘dynamically entwines self-assertion and mutual recognition’, which enables ‘a both/and understanding of the relationship between creativity and limit, self and other, freedom and law, and autonomy and dependency.’[7]  

If ethics is understood to be a practice of relating, one to the other, and this practice of how we relate to the ‘other’ is a key ethical problematic, then the processes involved in intra- and inter-relating are core to developing ethical research practices, both in psychoanalytic terms, such as empathy and identification, and in political terms, such as, accountability and responsibility.

Bringing her expertise in psychoanalysis to the field of research, Liz Bondi has explored the relationship between researcher and researched through what each can and cannot know, and  specifically through processes of empathy, identification and recognition. She locates recognition in terms of empathy, arguing that ‘empathy provides space for difference, while also enabling the researcher to communicate respect and recognition.’[8] She suggests that ‘Responding to people empathically creates psychic and intersubjective spaces in which experiences of difference and similarity can be respected without necessarily being remarked upon or even consciously recognised.’ For Bondi, empathy is a process which include recognising both similarities and differences, and not recognising.[9]

.. empathy entails oscillating between participating in processes of (unconscious) identification, and remaining aware of – observing – some distinction (however fragile) between one’s own and the other person’s inner realities. This communicates (usually non-verbally and often unconsciously) respect for differences as well recognition of similarities, and it is this process that matters, enabling us to communicate (however falteringly) across differences we can easily name (such as gender) and many others of which we are not consciously aware. [10]

Judith Butler’s work locates ethics between politics and morality, central to her theorisation of how one relates to another, is her focus on accountability and on recognition. 

The question most central to recognition is a direct one, and it is addressed to the other: ‘Who are you?’ This question assumes that there is an other before us whom we do not know and cannot fully apprehend, one whose uniqueness and nonsubstitutability set a limit to the model of reciprocal recognition offered within the Hegelian scheme and to the possibility of knowing another more generally.[11]

She acknowledges that the ability to recognise is not gaining by acquiring a set of special skills,  be they critical or psychological, but that the ‘possibility of recognition’ is conditioned by norms, and that ‘it still matters that we feel more properly recognized by some people than we do by others.’ [12]  

In Butler’s ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’, her extended theorisation of ethics, through relations of recognition, she discusses how subjects are constituted by and through others. She refers to the work of Adriana Cavarero who grounds the social in the dyadic encounter:

The ‘you’ comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they. Symptomatically, the ‘you’ is a term that is not at home in modern and contemporary developments of ethics and politics. The ‘you’ is ignored by individualistic doctrines, which are too preoccupied with praising the rights of the I, and the ‘you’ is masked by a Kantian form of ethics that is only capable of staging an I that addresses itself as a familiar ‘you.’ Neither does the ‘you’ find a home in the schools of thought to which individualism is opposed — these schools reveal themselves for the most part to be affected by a moralistic vice, which, in order to avoid falling into the decadence of the I, avoids the contiguity of the you, and privileges collective, plural pronouns. Indeed, many revolutionary movements (which range from traditional communism to the feminism of sisterhood) seem to share a curious linguistic code based on the intrinsic morality of pronouns. The we is always positive, the plural you is a possible ally, the they has the face of an antagonist, the I is unseemly, and the you is, of course, superfluous.[13]

Butler argues that who we choose to recognise, and who we need to recognise us, and how, are subject to norms.

Certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the institution of new norms, putting into question the givenness of the prevailing normative horizon. The normative horizon within which I see the other or, indeed, within which the other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening.[14]

For Butler two practices are essential to any ‘substantive account of ethical life’ – self-reflection and social recognition.[15]

Yet Hannah Stark has taken issue with Butler’s reliance on Hegelian concept of recognition for her theory of ethics, and explores the work of some of those who have critiqued Butler for this approach, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, who writes, as Stark quotes: ‘In spite of its place in the rhetoric of radical politics since Hegel’ … ‘recognition is the force of conservatism, the tying of the new and the never-conceived to that which is already cognized’[16] Stark highlights how Grosz’s  critique of recognition is that it ‘requires that things which are fundamentally strange … be subjected to already existing systems of meaning and value.’ And Stark goes on to cite Alain Badiou’s view that ‘the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned … what is beyond our recognition requires ethical valence.’ [17] Stark ends by noting:

This critique of recognition is imperative because it is the first step in rethinking difference, identity and political community. Moving beyond recognition enables new conceptualisations of ethics, which may facilitate an opening to the unknown. [18]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 3.

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/recognition/.

[3] Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 4.

[4] Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 4.

[5] Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 5.

[6] Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 5.

[7] Anna Yeatman, ‘A two-person conception of freedom: The significance of Jessica Benjamin’s idea of intersubjectivity,’ Journal of Classical Sociology (2015(, 15(1): 3–23. 

