In a clinical setting, healthcare workers confront life and death issues on a daily basis. What are the key ethical principles that guide one in practicing medicine ethically and in being an ethical healthcare professional? How are ethical issues in the clinical setting with individual patients different from the ethical issues in public health, where …
What Do We Think, and Why?
Laws against the use of various drugs are typically justified in two ways: preventing harm to the person who would use drugs, and preventing harm to the broader society (because a society is harmed if a lot of the people in it are harmed). Arguments for decriminalizing, or even legalizing, the use of various drugs …
When someone has committed the worst of crimes, murder, what is the appropriate punishment for that person, and what is the principled basis for that punishment? In particular, is the death penalty warranted in such cases, and if so why? Or, does capital punishment seem to be adding the state’s inhumanity to the criminal’s inhumanity? …
Ethics has traditionally focused on duties to persons. But do we also have duties to nature? To care for the environment? For other species? Animals can feel pain and suffer, so if minimizing pain and suffering is a moral duty, then animals would seem to be due some moral consideration. But, what about the environment? …
Environmentalism: For Nature’s Sake or for Ours? Questions of Justice? Read More »
Just about everyone would acknowledge an obligation to save a life, where the person in danger is right in front of you, and where only a small sacrifice of time or money is needed from you. Suppose the person in danger is far away, and you could still save them. Suppose that you have the …
In addition to honesty, respectfulness, fairness, and so on, are there other ethical issues unique to business? What is the ethics of profit-making? Is sustainability an ethical duty of businesses? What are the ethical responsibilities of businesses for the societies of which they are members?
We have duties to presently existing persons, but what about future people, people who don’t even exist yet? Do we have moral obligations to tomorrow’s child? What is the moral standing of future persons? Future people can’t say what their specific interests might be, so we can’t consult them and ask them to contribute to …
What we believe affects how we treat people, what we think is valuable in life, how we act and conduct ourselves in the world, and the choices we make. Therefore, there is a moral argument to be made that we have a duty to form beliefs responsibly. But what does that mean? A standard reply …