The South African society continues to stagger under an immense wave of corruption in both the private and the public sectors. Corruption is the misuse of public office or a position of authority for private, material or social gain at the expense of other people. The aim of this investigation is to discuss the phenomenon from a moral point of view and to suggest moral directives and ways that ...

OBJECTIVE The investigation provides recommendations for establishing institutional collection guidelines and policies that protect the integrity of the historical record, while upholding the privacy and confidentiality of those who are protected by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or professional ethical standards. METHODS The authors completed a systematic histori...

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for eScience in the context eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of ‘practical ethical action’ in which clinicians are seen to rou...

INTRODUCTION Over the past 3 decades, there has been a substantial shift to the marketisation of government-funded health services. For organisations traditionally buffered from the competitive pressures of for-profit enterprises, such as community-based organisations, this means developing the capacity to adapt to competitive tendering processes, shifting client expectations, and increasing de...

This paper analyses ethical issues in forensic psychiatric research on mentally disordered offenders, especially those detained in the psychiatric treatment system. The idea of a 'dual role' dilemma afflicting forensic psychiatry is more complicated than acknowledged. Our suggestion acknowledges the good of criminal law and crime prevention as a part that should be balanced against familiar res...

Care ethics as initiated by Gilligan, Held, Tronto and others (in the nineteen eighties and nineties) has from its onset been critical towards ethical concepts established in modernity, like 'autonomy', alternatively proposing to think from within relationships and to pay attention to power. In this article the question is raised whether renewal in this same critical vein is necessary and possi...

From the Hippocratic Oath to the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, from Maimonides’ Oath to the Declaration of Geneva (the Physician’s Oath), human history reveals an abundance of pledges, guidelines and laws to regulate the relationship between professionals and society. However, increasing concerns about the new and emerging ethical aspects of biomedical research, and its potential for abuse, have ...

Review boards responsible for vetting the ethical conduct of research have been criticised for their costliness, unreliability and inappropriate standards when evaluating some non-medical research, but the basic value of mandatory ethical review has not been questioned. When the standards that review boards use to evaluate research proposals are applied to review board practices, it is clear th...

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has proposed that regulatory oversight for research with human subjects be extended beyond the protection of individual research participants to include the protection of social groups. To accomplish this, the commission recommends that investigators and ethics review boards a) work directly with community representatives to develop study methods that ...

The impact of techno-scientific developments on societal evolution and lifestyles no longer needs to be demonstrated. The last half of the twentieth century has witnessed a considerable acceleration of the integration of technological elements, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the means of economic production in particular, and social life in general. This article aims to a...