Personality and social development begins before birth in the communication among mother, child and environment, during sensitive periods when the child’s brain and body are plastic and epigenetically co-constructed. Triune ethics theory postulates three evolved, neurobiologically-based ethics fostered by early life experience. The security ethic is selfprotective. The engagement ethic is relat...

Global Bioethics may be seen as the ultimate quid pro quo for the Land Ethic called for by Aldo Leopold in 1949• The core of that idea is conveniently expressed in the dedication of my first book on bioethics to Leopold directly quoting him. In the second of four paragraphs h~ had said: There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it...

North American physicians emerge from their medical training with a wide array of professional beliefs and values. Many are thoughtful and introspective. Many are devoted to patients' welfare. Some bring to their work a broad view of social responsibility. Nonetheless, the authors contend that North American medical education favors an explicit commitment to traditional values of doctoring-empa...

A review of medical ethics literature relating to the importance of the participation of patients in decision-making introduces the role of rights-based mediation as a voluntary process now being developed innovatively in America. This is discussed in relation to the theory of communicative ethics and moral personhood. References are then made to the work of medical ethics committees and the ro...

The recent surge of dialogue about medical professionalism has largely ignored HIV/AIDS, perhaps because the ethical issues that abounded during the 1980s and early 1990s have become largely passé. Prior to the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1996, the care ethic for patients with HIV/AIDS depended heavily on compassion since effective treatment was unavailable. ...

The compatibility of an "animal lib­ eration" ethic and an environmental eth ic depends prima ri lyon how one interprets the meaning and moral structu re of a theory of envi ronmental ethics. In part this is because the meaning and moral structure of an animal liberation ethic is fairly straightforward: it focuses on the absence of morally relevant differences between humans and animals, and on...

Zentall and Singer (2007a) hypothesized that our failure to replicate the work-ethic effect in pigeons (Vasconcelos, Urcuioli, & Lionello-DeNolf, 2007) was due to insufficient overtraining following acquisition of the high- and low-effort discriminations. We tested this hypothesis using the original work-ethic procedure (Experiment 1) and one similar to that used with starlings (Experiment 2) b...