Fritz Allhoff, J.D., Ph.D.

This second edition of _Professions in Ethical Focus_ comprises over seventy-five readings complemented by twenty case studies with corresponding discussion questions. These resources are organized into several thematic units, including “conflicts of interest,” “honesty, deception, and trust,” “privacy and confidentiality,” and “professionalism, diversity, and pluralism.” An alternative table of contents is also provided, identifying readings that bear on particular professions such as engineering, journalism, medicine, law, and policing. The book’s introductory unit offers short selections from classic and contemporary ethical theory, including non-Western traditions. All of the readings have been introduced by the editors and carefully excerpted for relevance, always with the needs of student readers in mind.

_Business in Ethical Focus_ is a compilation of classical and contemporary essays and case studies in business ethics. Readers will become acquainted with seminal ideas on corporate social responsibility and the place of business in a just society. Other topics include diversity in the workplace, sexual harassment, workplace rights, environmental responsibility and sustainability, global business, intellectual property, bribery, and ethical issues in advertising and marketing. This second edition adds a dozen original case studies, as well as new sections on global perspectives, entrepreneurship, and the non-profit sector. Background material on ethical theory and the nature of business ethics is included to orient readers new to this field.

Nanoethics is a contentious field for several reasons. Some believe it should not be recognized as a proper area of study, because they believe that nanotechnology itself is not a true category but rather an amalgamation of other sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and engineering. Critics also allege that nanoethics does not raise any new issues but rather revisits familiar ones such as privacy. This paper answers such criticisms and sets the context for the papers that follow in this nanoethics symposium.

This paper presents the principal findings from a three-year research project funded by the US National Science Foundation on ethics of human enhancement technologies. To help untangle this ongoing debate, we have organized the discussion as a list of questions and answers, starting with background issues and moving to specific concerns, including: freedom & autonomy, health & safety, fairness & equity, societal disruption, and human dignity. Each question-and-answer pair is largely self-contained, allowing the reader to skip to those issues of interest without affecting continuity.

With multi-year funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of researchers has just released a comprehensive report detailing ethical issues arising from human enhancement (Allhoff et al. 2009). While we direct the interested reader to that (much longer) report, we also thank the editors of this journal for the invitation to provide an executive summary thereof. This summary highlights key results from each section of that report and does so in a self-standing way; in other words, this summary presupposes no familiarity with the report and offers the opportunity to gain quick familiarity with its most central findings.

Human enhancement, in which nanotechnology is expected to play a major role, continues to be a highly contentious ethical debate, with experts on both sides calling it the single most important issue facing science and society in this brave, new century. This paper is a broad introduction to the symposium herein that explores a range of perspectives related to that debate. We will discuss what human enhancement is and its apparent contrast to therapy; and we will begin to tease apart the myriad intertwined issues that arise in the debate: (1) freedom & autonomy, (2) health & safety, (3) fairness & equity, (4) societal disruption, and (5) human dignity.

This collection of readings with extensive editorial commentary brings together key texts of the most influential philosophers of the medieval era to provide a comprehensive introduction for students of philosophy. Features the writings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Boethius, John Duns Scotus and other leading medieval thinkers Features several new translations of key thinkers of the medieval era, including John Buridan and Averroes Readings are accompanied by expert commentary from the editors, who are leading scholars in the field

This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary extensions and alternatives to the just war tradition in the field of the ethics of war. The modern history of just war has typically assumed the primacy of four particular elements: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, the state actor, and the solider. This book will put these four elements under close scrutiny, and will explore how they fare given the following challenges: • What role do the traditional elements of jus ad bellum and jus in bello—and the constituent principles that follow from this distinction—play in modern warfare? Do they adequately account for a normative theory of war? • What is the role of the state in warfare? Is it or should it be the primary actor in just war theory? • Can a just war be understood simply as a response to territorial aggression between state actors, or should other actions be accommodated under legitimate recourse to armed conflict? • Is the idea of combatant qua state-employed soldier a valid ethical characterization of actors in modern warfare? • What role does the technological backdrop of modern warfare play in understanding and realizing just war theories? Over the course of three key sections, the contributors examine these challenges to the just war tradition in a way that invigorates existing discussions and generates new debate on topical and prospective issues in just war theory. This book will be of great interest to students of just war theory, war and ethics, peace and conflict studies, philosophy and security studies.

