The rights of humans and other animals

Human moral rights place justified limits on what people are free to do to one another. Animals also have moral rights, and arguments to support the use of animals in scientific research based on the benefits allegedly derived from animal model research are thus invalid. Animals do not belong in laboratories because placing them there, in the hope of benefits for others, violates their rights.     

What’s Human Rights Got to Do with It? On the Proposed Changes to SSHRC Ethics Research Policy

What’s human rights got to do with it? That is, what’s human rights got to do with the June 2004 report of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Ethics Special Working Committee to the Inter-Agency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics. The disturbing answer is “not enough.” Certain key recommendations of the working committee, it is suggested, would unacceptably weaken the researcher’s legal and moral accountability to research participants. Those particular recommendations rely on misguided references to academic freedom and the nature of the non-medical research context. In fact, universal human rights, and the legal instruments in which they are embodied ought to inform the research endeavor at every stage; from problem selection to analysis and conclusions. This will lead us closer to shared truths rather than simply to the academic elite’s vision of truth. Without sufficient regard for the human rights of research participants academic freedom itself is not possible.     

Biobank research and the right to privacy

What is privacy? What does privacy mean in relation to biobanking, in what way do the participants have an interest in privacy, (why) is there a right to privacy, and how should the privacy issue be regulated when it comes to biobank research? A relational view of privacy is argued for in this article, which takes as its basis a general discussion of several concepts of privacy and attempts at grounding privacy rights. In promoting and protecting the rights that participants in biobank research might have to privacy, it is argued that their interests should be related to the specific context of the provision and reception of health care that participation in biobank research is connected with. Rather than just granting participants an exclusive right to or ownership of their health information, which must be waived in order to make biobank research possible, the privacy aspect of health information should be viewed in light of the moral rights and duties that accompany any involvement in a research based system of health services.     

Opposing views on animal experimentation: do animals have rights?

Animals have moral standing; that is, they have properties (including the ability to feel pain) that qualify them for the protections of morality. It follows from this that humans have moral obligations toward animals, and because rights are logically correlative to obligations, animals have rights.     

The Roles of Religiosity and Spirituality in Moral Reasoning

To better understand the influence of religiosity and spirituality on moral reasoning, 1,037 college students completed a survey including demographic questions, a religiosity measure, a spirituality measure, and Forsyth's Ethical Position Questionnaire. Religiosity and spirituality positively correlated with moral idealism, whereas spirituality negatively correlated with moral relativism. However, religiosity and spirituality accounted for a very little variability in moral reasoning, suggesting that they do not directly influence moral reasoning. In addition, female participants reported higher spirituality, but there were no gender differences on a spirituality measure. Future research is needed to examine other factors that may influence moral reasoning.     

Do animals have rights?

A right, unlike an interest, is a valid claim, or potential claim, made by a moral agent, under principles that govern both the claimant and the target of the claim. Animals cannot be the bearers of rights because the concept of rights is essentially human; it is rooted in and has force within a human moral world.     

做错事的权利

做错事的权利这一概念初看似乎是一个悖论。本文在排除了各种似是而非的解决方案之后,立足于道德权利的一般性概念对做错事的权利给出了论证。作者认为,道德对行为的评价大体上可分为三类:正确且可被允许的行为、错误且应受批评的行为以及与道德无关的行为。如果排除错误的行为,最终将会使道德权利变得贫乏,从而丧失保护个人选择这一重要功能。而且,做错事的权利也不涉及任何逻辑上的不一致。     

How has Philosophical Applied Ethics Progressed in the Past Fifty Years?

Applied ethics is relatively new on the philosophical scene, having grown out of the various civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the student demand that college courses be relevant. Even today, there are those who think that there are no philosophically interesting practical ethical questions, and that applied ethics is not a branch of philosophy at all. This article rejects that view, both because some of the most interesting and respectable philosophers in the world have worked in applied ethics and because applied ethics has been the source of many difficult conceptual questions in theoretical ethics and even metaphysics. These include the grounds for moral status, human identity, how to conceive rights in general and the right to life in particular, the question whether existence itself can be a harm (the nonidentity problem), and the nature of moral principles.     

A New Instrumental Theory of Rights

My goal in this paper is to advance a long-standing debate about the nature of moral rights. The debate focuses on the questions: In virtue of what do persons possess moral rights? What could explain the fact that they possess moral rights? The predominant sides in this debate are the status theory and the instrumental theory. I aim to develop and defend a new instrumental theory. I take as my point of departure the influential view of Joseph Raz, which for all its virtues is unable to meet the challenge to the instrumentalist that I will address: the problem of justifying the enforcement of rights. I then offer a new instrumental theory in which duties are grounded on individuals’ interests, and individuals rights exist in virtue of the duties owed to them. I argue that my theory enables the instrumentalist to give the right sort of justification for enforcing rights.     

