Ethics has been described where the law ends. Both share the goal of creating and preserving social good (Brock & Mastroianni, 2013). Ethics is never isolated, nor is the law. Issues that have both ethical and legal components include: The Mental Health Care Act, 2017 (MHCA 2017)[1] explicitly addresses the rights of patients with mental illness (PWMI) and sets out the ethical and legal responsibilities of mental health professionals and government. PWMI rights are on par with fundamental human rights and must be clearly taken into account, as they belong to a vulnerable group in terms of assessment, treatment and research. These rights are reflected in the ethics of psychiatric care, which refers to respect for autonomy; the principle of non-evil, charity and justice; confidentiality (and disclosure); border offences; informed consent (and involuntary treatment); etc.[2,3] I will discuss ethical, legal and related issues related to the manuscripts published in this issue of the journal. The complex conceptual nature of CLLs creates an obvious need for inference so that the understanding can unravel coherence gaps and implicit meanings. However, for people struggling with conclusions, the ability to grasp the gestalt meaning of CLLs may be compromised: while they may have a solid foundation on which to build their understanding, they may not be able to access the materials needed to build the understanding of “buildings.” Because understanding CLL is likely to require several components of inference, and because these requirements are likely to be difficult for many populations, the risk of problematic ethical outcomes resulting from understanding CLL is real. Research suggests that ethical conflicts in the healthcare sector are increasing, both due to the increasing complexity of care and due to scientific and technological advances. Several studies that have attempted to analyze ethical conflicts that occur in intensive care units have found that ethical conflicts faced by critical care nurses stem from three main sources: The legal contexts of CLL create the need for complex and accurate mental representation to achieve understanding. However, producing such a mental representation is likely to require cognitive skills and conceptual knowledge that many people, especially those with cognitive difficulties, may not have. Therefore, their ability to create a situational model may be questionable; Even with a solid base and a material with which they can build their model, the finished product may simply not fit.
Since this mental representation serves as the basis for both conscious understanding of the mind and subsequent behaviors, there is an obvious ethical need to ensure that this mental representation is as accurate and appropriate as possible; If this is not the case, ethical questions may arise. Veracity is not a fundamental bioethical principle and is only mentioned in passing in most ethical texts. It is essentially an element of respect for people (Gabard, 2003). The veracity contrasts with the concept of medical paternalism, which assumes that patients only need to know what their doctors reveal. Clearly, attitudes toward truthfulness have changed dramatically because it forms the basis of autonomy that patients expect today. Informed consent is, for example, the ability to exercise autonomy with knowledge. In summary, there are four aspects of CLL that present particular challenges for people trying to understand them. First, CLLs typically contain vocabulary, concepts, and syntax that challenge the lower-level cognitive functions required for successful understanding. Second, CLLs typically require a high level of inference processing to fill in significance gaps. Third, LLCs generally need a specific situational model that overlaps with the correct or expected legal meaning. Fourth, and finally, CLL generally represents a mixture of textual genres that require additional mental representations. Taken together, these aspects likely make CLLs particularly difficult to understand, and the resulting ethical concerns convincingly demonstrate that a number of subtle and complex ethical issues fall into the darkness of language understanding.
As difficult as legal language can be for the average person (Payne, Time, & Gainey, 2006; Rogers et al., 2012; Rogers et al., 2013), it may be even more incomprehensible to people with speech and communication disabilities. Research in many academic fields now suggests that understanding legal language is influenced by many groups of people, including adolescents (Helms, 2007; Rogers et al., 2008; Rogers et al., 2012), populations with speech and language disorders (Rost & McGregor, 2012; Snow, Powell, & Sanger, 2012), psychiatric patients (Cooper & Zapf, 2008), and traumatic brain injury individuals (Wszalek & Turkstra, 2015). Not surprisingly, these populations are over-represented in the criminal justice system (Williams et al., 2010; Farrer and Hedges, 2011; Fazel et al., 2011; Snow and Powell, 2011; Fazel and Seewald 2012), and the alarming frequency with which these individuals are included in court systems, link language skills, including language comprehension, to desirable legal outcomes (LaVigne and Van Rybroek, 2014; Wszalek and Turkstra, 2015).