Contemporary Environmental Ethics From Metaethics to Public Philosophy

In the past thirty years environmental ethics has emerged as one of the most vibrant and exciting areas of applied philosophy. Several journals and hundreds of books testify to its growing importance inside and outside philosophical circles. But with all of this scholarly output, it is arguably the case that environmental ethics is not living up to its promise of providing a philosophical contribution to the resolution of environmental problems. This article surveys the current state of the field and offers an alternative path for the future development of environmental ethics toward a more publicly engaged model of applied philosophy.     

SOME GOOD AND BAD NEWS FOR ETHICAL INTUITIONISM

The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non-inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non-inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a posteriori , their commitment to the autonomy of ethics and foundationalism does not entail any implausible non-inferential knowledge in areas outside ethics (such as the past, the future, or the unobservable). However, each form of intuitionism does require a controversial stand on certain unresolved issues outside ethics.     

Ethical breaches and deviations of method in psychoanalysis: A heuristic model for the differentiation of boundary transgressions in psychoanalytic work

The boundary concept has been central to discussions on ethics and psychoanalysis over the past few decades. The main distinction has been between less malignant boundary crossings and more harmful violations. More recently, the concept has been criticized as not discriminating between technique and ethics. The author argues that these problems are connected to the way the boundary concept is defined. He suggests that it is specified to indicate a delimitation of an analytic area of conduct. In an analogous manner, an area of ethical conduct is framed by a boundary between ethical and unethical actions in the treatment situation. The analytic area has a narrower limitation than ethics and a stricter articulation of its concept of attitude; not all unanalytic actions are unethical. This simple model of interpersonally specified boundaries allows us to discriminate between different kinds of transgression in analytic work. In addition to violations and crossings, a third instance is described denoting a transgression of the analytic but not the ethical boundary. These can be called boundary stretchings, and are either intended or unintended deviations of method. The slippery slope mechanism of ethical misconduct is an imminent risk if boundary stretchings are ignored and not subject to scrutiny and analysis.     

The Good Engineer: Giving Virtue its Due in Engineering Ethics

During the past few decades, engineering ethics has been oriented towards protecting the public from professional misconduct by engineers and from the harmful effects of technology. This "preventive ethics" project has been accomplished primarily by means of the promulgation of negative rules. However, some aspects of engineering professionalism, such as (1) sensitivity to risk (2) awareness of the social context of technology, (3) respect for nature, and (4) commitment to the public good, cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of rules, certainly not negative rules. Virtue ethics is a more appropriate vehicle for expressing these aspects of engineering professionalism. Some of the unique features of virtue ethics are the greater place it gives for discretion and judgment and also for inner motivation and commitment. Four of the many professional virtues that are important for engineers correspond to the four aspects of engineering professionalism listed above. Finally, the importance of the humanities and social sciences in promoting these virtues suggests that these disciplines are crucial in the professional education of engineers.     

道德哲学建基在错误之上吗？

责任或义务是伦理学中最基本的概念。它是客观的、绝对自明的,因而是不可定义的、无需推理的。人们既不能从别的非伦理的事实或非伦理的属性中推出义务,也不能把它归约为任何其它伦理属性。以往的各种伦理理论的错误在于用一些其它伦理属性来规定责任,从而使其丧失了绝对客观的和自明的意义,其结果是使伦理学长期陷入困境之中。     

The Population Ethics of Belief: In Search of an Epistemic Theory X

Consider Phoebe and Daphne. Phoebe has credences in 1 million propositions. Daphne, on the other hand, has credences in all of these propositions, but she's also got credences in 999 million other propositions. Phoebe's credences are all very accurate. Each of Daphne's credences, in contrast, are not very accurate at all; each is a little more accurate than it is inaccurate, but not by much. Whose doxastic state is better, Phoebe's or Daphne's? It is clear that this question is analogous to a question that has exercised ethicists over the past thirty years. How do we weigh a population consisting of some number of exceptionally happy and satisfied individuals against another population consisting of a much greater number of people whose lives are only just worth living? This is the question that occasions population ethics. In this paper, I go in search of the correct population ethics for credal states.     