[8] Liz Bondi, ‘Empathy and Identification: Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork,’ ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers(2003). https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/708.

[9] Liz Bondi, ‘Empathy and Identification: Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork,’ ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers(2003). https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/708.

[10] Liz Bondi, ‘Empathy and Identification: Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork,’ ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers(2003). https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/708.

[11] Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself,’ Diacritics, v. 31, n. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566427 Accessed: 20-06-2015 08:35 UTC 

[12] Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself,’ Diacritics, v. 31, n. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566427.

[13] Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 90-1, quoted in Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (Fordham University, 2005) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x01rf . p. 32.

[14] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (Fordham University, 2005) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x01rf p. 24.

[15] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, (Fordham University, 2005) http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x01rf . p. 49.

[16] Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 103, quoted in Hannah Stark, ‘Judith Butler’s post-Hegelian ethics and the problem with recognition,’ Feminist Theory (2014) 15(1): 89–100, 96.

[17] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 25 quoted in Hannah Stark, ‘Judith Butler’s post-Hegelian ethics and the problem with recognition,’ Feminist Theory (2014) 15(1): 89–100, 96.

[18] Hannah Stark, ‘Judith Butler’s post-Hegelian ethics and the problem with recognition,’ Feminist Theory (2014) 15(1): 89–100, 97.

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Reflexivity
(draft)

Although reflexivity is a familiar concept in the qualitative tradition, we suggest that it has not previously been seen as an ethical notion. We propose that reflexivity is a helpful conceptual tool for understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research and how ethical practice in research can be achieved.[1]

Australian researchers of medical science, Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, describe ‘ethically important moments’,[2] as marking an important ‘ethical dimension’ in the decision-making that takes place around the dilemmas that occur in day to day research practice. They are interested in ‘the difficult, often subtle, and usually unpredictable situations that arise in the practice of doing research’ and in how ‘existing ethical principles and frameworks’ both limit and offer potential to researchers.[3] Guillemin and Gillam describe ethical dilemmas as ‘situations in which there is a stark choice between different options’, and they discuss how the processes of negotiating them, and their relation to institutional ethical procedures, requires a degree of reflexivity on the researcher’s part. Guillemin and Gillam note the lack of conceptual tools for articulating ethical issues and ‘making sense’ of them,[4] in particular with regard to the relation of reflexivity to ethical practice in research, and suggest that reflexivity is a ‘potential tool’ for ethical research practice. They argue that being reflexive means being alert not only to formal ethical positions but also stances, and knowledge of this kind can help a researcher work with participants to go beyond formal procedures such as ‘informed consent’ to frame questions, choose methods and use findings in ways that are proactive. [5] Guillemin and Gillam believe that reflexivity is not only a resource for dealing with ethical dilemmas, but also an ethical notion that is ‘a helpful conceptual tool for understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research and how ethical practice in research can be achieved.’[6] They ‘distinguish two different dimensions of ethics in research, which we term procedural ethics and “ethics in practice,” as a ‘a framework for thinking through these issues’. [7] Showing that procedural ethics is not adequate for dealing with ethically important moments, Guillemin and Gillam propose that ‘at the level of ‘ethics in practice,’ the ‘homegrown’ notion of reflexivity actually encapsulates and extends the concerns of procedural ethics’. [8]

Audrey Kobayashi however has criticized researcher reflexivity as ‘navel gazing’.[9] She writes:

For several years now, I have struggled with a mounting disease over the reflexive turn in human geography, and with a mounting conviction that much of what passes for anti-racist scholarship, by including a reflexive acknowledgement of the writer’s ‘positionality’ with respect to her subjects, is actually a privileged and self-indulgent focus on the self that provides anything but an anti-racist lens and ends up instead distancing the writer – by virtue of her power to name (even if she is only naming herself) and to situate – from the very people whose conditions she might hope to change. [10]

Kobayashi asks if there is a ‘relative hierarchy of reflexive scholarship’, whether some have ‘a greater entitlement than others’, or a ‘greater moral need’, or ‘a greater social obligation’? And then if some kinds of reflexivity are more relevant, better justified, or more significant that others is whether that is due to the standard of the research (better writing), or the social issue being researched, or the distance between researcher and researched – is self-reflexivity more justified closeness or distance more  than others?[11] Posing reflexivity as a dilemma, Kobayashi writes:

