Human embryonic stem cell research can bring about major biomedical breakthroughs and thus contribute enormously to human welfare, yet it raises serious moral problems because it involves using human embryos for experiment. The ‘‘moral status of the human embryo’’ remains the core of such debates. Three different positions regarding the moral status of the human embryo can be categorised: the ‘...

This article suggests that due to a restricted understanding of the nature and scope of ethical theory, particularism discounts prematurely the possibility of a metatheory of Buddhist ethics. The textual evidence presented in support of particularism is reconsidered and shown to be consistent with a metatheoretical reading. It is argued that writers who have adopted a particularist approach bas...

The explosion in the use of computers has strengthened the need to address ethical issues in information systems (IS) education. As a result, several IS ethics education frameworks have been expounded. At the same time, it has been argued that for the purposes of IS ethics education the existing theories of ethics are inadequate. However, little empirical research has been undertaken on the eff...

OBJECTIVES Although ethics has been on the agenda in health technology assessment (HTA) since its inception, the integration of moral issues is still not standard and is performed in a vast variety of ways. Therefore, there is a need for a procedure for integrating moral issues in HTA. METHODS Literature review of existing approaches together with application of various theories in moral phil...

A Cognitive Model of Recognition-Based Moral Decision Making Morteza Dehghani The study of decision making has been dominated by economic perspectives, which model people as rational agents who carefully weigh costs and benefits and try to maximize the utility of every choice, without consideration of issues such as cultural norms, religious beliefs and moral rules. However, psychological findi...

In Gibb’s theory of moral development Piagetian ideas concerning egocentrism play an important role. Based on these ideas Gibbs offers a detailed analysis of transitions in moral development. However, Gibbs still fails to utilize the full potential offered by Piaget’s equilibration theory, because he does not generalize the idea of overcoming egocentrism, as an important mechanism, to all stage...

Many engineering ethics classes and textbooks introduce theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism (and most others draw from these theories without mentioning them explicitly). Yet using ethical theories to teach engineering ethics is not devoid of difficulty. First, their status is unclear (should one pick a single theory or use them all? does it make a difference?) Also, textbooks genera...