If the practice of ethics consists of the justifiable application of moral principles, then the challenge will always be to ensure, first, that the principles are well chosen and, second, that their application to the case in point is overtly justifiable. In this editorial, having briefly mentioned “principlism”, which itself involves the application of ethical principles in practice, we shall ...

BACKGROUND In the field of health technology assessment (HTA), there are several approaches that can be used for ethical analysis. However, there is a scarcity of literature that critically evaluates and compares the strength and weaknesses of these approaches when they are applied in practice. In this paper, we analyse the applicability of some selected approaches for addressing ethical issues...

Background: Some disasters, such as earthquake and flood make the majority of affected people homeless. Theaccommodation of these people in temporary shelters and camps requires some specific ethical issues. The aim of thepresent study was to discuss ethical issues regarding living in camps following natural disasters.Methods: This study is conducted utilizinga qualitative con...

Health care is developing rapidly. So are its correlates, such as health care technology, research, education, administration, communication, and more. Such change requires ethical deliberation, as change that is not ethically guided poses unnecessary risks. This may be particularly true in relation to health care, which impacts some of the most central domains of human life. Bioethics addresse...

In response to the increasing demand for expansion of health technology assessment (HTA) methodology to include ethical issues more systematically, this document reports on a multi-stage study that aimed at construction of a new practical framework for integration of ethical issues in HTA. The document is divided into three major parts. The first part provides the results of a systematic review...

Over the past several decades, medical ethics has gained a solid foothold in medical education and is now a required course in most medical schools. Although the field of medical ethics is by nature eclectic, moral philosophy has played a dominant role in defining both the content of what is taught and the methodology for reasoning about ethical dilemmas. Most educators largely rely on the case...

In their article “Different methods for ethical analysis in health technology assessment: An empirical study” published in International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, Volume 27 Number 4, Samuli I. Saarni, Annette BraunackMayer, Bjørn Hofmann, and Gert Jan van der Wilt present an empirical study about different methods for ethical analysis in health technology assessment (HTA)...

Biomedical ethicists often assume that common morality constitutes a largely consistent normative system. This premise is not taken for granted in general normative ethics. This paper entertains the possibility of inconsistency within common morality and explores methodological implications. Assuming common morality to be inconsistent casts new light on the debate between principlists and descr...

I am aware that I have picked two strands of Medicine that seem to have an image problem. As I discussed in the last piece, I deal with patients who I know are not going to get better. The second strand is ethics. Some say that medical ethics is just opinion, and rather than producing anything ‘useful’, ethics is accused of muddying (already muddy) waters and so, is inherently ‘useless’. Medica...

The fifth edition of Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics is distinguished by its emphatic embrace of common morality as the ultimate source of moral norms. This essay critically evaluates the fifth edition’s discussion of common morality and, to a lesser extent, its treatment of coherence (both the model of ethical justification and the associated concept). It is argued th...