While reflexivity is an important, and some may say essential, aspect of recognising the difference between the studier and the studied, and even in some cases of taking moral responsibility for that difference, indulgence in reflexivity is ironically the very act that sets us apart. … Reflexivity thus opens us to the charge not only that it is a selfish, self-centred act that is the very antithesis of activism, but that it can even work actively to construct a sense of the other, to deny the reflexivity of others, and to emphasise the condition of detached alterity. … Failure to acknowledge this dilemma, on the other hand, seems antithetical to the most fundamental tenets of feminism and anti-racism. [12]

Looking at the problems of reflexive research methods, Lee Ann Fujii discusses how ‘over-concern about positionality and reflexivity appear to have paralyzed some scholars into avoiding fieldwork’, while fears of research ‘perpetuating neo-colonial representations’, as well as (mis)representation and (in)authenticity, ‘have led to a general withdrawal from fieldwork in the Global South’.[13] However, Fujii notes that concerns around reflexivity have led to new approaches to writing – to less writing about or on behalf of and more writing with. Mona Domosh has also noted that by focusing on the researcher’s own positionality the researched subject’s positionality is overlooked.[14]

 Yet Farhana Sultana’s work argues that ‘being reflexive about one’s own positionality is not to self-indulge but to reflect on how one is inserted in grids of power relations and how that influences methods, interpretations, and knowledge production’.[15] With reference to the work of many other geographers, she draws attention to the detail of the methods used and how reflexivity is undertaken. She notes the extensive range of discussions on ‘reflexivity, positionality, difference and representation’ in feminist geography, especially with relation to participatory research, and how many have debated ‘how to undertake reflexive research while still engaging in material and political struggles that have meaning and relevance’.[16]

Gillian Rose has explored a particular aspect of reflexivity which is its relation to visibility and related spatialities, starting with the work of Donna Haraway:

As Haraway argues, situatedness is not given; it must be developed, its technologies revised and invented. For many feminist geographers, reflexivity is one of those situating technologies.[17]

She underscores how Haraway’s ‘description of reflexivity is formulated in terms of visibility’ and ‘a particular spatiality.’ Rose explores how this kind of reflexivity can look ‘inward’ to the identity of the researcher, and ‘outward’ to her research and the ‘the wider world’. Referring Pamela Moss, describes this as a ‘double reflexive gaze’ and the spatial division this creates between inside and outside, Rose clarifies her understanding of inward to mean ‘those introspective aspects of thought that are self-critical and self-consciously analytical' and points to the work of a range of feminist geographers who have explored reflexive positionality in terms of the specificity of their own positions, and developing a conscious awareness of their situatedness and the methods they use.[18]  She refers to how Cindi Katz advocates reflecting on one’s own position if `an analysis of position that if consciously appropriated can lead to, be part of, and inform collective oppositional practice',[19] and how Kim England writes of the importance of making a position conscious, and thus to ‘describe reflexivity as a process of “self-discovery”. Reflection can, as Rose, discusses through the work of Heidi Nast, lead to considerations of the extent to which we are transparent to ourselves, and whether a researcher-self is a ‘knowable agent whose motivations can be fully known’. Countering the inward gaze of reflection, Rose proposes that:

This transparent self then looks outward, to understand its place in the world, to chart its position in the arenas of knowledge production, to see its own place in the relations of power. [20]

She goes on to describe how looking out, to fields of power, connecting researcher and participant, audiences, ‘is a particular reflexive process’, which when scrutinised ‘raises questions such as “where are one's fields,” “what are the displacements,” and “how does the work deploy and confront power – whose power, where, and under what conditions?”[21] Returning to the work of both Katz and Nast, Rose emphasises the need for a full contextualisation of both fieldwork and written research, as part of the process of reflection, [22] while recognising that ‘the search for positionality through transparent reflexivity is bound to fail.’ [23]

Sultana discusses how feminist methods ‘emphasize non-hierarchical interactions, understanding, and mutual learning,’ and how they pay close attention to the ways in which research methods ‘may be embedded in unequal power relations between the researcher and research participants’.[24] For Sultana it is ‘by being analytical and reflexive about their fieldwork and research process’, that feminist researchers are able to ‘challeng[e] pre-given categories and narratives’, and be ‘attentive to power, knowledge and context’. [25]

Reflexivity in research involves reflection on self, process, and representation, and critically examining power relations and politics in the research process, and researcher accountability in data collection and interpretation.[26]

And Kalyani Thurairajah summarises the ‘method’ of reflexivity with all its complexities and possibilities well:

There is no one way to practice reflexivity, as researchers may choose to focus on different dimensions based on disciplinary or epistemological expectations. However, to truly be reflexive, researchers must first learn how to recognize their positionalities and the influence of these positionalities.[27]

