Ethical Analysis - Science topic

In Icarus; or, The future of science, by Bertrand Russell, E.P. Dutton & Co., first printing 1924 at page 63 - 64, he wrote:

“Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action. .... That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization.”

Has the quoted passage been connected to gain of function research? If so, can you supply the cites?

Is Russell right in general, and does his observation apply to gain of function research? What do you think? What are relevant references?

Of related interest is: Selgelid, M. J. Gain-of-Function Research: Ethical Analysis Sci Eng Ethics, 2016, 22(4), 923-964.

There are many other articles considering the issue.

effectiveness of the medicinal plant used 

Good studies or research relevant for discussing this question?

As the fashion industry has started to realise how important corporate responsibility towards the environment and society is, the communication of the responsible business initiatives and the promotion of responsible products becomes crucial. However, the communication has often been labelled to be greenwashing which creates distrust among consumers and other stakeholders. How can brands and companies in the fashion industry improve CSR communication to avoid claims of Greenwashing?

In 1997 Dolly the sheep was introduced to the world by biologists Keith Campbell, Ian Wilmut and colleagues. Not just any lamb, Dolly was a clone. Rather than being made from a sperm and an egg, she originated from a mammary gland cell of another, no-longer-living, six-year-old Fynn Dorset ewe.

With her birth, a scientific and societal revolution was also born.

Some prominent scientists raised doubts; it was too good to be true. But more animals were cloned: first the laboratory mouse, then cows, goats, pigs, horses, even dogs, ferrets and camels. By early 2000, the issue was settled: Dolly was real and cloning adults was possible. Is it ethical doing so and why has there been no organized opposition to it ?

Here is an ethical dilemma I would like to share with you guys to seek constructive feedback, thanks in advance:

A mother of one of my students came to me in tears and begged me that I pass her failing daughter in my course.

The mother said that she lost her husband in the war and that she is struggling to financially support her daughter.

I told the mother that my help to them is to give her daughter another chance to resit for the test and they thanked me.

The student did resit for the test, but when I came to score her answer sheet I discovered that she changed one of the question in her test paper with another that I did not ask! Additionally, her answer to the second question was not even close to English! She merely grouped letters to mock English! I wonder if she has been mocking me!

The mother was a real thorn in the ass doing the same with other professors. I don't know whether she was telling the truth about her difficult circumstances.

Your suggestions are much appreciated.

Does adherence to a good business practices, adherence to ethical and moral principles in business activities be an important factor in the development of effectively developing social market economies?

Please reply

Best wishes

The question is part of a project in the intersection of science, art and design that examines genetic identity. The aim is to create a "genetic ghost" by altering the genetic information of a DNA sample at loci that are necessary for DNA fingerprinting.

[Image by Dr. Thomas Splettstößer www.scistyle.com]

I am researching criteria which can be used to define the scope of the liability of a convicted person before the ICC. In particular, I am concerned with cases where the State omitted negligently to prevent those crimes whereby the person was convicted. So at the reparation stage before the ICC, is it possible to envisage an ICC order which considers the negligent State behaviour in establishing the amount to repair by who acted intentionally? In other words, can a negligent State behaviour reduce the amount to be repaired by who acted intentionally? So, assumed that it exists a concurrent liability, by negligence and intention, how can be defined the scope of the respective liability?

I need data about german economy during 60´s. I have problem to find sufficient literature. Has anyone some recommendations? Thanks!

Good morning I would like someone in great ape cognition subjects could answer-solve my two doubts regarding an investigation for my thesis master. I study zoos gorillas and I came to doubt these two questions:

1- Can great apes express the emotions of others, whether live or in photography? (They are known to have empathy, but at this level they may come).

2- Important, and I give many laps, do they have complexes, such as complex inferiority or superiority, like we who look from shoulder to shoulder or bend our heads to a being better than we? It is based on subjects of dominance and submission but does it make them feel that inferiority or superiority as the human being feels? How could a study of this area be carried out to arrive at the answer of this hypothesis?

