Zoe Krupka writes about the current issues dealing with what it means to be a normal family, and what it means to be a functional or dysfunctional family. She refers to Kay Hymowitz who also writes about the functionality of a family, specifically dealing with single-parents. That is to say, parents that are not married. Hymowitz writes that single motherhood parenting is destructive and harmful to children, and restricts their type of lifestyle. He writes that high levels of poverty and social immobility are linked with the rise of single motherhood, but people seem to disagree at a political level, whether or not this is a beneficial or sustainable lifestyle in regards to the child.

Zoe references plenty of authors in her work, which help create a larger understanding of the issue she’s writing about. Using an article from an Australian psychologist, Bettina Arndt, who has researched into this idea of the ‘casualistation of families’, but rather from a psychological perspective. Unfortunately the article that Zoe refers to in her writing requires a subscription to The Australia, and this limits how many people will and can read into her references. I find that including references that are unreadable and restrictive to the point where you have to pay for access is unprofessional, and lowers the standard of the writing.

These two authors that Zoe references however, she completely disagrees with, saying “It’s both a gross misuse of the evidence base and a stunted template for ethical decision-making.” She says that these two authors are trying to create a new ethical standard regarding how we view productive families. She states that there are so many more factors dependent on the production and success of a family that have to be considered. Competing interests such as the economics, gender, genetics and personal lifestyles can influence how a family will perpetuate.

She uses cold, hard, statistical facts to back up her claims, by attacking what can be seen as a ‘normal family’, to show that in a normal family, there are some large factors that influence the success of that family. She talks about family violence, and how one in five women face violence from their partner, and how 40-60% of divorced women live under the poverty line.

She finishes by stating that we cannot have a blueprint for a perfect family, there are so many personal and contextual events that drive each family individually to the next, that we can’t possibly compare the two.

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Sources:

Krupka Zoe, ZK 2014, ‘The ‘Perfect Family’ has created an ethical and moral vacuum’, The Conversation, 12th September, Viewed 10th April, < http://theconversation.com/the-perfect-family-has-created-an-ethical-and-moral-vacuum-31339 &gt;

Hymowtiz Kay, KH 2014, ‘How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids’, The New York Times, 8th February, Viewed 10th April, < http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/how-single-motherhood-hurts-kids/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=4 &gt;

Ethics is an important philosophy created to show what is right and wrong in just about everything. Ethics can apply to everything in the world, from scientific studies, to your local sports team. It creates a guideline of whats morally right, and what shouldn’t be done. In regards to studies, ethics is very important in maintaining a moral ground, so that the studies can be socially accepted. A common example to show studies that are not ethically met, are the Nazi experiments conducted during World War 2 on prisoners of war. These studies disregard all morals and ethics in today’s society, and the society of the time.

A more recent example of questionable ethics while conducting studies would be the ‘Emotional Contagion’ study conducted through Facebook, which knowingly affected the happiness and mood of some Facebook users. The experiment worked by changing the amount of positive and negative status’ made be friends to be shown in their newsfeed, and they found a correlation between viewing a saturation of one mood, to themselves posting status’ of that mood. So people viewing the more negative status’ were found to post more negative things themselves. You can see why people aren’t over the moon about this.

Simply scrolling through your newsfeed can affect your mood

David Hunter writes about this ethics breach, and asks the question, “when is someone involved in human research?“, he says that while technically, no rules were broken because Facebook is a privately owned business, and were legally able to conduct the research, but morally and ethically, was it right? He shares that “6.7% of Americans suffer from depression“, and we can determine that around 46,000 of the database has depression, and these people would have been greatly impacted by this research.

I found this research personally interesting, the idea that you can transfer emotions is powerful, and i’m sure someone, somewhere, is figuring out a bad way to use this new finding. However, this research can have great impact in the health sector, and could even help people suffering from depression, by applying this research in a way to help improve people’s mental health. So while this research was ethically wrong, some positive research and conclusions have amounted from it. One of the big questions that arise from this, is does ethics stand in the way of progress?

To answer this question, I thought it was best to ask around, and see what others think about not just if ethics stand in the way, but what people think about ethics all together, and what kind of studies they would be interested in, if they disregarded ethics completely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQSLQdSVtto&feature=youtu.be

 

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Sources:

Hunter David, DH 2014, ‘Facebook puts ethics of research by private companies in spotlight’, The Conversation, 4th July, Viewed 2nd April, < http://theconversation.com/facebook-puts-ethics-of-research-by-private-companies-in-spotlight-28798 >

Kramer Adam, 2014, ‘Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks’, PNAS, Vol. 111, No. 24.

Moe Kristine, 1984, ‘Should the Nazi Research Be Cited?’, The Hastings Centre Report, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp 5-7.