Sultana stresses the importance of conducting a reflexive research processes throughout a project, from beginning to end, [28] something underscored by Kalyani Thurairajah,[29] extending into the development of reflexive writing techniques. [30] She points to potential reflexive methods have for opening up research to ‘more complex and nuanced understandings of issues, where boundaries between process and content can get blurred,’ [31]  and rather than self-indulgence for thinking about ‘how one is inserted in grids of power relations and how that influences methods, interpretations, and knowledge production’, and thus the potential for relating to research participants and assessing the possibilities for conducting research with respect to ‘institutional, social, and political realities.’. In sum, she states that reflexivity is ‘integral to conducting ethical research’, [32] and for engaging with issues of ‘social justice, equity and democracy’ at micro and global scales, and for moving from the ‘strict codes of institutional paperwork’ and towards maintaining ethical commitments and moral understandings. [33]   

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] Guillemin and Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research,’ pp. 262–3.

[2] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research,’ Qualitative Inquiry, (2004), 10 (2), pp. 261–280. 

[3] Guillemin and Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research,’ pp. 262–3.

[4] Guillemin and Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research,’ p. 265.

[5] Guillemin and Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research,’ pp. 262–3.

[6] G&G, 263.

[7] G&G, 263.

[8] Guillemin and Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research,’ pp. 262–3.

[9] See Audrey Kobayashi, ‘GPC ten years on: Is self-reflexivity enough?’ Gender, Place and Culture (2003) 10, 4, pp. 345-349.

[10] See Audrey Kobayashi, ‘GPC ten years on: Is self-reflexivity enough?’ Gender, Place and Culture (2003) 10, 4, pp. 345-349.

[11] See Audrey Kobayashi, ‘GPC ten years on: Is self-reflexivity enough?’ Gender, Place and Culture (2003) 10, 4, pp. 345-349.

[12] See Audrey Kobayashi, ‘GPC ten years on: Is self-reflexivity enough?’ Gender, Place and Culture (2003) 10, 4, pp. 345-349, 376.

[13] Lee Ann Fujii, ‘Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, PS: Political Science & Politics, (2012), v. 45, n. 4, pp. 717–23. 

[14] See Mona Domosh, ‘Towards a more fully reciprocal feminist inquiry’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2003) 2, 1, pp. 107–111. 

[15] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[16] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[17] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[18] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[19] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[20] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[21] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[22] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[23] Gillian Rose, ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics,’ Progress in Human Geography (1997) 21 (3): 305–320.

[24] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[25] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[26] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[27] Kalyani Thurairajah, ‘Practicing Reflexivity: Balancing Multiple Positionalities During Fieldwork,’ in SAGE Research Methods Cases in Political Science and International Relations (2019).

[28] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[29] Kalyani Thurairajah, ‘Practicing Reflexivity: Balancing Multiple Positionalities During Fieldwork,’ in SAGE Research Methods Cases in Political Science and International Relations (2019).

[30] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[31] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[32] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

[33] Farhana Sultana, ‘Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2007) 6, 1, pp. 374-385.

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Relationality

Relationality refers to an understanding of social existence as networks of relationships between people. Relationality is a central concept of care ethics, which focuses on relations as interactions that lead to responsibility. The perception of persons as relational beings stands in contrast to that of dominant western theories of ethics (such as deontological ethics and utilitarian and consequentialist approaches) that place the individual in the centre, as an independent, self-sufficient, autonomous agent, which is bound by abstract ethical principles.[1]  However, relationality and relational ethics are not limited to interpersonal relationships, but exist also within professional, institutional, public and national contexts.[2] Relational responsibility therefore exists within power asymmetries, and is affected by the political, social and epistemological context in which it is practiced.[3] The broader scope of relationality refers to responsibilities between people in a global context. Through their participation in the acts of institutions such as states and corporations, people across the globe are socially connected,[4] and by recognising the existence of these ‘inextricable interdependencies’[5] some global relational responsibilities become evident. 

Relationality is also a key aspect of research partnerships.[6] While institutional research ethics principles offer little guidance about how to tackle the various ethics issues that come up during research, relationality suggests an alternative approach based on mutuality and care. Nevertheless, it is important to also think about relationality critically. A postcolonial reading highlights the discontinuities and limitations of relationality practiced under unequal power relations, and presents the need to reveal obscured or unrecognised layers of relationships.[7]Furthermore, relationality can be interpreted in different ways, making it a contested and complicated interaction,[8]that may be challenged, rejected or refused.

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford University Press, 2006), 13.

[2] Klaartje Klaver, Eric van Elst, and Andries J. Baart, 'Demarcation of the Ethics of Care as a Discipline: Discussion Article,' Nursing Ethics 21, no. 7 (2014): 759, https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733013500162.

[3] Joan C. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,” Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 308–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[4] Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Justice and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2006): 102–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511550744.005.