For now these are my doubts.

Thank you for everything.

Ivan.

Interesting new idea! I'm interested to understand your ideas on how product safety culture differs from more general safety culture in terms of cognitions and behaviours.

The Declaration of Helsinki is a statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects, including research on identifiable human material and data. 

As the Helsinki's main target is bio-medical research. Which ethical aspects are demands from health care research by social scientists? 

For example, 

1. Which ethical aspects should be addressed to claim that the study (related to health care research) has settled ethical considerations?

2. How to deal with the situation where an institute doesn't have Institutional Review Board (IRB) for ethical approval? 

Rights and obligations for TNCs to 'Respect' HR are formulated in the Ruggie Report, however, how and to what extent are TNCs held criminally liable?

Scenario: You are a doctor from India who lives and practices medicine in the United States. How does your first culture affect your decision making in the following scenarios?

1. Making decisions about patients' care. You have received the same training as people who were born in the United States. 

2. Making decisions in social situations. 

Zach

Thinking of VW and Rana Plaza etc etc

Also adopted by:-

"A Matter of Reputation and Pride: Associations between Perceived External Reputation, Pride in Membership, Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intentions" Helm (2013)

What comes to mind for me here is the debate on the use of arguably (?) life-saving medical data collected by Nazi doctors in concentration camps.

Is wasta ( which is known also as favoritism or nepotism) a part of ethical culture? is there any questionnaire to test wasta?

Does anyone have the latest guidelines from the European Commission for research with children/young people? Or some other interesting documents/papers/links in this field?

I have come across instances where a number of good manuscripts especially from developing countries were rejected by some journals on the grounds that the authors did not provide Ethics Committee approval letters. This has to do with experiments involving human subjects or animals. This notwithstanding the fact that such a committee does not exit in the authors' institution(s). Is this decision fair enough?

A. Yakubu.

Dear Colleagues

How can we match KAIZEN theory with factors affecting ethical behaviour in the workplace?or do you have any articles about that subject?

Kind regards

Waleed 

The absence of informed consent clearly raises ethical issues against the risk of compromising results. How would you deal with the implications? 

As academics our goals are to involve audiences, but should we appeal to the mystery inherent to our better instincts to evoke involvement?  Are we guilty of perpetuating a system in which involvement is compromised through the salience of new ideas, cultivated in nebulous, inspecific, vague, mysterious and the imprecise manners.  Does imprecision have a role in academic exploration?

Is it possible to reach a consensus about human rights? Do we share common ethics? Is there someone who could put me on track in my recent interest in finding out more about universal human rights / or universal human ethics? Thank you all in advance for your suggestion! I appreciate any papers from any discipline that may help me finding some meaningful path. 

Hi, can someone please provide reasons as to why the current system of patenting of pharmaceutical products are ethically sustainable?

I'm looking for influential thinkers who argue that intersubjectivity is necessary for being moral and/or living a good life. Ideally I want to find examples of well-known analytic, continental, and feminist thinkers who hold this view. Thanks so much!

what is a suitable scale to measure ethical behavior in the workplace?.

Why transparency and risk management are important? What is the role of transparency? What are the effectiveness of risk management?

To be able to carry out a proper ethical analysis, I need to read the trial protocols. These protocols are usually submitted and made public on registration. I have tried and failed to get any information about protocols for trials on Zmapp and the vaccines that are reported in the Press to have started undergoing trials in West Africa.

I’m planning to investigate a framework about ethics in health technology assessment for elderly person. I read about various methods for assess policies in Canada. I’m really looking to find out what you’d consider to be the most efficient method as an ethical approach.

The WHO, and others, council against the donation of medicines that have past their "expiry date", criticising donors for exhibiting double standards. Is this a justifiable criticism or a failure to understand the significance of an "expiry date"? Guidelines for Medicine Donations Revised 2010. World Health Organization 2011."

The word fairness has been used several times in ethical studies, but its meaning still remains blur. Which is actually prioritized by the concept of fairness: need, ability or effort?