医学伦理的多元、通约及其他--《医学伦理学》序

要重视医学伦理学的理论研究,案例分析不能完全取代理论讲授。医学伦理学是多元的,许多伦理问题的答案可有多种选择。许多不同伦理思想之间不仅有其差异,同时又是相容和可通约的。我们在尊重伦理多元化的同时,还应致力于寻求人类共同的道德准则和全球伦理的建设。     

石峻先生和伦理学研究

石峻先生对伦理学研究有很深的造诣,他认为,伦理道德问题必须提高到哲学的高度来解决,在中国传统的人性学说中包含着深厚的伦理意蕴。石先生对中国伦理思想的批判继承抱有十分强烈的自信心．认为学术研究应以过去为起点才能进步,反对对外国文化和伦理的移植,强调马克思主义哲学的指导是伦理学研究的根本。     

From world hunger to food sovereignty: food ethics and human development

The role of Amartya Sen's early work on famine notwithstanding, food security is generally seen as but one capability among many for scholars writing in development ethics. The early literature on the ethics of hunger is summarized to show how Sen's Poverty and Famines was written in response to debates of past decades, and a brief discussion of food security as a capability follows. However, Sen's characterization of smallholder food security also supports the development of agency in both a political and an economic sense. Economic agency is discussed and tied to longstanding literatures on the moral significance of farming within political economy. Finally, while the newly emergent literature on food sovereignty includes many themes, it is shown to be re-articulating arguments that stress smallholder's economic agency as a development goal. This pattern of argument thus provides a way to reconcile at least some of the claims being advanced under the banner of food sovereignty with the human development approach, while also restoring food ethics to a more central place in the overall discourse of development ethics.     

儒家伦理与政治文明

我们遵循取其精华,去其糟粕,古为今用的原则,对于儒家政治伦理及其治国思想进行新的开发,转化,创新和利用,可以为建设当代中国政治明提供服务。     

Is There a Place for Traditional Values and Virtues in Society Today?

This paper argues that rather than looking to the past for a previously developed set of traditional values and virtues we should instead look to the past for ways of thinking about morality and ethics which may be found in the “tradition” and which may also be relevant for the contemporary situation. It examines the causes of the disconnection between traditional ways of thinking and the contemporary situation at two levels: the marginalization of morality and the disarray in ethics. Both aspects are found to be rooted in the emergence of the empirical scientific differentiation of consciousness. The paper then goes on to ask what resources in the tradition may be found to overcome the gap between ancient and modern, or traditional and contemporary, ways of thinking about morality and ethics. The contemporary relevance of the thought of Bernard Lonergan to this issue is examined.     

What Are Applied Ethics?

This paper explores the relationships that various applied ethics bear to each other, both in particular disciplines and more generally. The introductory section lays out the challenge of coming up with such an account and, drawing a parallel with the philosophy of science, offers that applied ethics may either be unified or disunified. The second section develops one simple account through which applied ethics are unified, vis-à-vis ethical theory. However, this is not taken to be a satisfying answer, for reasons explained. In the third section, specific applied ethics are explored: biomedical ethics; business ethics; environmental ethics; and neuroethics. These are chosen not to be comprehensive, but rather for their traditions or other illustrative purposes. The final section draws together the results of the preceding analysis and defends a disunity conception of applied ethics.     

关于工程伦理学的对象和范围的几个问题——三谈关于工程伦理学的若干问题

工程是一种独立的社会活动,这是工程伦理学存在的现实基础和学理前提。由于对“工程”的性质、对象和范围存在“广”“狭”两种不同理解,从而也就在工程伦理学的学科定位和学科发展方向上出现了两种理解和两种发展进路。中国学者在进行工程伦理学研究时,不但必须重视“狭义工程伦理学”进路的研究,而且应该更加重视“广义工程伦理学”进路的研究。在研究和分析工程伦理时,必须把伦理分析和其他纬度的分析结合起来,不但应该注意不同纬度之间的相互渗透问题,而且应该注意不同纬度之间的矛盾、冲突、排序和协调问题。     

Different Voices, Still Lives: Problems in the Ethics of Care

ABSTRACT Recent writings in feminist ethics have urged that the activity of caring is more central to women's lives than are considerations of justice and equality. This paper argues that an ethics of care, so understood, is difficult to extend beyond the local and familiar, and is therefore of limited use in addressing the political problems of the modern world. However, the ethics of care does contain an important insight: if references to care are understood not as claims about women's nature, but as reflections on the extent to which moral obligations are both unchosen and conflicting, then an ethics of care can supplement an ethics of justice, and can also provide a more realistic account of both men's and women's moral life.     