[5] Eva Feder Kittay, 'A Theory of Justice as Fair Terms of Social Life given Our Inevitable Dependency and Our Inextricable Interdependency,' in Care Ethics and Political Theory, ed. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2015), 52, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716341.001.0001.

[6] Tula Brannelly, 'An Ethics of Care Research Manifesto,' International Journal of Care and Caring 2, no. 3 (2018): 368, https://doi.org/10.1332/239788218x15351944886756.

[7] Pat Noxolo, Parvati Raghuram, and Clare Madge, 'Unsettling Responsibility: Postcolonial Interventions,' Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, no. 3 (2012): 421, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00474.x.

[8] Parvati Raghuram, Clare Madge, and Pat Noxolo, 'Rethinking Responsibility and Care for a Postcolonial World,' Geoforum 40, no. 1 (2009): 10–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.007.

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Risk

Risk is closely related with harm, a central principles of contemporary institutional research ethics. The Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) of the UK guidelines state that ‘Risk is often defined by reference to the potential physical or psychological harm, discomfort, stress or reputational risk to human participants (and participating groups, organisations and funders) that a research project might generate.’[1] One of the key texts that inform institutional research ethics is the Belmont Report,[2] which states that risk should be considered in advance of every research project, and assigns responsibility to the researchers ‘to decide when it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved, and when the benefits should be foregone because of the risks.’[3]

Assessing risk is complicated, since beyond physical risk of harm, there are many other possible types of harm that could result from research. For example, the Association of Social Anthropologists ethical guidelines point out that negative consequences should be considered for both the immediate research participants, and the long-term effects for other members of the social group or even wider society.[4] Other types of non-physical risk may include ‘risk to a participant’s personal social standing, privacy, personal values and beliefs, their links to family and the wider community, and their position within occupational settings.’[5] In addition to risks for research participants, there could be risks to the researchers as well.  The ethical guidelines provided by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) remind us that ‘Safeguarding the physical and psychological wellbeing of researchers is part of the ethical responsibility of employing institutions and sponsors, as well as of researchers themselves.’[6]

Academic institutions classify research into ‘high risk’ and ‘low risk’ categories, which must be approved by a relevant ethics board. High risk is generally defined as research involving children and young people, those with a learning disability or cognitive impairment, individuals in a dependent or unequal relationship, and other potentially vulnerable groups. This applies also to ‘sensitive research’, involving ‘sensitive research topics’, such as‘participants’ sexual behaviour, illegal or political behaviour, experience of violence, abuse or exploitation, mental health, their personal or family lives, or their gender or ethnic status.’[7]

Safety for researchers and research participants is not only a moral duty but also a legal responsibility (detailed in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999), and research institutions require a risk assessment to be carried out before the research commences, to recognise situations that are potentially risky and identify measures for control and minimisation of risk.[8] However, the acts of assessing and managing risk are in themselves social, political and culturally-dependant constructs. One way to consider this, suggested by the BERA guidelines, is for researchers to think through their duty of care.[9]

Care ethics provides valuable tools for considering risk, because its emphasis on ‘relationships of responsibility’ opens the possibility for understanding risk and prevention of harm as relationships of care and commitments.[10] Care ethics allows for the very notion of risk to be considered under the specific context of the research. For example, Flicker et al. point out that in some cases, ‘What constitutes “risk” to an outsider may be part of everyday experience for individuals within a community.’[11] This stresses the importance of ethical thinking regarding the political, cultural and situated conditions of risk, and further amplifies the question regarding who decides what constitutes risk and how to address it. 

Written by Yael Padan.

[1] 'ESRC Framework for Research Ethics'  https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for-research-ethics-2015/, p.27.

[2] The Belmont Report was published in 1979 by the USA’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research.

[3] Kenneth John Ryan et al., “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research,” Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, USA, 1979, https://doi.org/10.1021/bi00780a005.

[4] The ASA Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice https://www.theasa.org/ethics/guidelines.shtml.

[5] 'ESRC Framework for Research Ethics.'  https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for-research-ethics-2015/, p. 27.

[6] ‘BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.)’ https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online#harm

[7] ‘ESRC Framework for research ethics, Updated January 2015’ https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrc-framework-for-research-ethics-2015/, p.9.

[8] ‘BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.)’ https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online#harm.

[9] BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.)’  https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018-online#harm.

[10] Joan C. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics,” Ethics and Social Welfare 6, no. 3 (2012): 303–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058.

[11] Sarah Flicker et al., 'Ethical Dilemmas in Community-Based Participatory Research: Recommendations for Institutional Review Boards,' Journal of Urban Health 84, no. 4 (2007): 487, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-007-9165-7.