This is a weird question on a taboo topic.

I have been discussing some issues about data manipulation with colleagues. Some of them believe that considerable manipulation is done in statistical description of experimental data when unethical researchers want to "prove" their point with statistical analysis. This is made easier by the traditional practice of not publishing raw data behind statistical tests and data descriptions.

However asking to see the raw data is often prized as the ultimate test for veracity. My friends insist that there must be a simple tool, even in Excel, of generating random numbers that would be fit any given (plausible) description of mean +/- SD within an interval, which could be used to bypass such proof tests by giving a false superficial impression of data veracity. I particularly think that such a generated random numbers would not fit statistical tests perfectly, especially if the index values given were also manipulated. This comparison sounds like be an interesting way of using the same tool to double-check statistical data, and seems like it could be automated and even applied to random published literature as a (very controversial yet interesting) scan test.

This is an awkward idea that crossed my mind, and I got curious. I could not find any discussion on this and I find this relevant.

Maybe others here would know more about this?

Some studies showed that accepting gifts from the pharmaceutical industry by physicians has implications for the doctor-patient relationship as it affects patients’ intent to adhere to medical recommendations.

Spinal cord injury and quadriplegia due to car crash, sports injury (rally race car, horse. moto, sky, etc), shooting.

I wonder for comments, including ethical ones. Someone has been suggesting:

1. chemical castration drugs or surgical castration.....

2. "nurse service" for giving them a chance of orgasm...

3. erotic movies...

Any thoughts for helping these particular patients.

I attended an alumni family outing for Yale graduates the other day. As is generally the case with these types of gatherings, it is a time to catch up on the new jobs and/or career moves of fellow alumni. For several of those job changers, new jobs or careers meant relocating to a different area in the Tri-State area (NY/NJ/CT). It surprised me to learn that none of the job changers – all of whom had young children – intended to buy a house in the new area, rather they intended to rent. Since the jobs that they had been lured to were all high-end, well-paying jobs within professions that appeared to offer relative job security, I wondered why these young parents (with two-income households) possessing first-hand experience with the value of good schools would not want to BUY homes in the new area; i.e., to settle down in good communities with good school systems. My reasoning was that they would want to give their children firm roots in solid communities. I expressed this view and -- to a person-- the job changers told me that at most one should expect to remain at the same job for a period of 3-5 years and given the volatile housing market, that it would be foolish to invest in a home for this short period. In other words, one might have to sell in a weak housing market and that weighed heavier as a decision-making factor than the fact that one can find some real bargains on homes in upscale neighborhoods at the present time. Will this phenomenon of “portable” families have a negative impact on the children that are raised in this environment of “Have Talent, Will Travel”? Isn’t there something inherently wrong with letting economics be the overriding consideration in what values one will impart to one’s children and whether these children will have a sense of stability while growing up?

There is ongoing debate about whether climate change is a natural phenomenon or is attributable to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels or the cutting down of trees (“deforestation”) for construction purposes or even for use as biofuel. Not subject to debate, however, are the deleterious health effects of the concentrations of greenhouse gases that result from these human activities <http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/bernstein-greenhouse-gases-health-threat/>.

In his "A Common Humanity", Raimond Gaita has written: “The secular philosophical tradition speaks of inalienable rights, inalienable dignity, and of persons as ends in themselves. These are, I believe, ways of whistling in the dark, ways of trying to make secure to reason what reason cannot finally underwrite. Religious traditions speak of the sacredness of each human being, but I doubt that sanctity is a concept that has a secure home outside of those traditions.” Is he correct?

Hume wrote in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: "In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the question cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil."

This is clearly a different sort of utility than that of Bentham and Mills. It appears to square with Foot's claim that, “It is surely clear that moral virtues must be connected with human good and harm, and that it is quite impossible to call anything you like good or harm.”

I think that this notion of utility in the Enquiry does not get much attention in today's discussion of Hume's ethical thought.