Contents 1. Introduction 2. The capability approach 3. Theories of justice 4. Equality 5. Justification of moral principles and weighting different functionings 6. Rules for aggregating individual welfare into social welfare 7. Prescription and description 8. Social measurement, justice and pragmatism 9. Welfare economics and the criticism of the capability approach 10. Conclusions Glossary Bib...

The paper (McMaster & Wastell, 2005) basically discusses the concept of ‘diffusionism’, which was originally introduced by Rogers (1962) to describe the processes of technology transfer and adoption by individuals, states or countries. Diffusionism has influenced the way of thinking in western society in almost all fields, and is considered as a moral justification for the colonialist exploitat...

Different beliefs about the nature and justification of bioethics may reflect different assumptions in moral epistemology. Two alternative views (put forward by David Seedhouse and Michael H Kottow) are analysed and some speculative conclusions formed. The foundational questions raised here are by no means settled and deserve further attention.

A peer commentary on Alan Wertheimer’s (Why) should we require consent to participation in research?—Journal of Law and the Biosciences Alan Wertheimer’s important article shows that while ‘the balance of [first-order] moral reasons might well tell against the use of coercion in most cases’ of interventional biomedical research, it does not tell against its use in all those cases.1 Wertheimer i...

Infertility causes significant psychosocial morbidity by reducing both personal sense of wellbeing (health) and capacity to exercise self determination over reproduction (autonomy). As the primary moral responsibilities of health professionals are restoration of health and respecting patients’ autonomy, it follows that preserving fertility or treating infertility has sound ethical justification...

Correspondence: Louis M. Guenin, Lecturer on Ethics, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. Telephone: 617-484-5591; Fax: 617-738-7664; e-mail: guenin@hms. harvard.edu Received May 4, 2005; accepted for publication July 29, 2005; first published online in Stem Cells EXPRESS August 2, 2005. ©AlphaMed Press...

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally...

This paper focuses on the consumer orientation of the middle class in contemporary China, using the data from 30 interviews with middle class people conducted in Beijing. The existing literature tends to depict the Chinese middle class one-dimensionally as in pursuit of either conspicuous display or frugality and neglect the moral justifications consumers deploy, whereas this paper argues that ...

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...

Is research aimed at preserving the fertility of cancer patients morally justified? In response to this question, some people would resoundingly answer “yes.” Many oncofertility researchers and some survivors of cancer who are now infertile would probably react this way. But others might say “no,” in particular people who worry about the just distribution of scarce resources, the risks to patie...