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Situatedness
(draft)

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

Feminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particular relations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower.[1]

Feminist geographers and philosophers engaging with postmodern and poststructural discussions of subjectivity, have frequently relied on spatial metaphors and concepts to emphasize the importance of physical location and social position in the construction of gendered and sexed identities and subjectivities.[2] From the late 1980s onwards the language of core feminist texts across the social sciences, and arts and humanities, became highly spatialised, with words such as ‘mapping’, ‘locating’, ’situating’, ‘positioning’ and ‘boundaries’ appearing frequently. Discussions of new ways of knowing and being were articulated through spatial terms, with conceptual and critical tools such as ‘standpoint theory’ and ‘situated knowledge’ developed for examining the relationship between the construction of subjects and the politics of location. 

Feminist theorists enter into and echo postmodernist discourses as we have begun to deconstruct notions of reason, knowledge, or the self and to reveal the effects of the gender arrangements that lay beneath their ‘neutral’ and universalizing facades.[3]

Susan Heckman has argued that Nancy Hartstock’s critique of positivism and introduction of standpoint theory, in her 1983 book Money, Sex, and Power ‘changed the landscape of feminist theory’:

[Hartsock's] goal is to define the nature of the truth claims that feminists advance and to provide a methodological grounding that will validate those claims. The method she defines is the feminist standpoint. Borrowing heavily from Marx, yet adapting her insights to her specifically feminist ends, Hartsock claims that it is women's unique standpoint in society that provides the justification for the truth claims of feminism while also providing it with a method with which to analyse reality. [4]  

Hekman discusses how Hartsock's essay ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, brought the concept of ‘standpoint theory’ to a philosophical audience.[5] At the start of this essay Hartstock acknowledges how the title responds to ‘Iris Young’s call for the development of a specifically feminist historical materialism’,[6]  and that her work is ‘deeply indebted to a number of women whose ideas are incorporated here, although not always used in the ways they might wish’ – these women include Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding and Jane Flax.[7] In Sandra Harding’s identification of three kinds of feminist epistemology, feminist stand-point theory based on a feminist angle of interpretation, is put forward alongside feminist empiricism based on women’s authentic experience, and feminist postmodernism, as a stance rejecting the possibility of any universal theory.[8]

 In her 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges,’ Donna Haraway argued, most memorably, that ‘feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.’[9] As Gillian Rose has noted, in ‘its use of terms like `position' and `situated', Haraway's analysis is spatialized. But she also develops her understanding of situated knowledge by using what she describes as visual metaphors. She characterizes oppressive knowledges that present themselves as universal, for example, as knowledges that claim to see everything from nowhere.’[10]

Although her essay became (possibly) the most cited text from this period of feminist scholarship, from Seyla Benhabib’s critical articulation of ‘feminism as situated criticism’ in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics,[11] to bell hooks’ exploration the margin as both a site of possibility and repression,[12] it is clear that Haraway was by no means the only one to argue that knowledge is constructed and subjectivity is contingent on situatedness. Indeed writing by women of colour in the 1980s, led the way in developing theories of female difference – raced, classed, sexed and gendered – through accounts of situated life experiences located often around home.[13]

A situated form of knowledge means that people understand the same things in different ways resulting from the distinct relations in which they stand to it. The ‘Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science’ entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises eight key qualities of situated knowledge: embodiment; first-person v third person knowledge; emotions, attitudes, interests and values; personal knowledge of others; know-how; cognitive styles; background beliefs and worldviews; and relations to other inquirers. [14]

Situatedness influences knowers’ access to information and the terms in which they represent what they know. They bear on the form of their knowledge (articulate/implicit, formal/informal, and so forth). They affect their attitudes toward their beliefs (certainty/doubt, dogmatic/open to revision), their standards of justification, and the authority with which they lay claim to their beliefs and offer them to others. They affect knowers’ assessment of which claims are significant or important. [15]

Feminist epistemology focuses on how the social location of the knower affects what and how she knows. 

Individuals are subject to different norms that prescribe different virtues, habits, emotions, and skills thought to be appropriate for their roles. They also have different subjective identities—identities incorporated into their self-understandings—, and attitudes toward their ascribed identities, such as affirmation, rejection, pride, and shame. [16]

Taking a situated approach to the practice of research ethics engages with the concept of situatedness itself addressing the particularities of a site and a researcher-practitioner’s relation to it. This prompts the researcher-practitioner to address the material, political, and emotional qualities of their own subjectivities and what constitutes a change or transformation in a condition that can bring us into a state of critical awareness. In her essay ‘Thinking about Feeling Historical,’ Lauren Berlant writes the following about two men ‘in the now’:

A situation has forced them to think. A situation has changed the ordinary into something they can no longer presume. . . . A situation is a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life.[17]

