We always treat fluent language as a marker of intelligence and trustworthiness, often independent of factual accuracy. Large language models (LLMs) exploit this bias by producing confident, human-like texts that are perceived as intelligent and trustworthy, even when they lack accurate contextual understanding or are factually incorrect. This creates particular risks in mental healthcare, where communication, trust and context are central, and where errors are difficult to detect but highly consequential. This article examines how linguistic fluency shapes judgement, how LLMs amplify these effects and why their use in mental healthcare poses ethical and clinical dangers. It argues for strict limits on deployment, restricting LLMs to supervised, assistive tasks rather than clinical judgement.

There is a widespread perception among academics, doctors and patients that the common law can effectively drive the development and incorporation of patients’ autonomy-based rights into medical practice. However, there is reason to doubt that this is correct.

We present a critical analysis of this view, prompted by themes that emerged from interviews with n=31 lawyers and n=24 doctors as part of a larger interdisciplinary study. We focus on the limitations of case law in driving autonomy-respecting clinical practice. Part I examines how the development and impact of decided cases is dominated by practical and economic considerations. It also considers the lack of understanding of case law among clinicians and the extent to which this limits its ability to drive change. Part II sets out our reasons for treating these limitations as a cause for concern. In Part III, we conclude by considering different levers for supporting case law in creating or confirming autonomy-respecting norms in medical practice, suggesting ways in which these might be developed further.

We argue that clinical negligence litigation is important as a guide to clinical practice and a means of enforcing autonomy-based patient rights but that it cannot be relied upon to drive changes in practice. Both professional guidance and legislation can augment case law but, for them to be effective, proper communication between doctors and legislators, courts, lawyers and insurance organizations is essential.

Mental health advance directives are one mechanism to enable individuals to have a voice in their treatment at a time when most legislative systems would consider them to lack the capacity to make informed choices. This honours their will and preferences while at the same time recognising the difficulties of the legislative framework. In this review we consider the use of such advance directives in New Zealand, in the form of a specialised advance agreement known as a mental health advance preference statement (MAPS). By evaluating their development and considering their ethics and cultural components we offer insights into one approach to the creation and implementation of MAPS for other jurisdictions.

In social entrepreneurship research, social businesses have increasingly been cited as a proper conduit to solutions for pressing social problems to transform societies into better places. As a result, the ethics of social entrepreneurship is often assumed but not explicitly explained. In this article, we reflect on this view and offer an alternative to enrich the comprehension of ethics in this area. We draw on Ricoeur’s notion of the economy of the gift, which stresses the generosity that we put in our relationships with others to evaluate the ethicality of our actions. This approach brings fresh insights to judge the ethics in the social entrepreneurship field with an integrative approach that goes beyond what is considered to serve a social mission or adopting a social governance but considering the ethics of actions in the immediacy and singularity of each relationship and situation.

We conducted an exploratory cross-sectional analysis of ethical principles and practices in forty-one published research papers with empirical data on HIV prevalence, incidence, or risk factors in humanitarian settings. We identified ten key concepts pertinent to ethical principles and applications, and presented recommendations to inform future HIV prevention research.

Despite being a rare phenomenon, children who kill galvanise extraordinary amounts of conversation about why they did it, how to deal with them and how to prevent recurrences. The debate quickly becomes polarised and occasionally politicised, often without nuanced consideration of the benefits and costs of proceeding in one direction or another. A scientific approach would begin with the question: ‘what do we actually want the outcomes to be?’, which might assist in relinquishing the less helpful desire for natural justice or revenge and move towards a more evidence-informed and inclusive approach to children who have committed very serious crimes.

Ethics has become a central concern in applied linguistics, with researchers from both qualitative and quantitative paradigms increasingly engaging with ethical considerations. While methodological guidelines have been proposed to support ethical research practices (De Costa, 2024), it remains unclear to what extent these are implemented and reported. Narrative inquiry, in particular, poses complex ethical challenges due to its relational and often deeply personal nature. Although qualitative traditions have long led ethical reflections in applied linguistics, ethical enactment and transparency in narrative inquiry remain inconsistent. To explore this issue, we conducted a methodological synthesis of 332 narrative inquiry studies published between 2012 and 2023, examining ethical practices across study design, recruitment, data collection, and analysis. Findings reveal that while issues like anonymity were commonly addressed, other areas – such as IRB approval, participant incentives, considerations for vulnerable populations, and data sharing – showed marked variation. Drawing on current literature, we propose empirically grounded recommendations to strengthen ethical reporting in narrative research. Rather than associating macro-ethics and micro-ethics with specific paradigms, we integrate both to explore how ethical principles are enacted in context. Given the relational and situated nature of narrative inquiry, this review responds to a timely need for more transparent and reflexive ethical practice in the field.

The consensus on the need to regulate artificial intelligence is clear, but the how remains elusive. Private regulation, as proposed by the tech industry itself, and state regulation, as embodied in the recent EU Artificial Intelligence Act, are two common forms of governance. We advance a third option that has received very little attention to date: professional regulation. Professional regulation is modeled after hybrid public-private regulatory structures found in medicine, such as those put forth by the American Medical Association. Such governance schemes develop both technical and ethical standards, shaping professional training, continuing knowledge, and conduct. We contend that it is the most practical means of ensuring the development of human-centered AI in an era of rapid technological change and intensely opposing views of what regulation ought to do. This article places the responsibility of acting ethically on the group that knows the technology best and can anticipate its effects: AI developers. But unlike other voluntary standards, professional regulation articulates and enforces standards to certify individuals. Professional licensing is an alternative that provides public protections based on privately developed standards that ensure the safety of AI prior to their release.