I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.

The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.

In the eighteenth century, the practice of law was not a self-governing profession in the modern sense. Many lawyers and judges lacked specialized knowledge and formal training, and only a few were subject to regulation or oversight. This chapter examines how Henry Fielding grapples with the consequences of this undisciplined, undereducated, and ethically unmoored legal culture in Tom Jones (1749). Fielding derides the inadequacies of the period’s legal order by featuring magistrates and attorneys whose primary characteristics are intellectual incompetence, poor judgment, and moral corruption. Yet he also proposes a remedy to the law’s limitations. Drawing from moral philosophies circulating in the mid eighteenth century, Fielding implicitly advocates for a professional system that fosters its representatives’ innate moral virtues and enforces a stable but flexible code of ethics. His proposal has relevance for today’s legal profession, which is likewise susceptible to charges of ineffectiveness, injustice, and unfairness.

The book concludes by pointing out two major shifts that my reading of the Shepherd produces: one focused on how the centrality of slavery in the Shepherd that complicates earlier treatments of the text as most invested in baptism and/or repentance, and the other focused on the ethical and historical anxieties that emerge from the enslaved–enslaver relationship being so deeply embedded in early Christian literature, ethics, and subject formation. Additionally, I point to how my findings reveal why the Shepherd would be appealing to late ancient Christians: its visionary, dialogical, parabolic, and ethical content are aimed toward crafting obedient enslaved believers who were unified in their ecclesiastical vision. The work of feminist, womanist, Africana, and slavery studies scholars offer an intellectual and ethical scaffolding upon which I contend with the centrality in early Christian thought of God as an enslaver and believers as enslaved persons, as well as the continuations and challenges of the embeddedness of slavery in Christian vocabulary into the twenty-first century.

Chapter 4 considers ethical issues in healthcare communication research through two case studies. The first case study looks at a relatively straightforward situation involving a study of the Pain Concern online forum. Data from the forum was provided by Health Unlocked, a company that runs a large number of online communities related to health. One advantage of using their service was that Health Unlocked took care of relevant legal requirements concerning ethics and only shared data from contributors to the forum who had agreed for their posts to be used for research purposes. The second case study relates to the study of dementia and brings into focus the difficulties of working with multiple datasets and a range of stakeholders. The data collection for this project involved public health communication in terms of news media and external communications from support services, including social media. As such, it presents scenarios that are common to studies of health communication and thereby offers instruction in how to navigate related ethical concerns.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth (Vanderbilt Law) argues that the legal services regulatory scheme perversely both over- and under-regulates the legal services marketplace – licensing too few lawyers on the front end and then, on the back end, taking insufficient steps to ensure adequate quality. According to Allensworth, the current system of lawyer regulation bars nonlawyer providers from the system and simultaneously shunts the lowest-quality lawyers into the system’s lower precincts, where the consequences of poor representation are most sharply felt. Allensworth’s lightning bolt of a chapter shows that the challenge of regulatory reform is not just opening the system to new providers but also rethinking how to allocate – and police – the providers already there.

Chapter 55 covers the topic of forensic psychiatry. Through a short answer question format with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the more common aspects of forensic psychiatry. Topics covered include the roles of a forensic psychiatrist, typical preamble given prior to the start of a forensic psychaitry consult, expert witness role, fitness to plead, asssessment for criminal responsbilty, the associatiation between mental disorders and crimes and medical malpractice.

In 2018, Hannah Gadsby created a sensation through her stand-up show Nanette. In it she shocked audiences by telling her hard-hitting trauma narrative, revealing the impact of sexual abuse, male violence, and homophobia on her mental health. Controversially, Gadsby also claimed that stand-up as a form and the mainstream stand-up industry itself were significant agents in deepening her psychological harm. This chapter examines Gadsby’s dramaturgical strategies and struggles in attempting to construct a means of speaking about the pain of her lived experience and seeking a therapeutic means of addressing her trauma through stand-up. Luckhurst analyses Gadsby’s interest in ethical story-telling and her notion of educating audiences about laughter and political complicity. Finally, Luckhurst argues that Gadsby draws on therapy models to transform her trauma narrative into a story of healing for herself and her audiences.

It is impossible to understand Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie” without a sense of how Kant’s theory of truth and truthfulness developed over time; and it is impossible to trace the development of Kant’s thought without a clear sense of the conceptual framework that he took as his starting point. This chapter examines the early modern debate with its distinction between morally objectionable lies (mendacia) and morally innocent falsified assertions (falsiloquia) and then presents Kant’s thoughts on the topic in his lectures and in his major writings on moral philosophy. He endorses the distinction between unobjectionable and objectionable falsehoods in the early lectures; in his later publications, he rejects it.

Since the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022, public discourse has intensified regarding the intersection of artificial intelligence and intellectual property rights, particularly copyright. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini have sparked debates about what deserves copyright protection and what constitutes copyright infringement. Key questions arise: Are LLM-generated outputs original enough to merit copyright protection? And do they infringe upon existing copyrighted works used in their training data? This chapter delves into these issues, examining the legal and ethical implications of training LLMs on copyrighted material. The chapter also explores the concept of fair use, the potential for transformative use of copyrighted works, and the evolving landscape of copyright law in the age of AI.

This chapter explores the notion of ethics and ethical decision-making frameworks in leading and managing health services. Chapter 1 outlined the four sets of skills, or functions, that every manager should possess, which are usually summarised under the acronym POLC: planning, organising, leading and controlling. With leadership being one of the four functions of management, it is important to understand both the management and the leadership aspects of ethical decision-making.

The details of the example of the ‘murderer at the door’ – as it is commonly, if inaccurately called – are more complicated than most interpreters assume. This chapter is dedicated to the details of the case, many of which surface only in the light of other eighteenth-century versions of the story. Does the would-be murderer know that the person hiding his intended victim knows about his murderous intentions? Why are the options of the person asked about the victim’s hiding place restricted to yes or no, and how would this restriction work in practice? What are the reasons or motives of someone who intends to lie to a would-be murderer? And what are Constant’s ‘intermediate principles’, which he introduces to defuse the problem case? The chapter also explores Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s discussion of the case in his 1798 System of Ethics. Fichte and Kant agree that lying is not a legitimate option; but Fichte is by far the more radical moralist of the two.

This chapter explores key elements of AI as relevant to intellectual property law. Understanding how artificial intelligence works is crucial for applying legal regimes to it. Legal practitioners, especially IP lawyers, need a deep understanding of AI’s technical nuances. Intellectual property doctrines aim to achieve practical ends, and their application to AI is highly fact-dependent. Patent law, for example, requires technical expertise in addition to legal knowledge. This chapter tracks the development of AI from simple programming to highly sophisticated learning algorithms. It emphasizes how AI is rapidly evolving and that many of these systems are already being widely adopted in society. AI is transforming fields like education, law, healthcare, and finance. While AI offers numerous benefits, it also raises concerns about bias and transparency, among numerous other ethical implications.