The process of taking notice and becoming aware is an embodied experience. Iris Marion Young, drawing on Toril Moi’s work and existentialist philosophy, uses the term ‘body-in-situation’ to argue that the lived body is a better concept for theorizing subjectivity than gender. Young writes, ‘The lived body is a unified idea of a physical body acting and experiencing in a specific sociocultural context; it is body-in-situation.’[18] The relation between the noun, situation and the verb, to situate, can be understood with respect to processes of problematization. In his study of Foucault, Clive Barnett writes, ‘Problematization is an object of study,’ where the ‘process by which modes of living or modes of self-care become problems.’ Problematization is located in the mode of interpretation itself, ‘in which the task of analysis is primarily to call into question taken-for-granted assumptions and identities and settlements.’[19]Barnett notes that as part of Foucault’s thinking about problems is ‘his particular understanding of the situational emergence of problems and of their manifestation in “thought”’[20] and ‘how experience and thought, understood as functions of practices of reflection, are historically variable, and in turn how thought in this sense is occasioned by uncertain situations.’[21] Despite the critiques levelled at Foucault by feminists for his gender blindness, the techniques and practices of the self which he examines in extraordinary detail in his late work, are helpful for understanding how the experiential process of situating oneself in that a situation relate to ethics. For Foucault, the ‘determination of the ethical substance’ is ‘the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct,’ and ‘the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement)’ is ‘the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice.’[22]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#SituKnow

[2] See the ground-breaking work produced in the mid 1990s by Liz Bondi, Linda McDowell, Doreen Massey, Steve Pile, and Gillian Rose. 

[3] Jane Flax, ‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory’, Signs, v. 12, n. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 621–43, p. 626. Flax references Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’ Socialist Review 80 (1983), pp. 65-107; Kathy E. Ferguson, The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); and Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

[4] Susan Hekman, ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’, Signs , Winter, 1997, v. 22, n. 2 (Winter, 1997), pp. 341-365, p. 341. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175275.

[5] Hartsock, Nancy C. M. (1983). "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism". In Harding, Sandra; Hintikka, Merrill B. (eds.). Discovering Reality. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library. 161. Springer Netherlands. pp. 283–310. 

[6] Iris Young. ‘Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory,’ in Socialist Review 10, 2/3 (March-June, 1980).

[7] Hartstock references Jane Flax, ‘Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics’. See also See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 232.

[8] See Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press and Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1986).

[9] Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Knowledge,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 581. Emphasis original.

[10] Gillian Rose, ‘Positionality, Reflexivities and other tactics,’  pp. 307-8.

[11] Seyla Benhabib’s critical articulation of “feminism as situated criticism” in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).

[12] bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End, 1984). See also bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (London: Turnaround Press, 1989).

[13] Cherrie Moraga, ‘From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism,’ in Teresa de Lauretis (ed.) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983); Barbara Smith, ‘Introduction,’ in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Barbara Smith (ed.) (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983), xix-lvi; and Audre Lorde, ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,’ in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing, 1984), 114-23.

[14] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#SituKnow

[15] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#SituKnow

[16] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#SituKnow

[17] Lauren Berlant, “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Emotion, Space and Society 1 (October 2008): 4.

[18] Young also quotes Moi: ‘To claim that the body is a situation is to acknowledge that the meaning of a woman’s body is bound up with the way she uses her freedom.’ Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16. See Toril Moi, ‘What is a Woman?’ in What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 

[19] Clive Barnett, “On Problematization: Elaborations on a Theme in ‘Late Foucault,’” nonsite.org 16, June 22, 2015, https://nonsite.org/article/on-problematization/.

[20] Ibid., 14.

[21] Ibid., 15.

[22] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 26. Emphasis original.

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Virtue
(draft)

A virtue [1] is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition, well entrenched in its possessor—something that, as we say, goes all the way down, unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker—to notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react in certain characteristic ways. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset.[2] 

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Two concepts that are central to all forms of virtue ethics, namely, virtue and practical wisdom.[3]

In eastern philosophy, virtue ethics can be traced back to Mencius and Confucius, and in the west, where it is one of the oldest normative traditions of ethics theory, to Plato and Aristotle. Plato, for example, emphasized four virtues, later called cardinal virtues, in particular, wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. Other important virtues include fortitude, generosity, self-respect, good temper, and sincerity. As well as arguing for good habits of character, virtue theorists also advise against acquiring bad character traits, or vices, such as cowardice, insensibility, injustice, and vanity.[4]

In Aristotle’s understanding of virtue it is related to character, which is ‘about a state of being’, ‘having the appropriate inner states’, and ‘involv[ing] the right sort of emotions and inner states with respect to our feelings towards others.’[5]For Aristotle, ‘character is also about doing’: 

