In this paper, I will argue that, while the ethical issues raised by cluster randomization can be challenging, they are not new. My thesis divides neatly into two parts. In the first, easier part I argue that many of the ethical challenges posed by cluster randomized human subjects research are clearly present in other types of human subjects research, and so are not novel. In the second, more ...

Ethical reasoning and decision-making may be thought of as 'professional skills', and in this sense are as relevant to efficient clinical practice as the biomedical and clinical sciences are to the diagnosis of a patient's problem. Despite this, however, undergraduate medical programmes in ethics tend to focus on the teaching of bioethical theories, concepts and/or prominent ethical issues such...

Designing programmable privacy logic frameworks that correspond to social, ethical, and legal norms has been a fundamentally hard problem. Contextual integrity (CI) (Nissenbaum 2010) offers a model for conceptualizing privacy that is able to bridge technical design with ethical, legal, and policy approaches. While CI is capable of capturing the various components of contextual privacy in theory...

The increasing use of autonomous arti cial agents in hospitals or in transport control systems leads to consider whether moral rules shared by many of us are followed by these agents. This is a particularly hard problem because most of these moral rules are often not compatible. In such cases, humans usually follow ethical rules to promote one moral rule or another. Using formal veri cation to ...

In dealing with ethical issues, non-profit managers are often faced with dilemmas that defy a simple choice between right and wrong. When there is no obvious way of prioritizing responsibility, and no precedent to emulate, resolution of such dilemmas demands careful consideration of stakeholder expectations when looking at the ethical options, so that decisions satisfy not only the immediate pr...

Problem of Ethical Metaphysics,” I promise to show how Kierkegaard provides a solution to ethical problems raised by the intersection of Levinas and Kant. This same solution, I hope to argue elsewhere, appears implicitly in the subtext of Plato’s Republic and in a few other key places in the history of Western philosophy. The unfinished paper below is a start in the direction of an answer on be...

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa is not merely a biomedical problem that can be seen in isolation and dealt with only through emergency medical rescue processes. The ethical dilemmas surfaced by this epidemic are also not confined to the usual micro-ethical problems associated with medical care and medical research. The pandemic, as one of many manifestations of failed human and social develop...

The threat of malpractice litigation in the United States is encouraging physicians again to assume responsibility for their patients. The fundamental ethical problem, however, is that this approach denies the patient's moral agency. In this essay, responsibility to patients, rather than for them, is discussed as an alternative to the emerging neo-paternalism. Responsibility to avoids the ethic...

The ethical behavior of information systems personnel remains a key IS management problem in need of attention. Codes of ethics have become important mechanisms for influencing ethical behavior, yet their efficacy has not been proven. The communication and enforcement of codes within an organization are thought to be necessary for ensuring a code’s success in influencing employee behavior. This...

The ethical landscape surrounding the introduction of autonomous vehicles is complex, and there are real concerns over whether the operational safety of these systems can be adequately demonstrated. In this paper we focus on the ethical factors relevant to the design and safety justification of autonomous systems, considering issues such as risk transfer, ALARP considerations, capability vs ris...