Business in Ethical Focus is a compilation of classical and contemporary essays on business ethics. Approximately 50 essays are organized into five units: Corporate Social Responsibility; Rights and Obligations of Employees and Employers; Justice and Fair Practice; Distributive Justice; and Advertising, Marketing, and the Consumer. Readers will become acquainted with seminal ideas from important thinkers such as Milton Friedman on corporate social responsibility and Amartya Sen on whether business ethics makes economic sense. They will also find classic readings on distributive justice by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Karl Marx, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick. Other topics include drug testing, sexual harassment, environmental responsibility, bribery, and ethical issues in advertising and marketing. The editors provide thoughtful commentary, case studies, and study questions for each unit, enabling readers to clearly understand the growing discipline of business ethics.

Automated vehicles promise much in the way of both economic boons and increased personal safety. For better or worse, the effects of automating personal vehicles will not be felt for some time. In contrast, the effects of automated work vehicles, like semi-trucks, will be felt much sooner—within the next decade. The costs and benefits of automation will not be distributed evenly; while most of us will be positively affected by the lower prices overall, those losing their livelihoods to the automated semi-trucks and other similar work vehicles will be much worse off. This sets up a classic distributive justice problem: how do we balance the harms and benefits of automation? In this paper, the authors recommend work alternatives: policies that the government would enact in order to ensure that each person could live a decent life even if one could not work, especially for reasons like having one’s job automated. After arguing for this position, we propose some policy guidelines.

This special issue on ethics and error in medicine reinvigorates a conversation that has been substantially dormant for twenty years. The papers in this issue elaborate and update that conversation in significant ways, particularly with regard to vulnerable populations and the epistemology of medical error. But this first paper is largely conceptual, laying out the motivation for caring about medical error in the first place, exploring what medical error is, and proposing a moral framework to help us think about it. This paper therefore sets up those that follow—while, at the same time, remaining largely neutral about the substantive views advanced by those authors. The papers are therefore complementary and form a...

With by far the lowest population density in the United States, myriad challenges attach to healthcare delivery in Alaska. In the “Size, Population, and Accessibility” section, we characterize this geographic context, including how it is exacerbated by lack of infrastructure. In the “Distributing Healthcare” section, we turn to healthcare economics and staffing, showing how these bear on delivery—and are exacerbated by geography. In the “Health Care in Rural Alaska” section, we turn to rural care, exploring in more depth what healthcare delivery looks like outside of Alaska’s major cities. This discussion continues in the “Alaska’s Native Villages” section, which specifically analyzes healthcare in Alaska’s indigenous villages, some of the smallest and most isolated communities in the United States. Though many of the ways we could improve Alaskan health care for Alaskan residents are limited by its unique features, the “Justice and Healthcare Delivery” and “Technology and Telemedicine” sections consider ways in which certain policies and technology—including telemedicine—could mitigate the challenges developed in previous sections.

This book is a collection of original, interdisciplinary essays on the topic of medical error. Given the complexities of understanding, preventing, and responding to medical error in ethically responsible ways, the scope of the book is fairly broad. The contributors include top scholars and practitioners working in bioethics, communication, law, medicine and philosophy. Their contributions examine preventable causes of medical error, disproportionate impacts of errors on vulnerable populations, disclosure and apology after discovering medical errors, and ethical issues arising in specific medical contexts, such as radiation oncology, psychopathy, and palliative care. They also offer practical recommendations for respecting autonomy, distributing burdens and benefits justly, and minimizing injury to patients and other stakeholders. Ethics and Error in Medicine will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, students, and practitioners in bioethics, philosophy, communication studies, law, and medicine who are interested in the ethics of medical error.

The past presidential election reinvigorated interest in the applicability of conflict of interest legislation to the executive branch. In § 2, we survey various approaches to conflicts of interest, paying particular attention to 18 U.S.C. § 208. Under 18 U.S.C. § 202, this conflict of interest statute is straightforwardly inapplicable to the President. We then explore the normative foundations of such an exemption in § 3. While these sections are ultimately lenient, we go on to consider the Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution in § 4. In §§ 5–6, we apply the Emoluments Clause to the presidency, arguing that it complements conflict-of-interest regimes with regards to foreign affairs, but with more substantial restrictions.