Aristotelian theory is a theory of action, since having the virtuous inner dispositions will also involve being moved to act in accordance with them. Realizing that kindness is the appropriate response to a situation and feeling appropriately kindly disposed will also lead to a corresponding attempt to act kindly.[6]

Virtue ethics that follows Aristotle’s work focuses on three concepts: ‘arête (excellence or virtue), phronesis (practical or moral wisdom) and eudaimonia (usually translated as happiness or flourishing).’[7]

A key feature of virtue ethics holds that character traits are developed over a long period of time, and are also stable over time, and consistent: 

If an agent possesses the character trait of kindness, we would expect him or her to act kindly in all sorts of situations, towards all kinds of people, and over a long period of time, even when it is difficult to do so. A person with a certain character can be relied upon to act consistently over a time. [8]

People might be born with positive and negative natural tendencies, which can be encouraged or discouraged, so people’s exposure to different situations and people will influence how a character forms and habits develop. For this reason, processes of moral education are important, as the development of virtues depends on good role models.Since virtuous character traits are developed in one’s youth, virtue theory emphasizes adults responsibility for instilling virtues in the young.[9]

While other theories of normative ethics focus on universal principles which can be applied in any moral situation, and duty ethics in particular places emphasis on rules, and ensuring one’s actions follow rules, in virtue ethics the focus is on the importance of learning ‘good habits of character’. Virtue ethics asks broader questions such as ‘How should I live?’ and ‘What is the good life?’

Virtue ethics was a dominant approach in Western moral philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, was less dominant during the nineteenth century, and then is argued to have re-emerged in Anglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s, due to the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) which ‘crystallized an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing.’[10] Modern virtue ethics is considered to have developed different strands. The suggestion is that: 

While all forms of virtue ethics agree that virtue is central and practical wisdom required, they differ in how they combine these and other concepts to illuminate what we should do in particular contexts and how we should live our lives as a whole. [11]

According to the The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy there are three branches: eudaimonism, which bases virtues in human flourishing, where flourishing is equated with performing one’s distinctive function well; agent-based theory which emphasizes that virtues are determined judging admirable traits in other people; and an ethics of care, which has been developed out of feminist thinking, and challenges an ethics that focuses solely on justice and autonomy; arguing instead for traits such as caring and nurturing.[12] However, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out four distinct forms that contemporary virtue ethics takes ‘a) eudaimonist virtue ethics, b) agent-based and exemplarist virtue ethics, c) target-centered virtue ethics, and d) Platonistic virtue ethics,’ [13] arguing that a ‘complete account of virtue’ will map out a virtue’s field, basis of moral acknowledgement, mode of responsiveness and target. Different virtues are concerned with different fields, and the basis of acknowledgment of a virtue is the feature within the virtue’s field to which it responds. A virtue’s mode concerns the way in which responds to the basis of acknowledgment within its field, and a virtue’s target is that at which it is aimed.[14]  Objections raised against virtue ethics include a) application, b) adequacy, c) relativism, d) conflict, e) self-effacement, f) justification, g) egoism, and h) situationist problems.[15]

In Judith Butler’s close analysis of Michel Foucault’s 1978 lecture ‘What is Critique’ from The Politics of Truth, she notes how ‘critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses it character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice’.[16]  Butler talks of how, for Foucault, ‘critique is precisely a practice that not only suspends judgment …  but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension’. [17]  Pointing to the way in which the practice of critique emerges from ‘the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web’,  she outlines that, for Foucault, this exposure of the limit of the epistemological field is linked with the practice of virtue, ‘as if virtue is counter to regulation and order, as if virtue itself is to be found in the risking of established order’. [18]   According to Foucault, the ‘signature mark’ of the critical attitude and its particular virtue is governance, ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’. ‘I would therefore propose’, says Foucault, ‘as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much’.[19]

Written by Jane Rendell.

[1] This entry was compiled from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) (ISSN 2161-0002), https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H3, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/.

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/#PracWisd

[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[4] https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#SH2a

[5] https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/

[6] https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/

[7] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[8] https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/

[9] https://iep.utm.edu/ethics/#H3

[10] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[11] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[12] https://iep.utm.edu/virtue/

[13] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[14] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[15] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

[16] Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,’  D. Ingram (ed) The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, (London: Blackwell, 2002), 212.

[17] Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,’  D. Ingram (ed) The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, (London: Blackwell, 2002), 212.

[18] Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,’  D. Ingram (ed) The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, (London: Blackwell, 2002), 212.

[19] Michel, Foucault, ‘What Is Critique?’ The Politics of Truth, (New York:  Semiotext(e), (2007), 41-82.

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