关于医学伦理学教育的几点思考

医学伦理学教育中长期存在的一些问题尚未很好解决.由于较多强调课程的道德教育功能,对其作为独立学科存在的性质和意义仍重视不够,医学伦理学是进行道德分析、准则与价值评判的理论体系,通过医学伦理学的学习和训练,应使学生能够对有关问题在广阔的背景中进行深层次思考并做出独立判断.我们应在进一步更新观念的基础上,改进哲学、伦理学基础教育,以促进医学伦理学教育的发展,而其意义已远超出医学伦理学之外.     

Human Participants in Engineering Research: Notes from a Fledgling Ethics Committee

For the past half-century, issues relating to the ethical conduct of human research have focused largely on the domain of medical, and more recently social–psychological research. The modern regime of applied ethics, emerging as it has from the Nuremberg trials and certain other historical antecedents, applies the key principles of: autonomy, respect for persons, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice to human beings who enter trials of experimental drugs and devices (Martensen in J Hist Med Allied Sci 56(2):168–175, 2001). Institutions such as Institutional Review Boards (in the U.S.) and Ethics Committees (in Europe and elsewhere) oversee most governmentally-funded medical research around the world, in more than a hundred nations that are signers of the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association 2008). Increasingly, research outside of medicine has been recognized to pose potential risks to human subjects of experiments. Ethics committees now operate in the US, Canada, the U.K. and Australia to oversee all governmental-funded research, and in other jurisdictions, the range of research covered by such committees is expanding. Social science, anthropology, and other fields are falling under more clear directives to conduct a formal ethical review for basic research involving human participants (Federman et al. in Responsible research: a systems approach to protecting research participants. National Academies Press, Washington, 2003, p. 36). The legal and institutional response for protecting human subjects in the course of developing non-medical technologies, engineering, and design is currently vague, but some universities are establishing ethics committees to oversee their human subjects research even where the experiments involved are non-medical and not technically covered by the Declaration of Helsinki. In The Netherlands, as in most of Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa, no laws mandate an ethical review of non-medical research. Yet, nearly 2 years ago we launched a pilot ethics committee at our technical university and began soliciting our colleagues to submit their studies for review. In the past year, we have become officially recognized as a human subjects ethics committee for our university and we are beginning the process of requiring all studies using human subjects to apply for our approval. In this article, we consider some of the special problems relating to protecting human participants in a technology context, and discuss some of our experiences and insights about reviewing human subjects research at a technical university, concluding: that not less than in medical studies, human participants used in technology research benefit from ethical committees’ reviews, practical requirements for publications, grants, and avoiding legal liability are also served by such committees, and ethics committees in such contexts have many similarities to, but certain other special foci than medical ethics committees. We believe that this experience, and these observations, are helpful for those seeking to establish such committees in technology research contexts, and for framing the particular issues that may arise in such contexts for the benefit of researchers, and nascent committees seeking to establish their own procedures.     

Medical ethics in Britain

This paper describes ‘the medical ethics scene’ in Britain. After giving a brief account of the structure of British medical ethics and of the roles of the different groups involved it mentions some of the important medico-moral events and issues of the fairly recent past, and describes in greater detail four important examples of professional, legal, governmental and media concerns with medical ethics, themselves illustrating the wide variety of interests wishing to influence the British medical profession's ethics. The examples offered are the development of research ethics committees, the Sidaway case concerning informed consent, the Warnock Committee's Report on in vitro fertilisation and associated issues, and the 1980 Reith Lectures on ‘Unmasking Medicine’. In the final section a fairly new methodological development in British medical ethics is described in which the medical profession is increasingly recognising the need to add to traditional medical ethics education, with its longstanding history of the inculation and enforcement of ethical norms, an element of philosophical or critical medical ethics, at the heart of which is justification of substantive medico-moral claims in the light of counterarguments.     

Issues and Insights: Philosophy,Moral Philosophy,and Counseling Ethics: Not an Abstraction

Despite the counseling profession's relatively nascent status, a complex history of dialogue and debate surrounds the content of counselor preparation curricula and the educational process. Many practitioners and educators acknowledge the important role ethics plays in the helping professions; over the past several decades, increased attention has been given to ethics in the preparation of counselors and psychologists. With that increase comes a small, but growing, number of voices calling for exposure to and integration of not only moral philosophy but other areas of philosophy to enhance understanding and provide a foundation for counseling practice among practitioners and students. The authors review and echo these calls.