This paper engages with the question of what it is to 'do good medical ethics' in two ways. It begins with an exploration of what it might mean to say that health professionals practise good medical ethics as part of practising good ethical medicine. Using the example of the Genethics Club, a well-established national ethics forum for genetics professionals in the UK, the paper develops an acco...

Education in ethics among practising professionals should provide a systematic procedure for resolving moral problems. A method for such decision-making is outlined using the two classical orientations in moral philosophy, teleology and deontology. Teleological views such as utilitarianism resolve moral dilemmas by calculating the excess of good over harm expected to be produced by each feasibl...

This paper analyzes the moral relevance of technological artifac ts and its possible role in ethical theory, by taking the postphenomenological approach that has developed around the wo rk of Don Ihde into the domain of ethics. By elaborating a postphenomenological analysis of the mediating role of ultrasound in moral decisions about abortion, the article argues that technologies embody moralit...

When thinking about ethics, technology is often only mentioned as the source of our problems, not as a potential solution to our moral dilemmas. When thinking about technology, ethics is often only mentioned as a constraint on developments, not as a source and spring of innovation. In this paper, we argue that ethics can be the source of technological development rather than just a constraint a...

Edward Westermarck (1862-1939) taught sociology and moral philosophy at the University of Helsinki; later, he taught sociology at the University of London. He initially sought graduate work in moral philosophy but quickly concluded that normative ethics must be based on empirical behavior and so turned to field work. As a pioneer in anthropological field work, he championed a comparative method...

The author argues that virtue ethics offers a potentially fruitful framework for approaching Catholic social thought. A virtue-based approach provides a means of connecting a Catholic understanding of social justice to issues of personal morality and moral formation. Three overlapping virtues are proposed as foundational to this approach: solidarity, compassion, and hospitality. The cultivation...

Calls for the expansion of ethics education in the business and accounting curricula have resulted in a variety of interventions including additional material on ethical cases, the code of conduct, and the development of new courses devoted to ethical development (Lampe, 1996). The issue of whether ethics should be taught has been addressed by many authors (see for example: McDonald and Donleav...

This paper has two purposes, first to discuss the nature of ethics (or moral philosophy, I take these terms to be equivalent) and second to examine the notion of moral status in general and in particular the moral status of nonhuman animals.l The practical importance of the second purpose will be apparent to readers of this joumal. But the fIrst purpose must come first, I believe, in order to c...

This research examined the influence of undergraduate degree and ethics education on the moral reasoning of social workers. Statistical analyses found MSW social workers with liberal arts undergraduate degrees more likely to prefer postconventional levels of moral reasoning, defined as greater complexity of thought and principled reasoning. The overall mean Defining Issues Test scores of 44.77 ...

Ethics committee and ethics consultants are among the more interesting phenomena associated with bioethics. Although in some respects both reach back to the ancient origins of medical ethics, in other ways they are reflections of a ‘postmodern’ society that seeks moral resolutions while remaining agnostic about substantive moral absolutes. In the present article I shall describe the history of ...