The role of moral identity in the aftermath of dishonesty

People lie on a regular basis. However, lying can pose a threat to the self-view of being an honest and moral person. How do people respond to their previous dishonest acts? A way to deal with psychological discomfort arisen for previous lying is reconfirming oneself to be an honest and moral person, for example, by showing subsequent moral behavior. We hypothesize that people engage in this reconfirmation depending on whether their moral identity is central to their self-concept. This was supported in three studies in which, compared to low moral identifiers, high moral identifiers engaged in more efforts to uphold a moral self-image and were more likely to show a compensatory reaction rather than a consistency reaction to their previous dishonesty. Implications for the topics of moral self-regulation and compensatory ethics and for the concept of moral identity are discussed.     

The Inducement of Meaningful Work: A Response to Anderson and Weijer

James A. Anderson and Charles Weijer take the wage payment model proposed by Neil Dickert and Christine Grady and extend the analogy of research participation to unskilled wage labor to include just working conditions. Although noble in its intentions, this moral extension generates unsavory outcomes. Most notably, Anderson and Weijer distinguish between two types of research subjects: occasional and professional. The latter, in this case, receives benefits beyond the moral minima in the form of “the right to meaningful work.” The problem is that meaningful work can itself be a form of inducement, and consequently, may in fact increase the incidence of inducement contrary to the intentions of the wage payment model.     

Has Emergency Medicine Research Benefited Patients? An Ethical Question

From an ethical standpoint, the goal of clinical research is to benefit patients. While individual investigations may not yield results that directly improve patients’ evaluation or treatment, the corpus of the research should lead in that direction. Without the goal of ultimate benefit to patients, such research fails as a moral enterprise. While this may seem obvious, the need to protect and benefit patients can get lost in the milieu of clinical research.Many advances in emergency medicine have been based upon the results of research studies conducted both within the specialty and by others outside of the field. But has this research benefited patients? Has it followed the Hippocratic commitment “to do good or at least do no harm”? The answer is: yes, and no. This paper attempts to demonstrate this: first by citing advances from applied research that have benefited emergency department patients over the past three decades, and follows with some aspects of emergency medicine research that makes one question both its safety and its efficacy. While enormous gains have been made in patient care as a result of emergency medical research, ethical considerations complicate this rosy picture, and point to future areas of concern for researchers.Some aspects of clinical research and research oversight fall short of meeting the ethical standards of safety and patient benefit. Research agendas are still driven largely by the availability of funds, both from private industry and from government agencies. Many vital patient groups are harmed by omitting or sorely under-representing them as research subjects, most notably those that are critically ill and injured. Finally, questions still arise about clinical researchers’ fiduciary responsibility to their subject-patients. Even more important than the institutional safeguards, such as the Institutional Review Boards, is the individual researcher’s moral compass, which must serve to protect the subject-patients of clinical research.Overall, emergency medicine research has been and continues to be a moral endeavor. Perhaps the greatest moral lapse has been the lack of attention to key populations within emergency medicine research, and the patients most needing acute intervention are the ones who suffer.     

关于伦理道德与智慧

伦理道德与智慧的关系是一个有着重要的理论和现实意义的课题。伦理、道德与智慧都有联系,但本身都不是智慧。伦理智慧与道德智慧相通,但两者不是同一种意义上的智慧。伦理智慧与道德智慧具有多方面的社会价值,提倡伦理智慧和道德智慧有助于当代中国的社会改革和全面进步,为此需要对中国传统伦理思想和道德价值进行批判性的反思。     

Moral Courage and Facing Others

Abstract

Moral courage involves acting in the service of one’s convictions, in spite of the risk of retaliation or punishment. I suggest that moral courage also involves a capacity to face others as moral agents, and thus in a manner that does not objectify them. A moral stand can only be taken toward another moral agent. Often, we find ourselves unable to face others in this way, because to do so is frightening, or because we are consumed by blinding anger. But without facing others as moral subjects, we risk moral cowardice on the one hand and moral fanaticism on the other.     

Moral Lumps

Can all goods or bads be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces? Can all goods or bads be added together with some other good or bad to get a larger amount? Further, how does moral significance track the disaggregation and the aggregation of moral goods and bads? In Part 1, I examine the limits placed on aggregation by moderate deontological moral theories. This paper focuses in particular on the work of Judith Thomson and T.M. Scanlon as well as on some of my own past work on the question of aggregation in the context of overriding rights. In Part 2, I examine consequentialist criticism that harms and benefits can be broken down into smaller pieces than the deontological theory allows and the argument that the moderate deontological view is too permissive since it allows aggregation of benefits within a single person's life. In Part 3 I suggest how a moderate deontological moral theory might respond to the criticisms. I cast my answer in terms of the existence of lumpy goods and bads. I argue that consequentialist critics of deontology are wrong to insist that all goods and bads can be disaggregated and aggregated at will. Instead, I offer the suggestion that most, or many, goods and bads come in morally significant lumps. That said, it will not always be obvious what those lumps are. Determining the texture of moral value is a substantive project in normative ethics. All I have hoped to do in this paper is suggest that two standard positions on how to group moral value are mistaken and give hope that we need not adopt one of the two. Part 4 of the paper responds to an objection and sets the stage for further work in value theory.     

Ethical and institutional frameworks for interactional justice in public organizations: a comparative analysis of selected Western and Chinese sources

This paper explores both differences and points of contact between selected contemporary theories of public ethics in the West and China. China is in a greater state of flux in this connection, with new, eclectic approaches to ethical justification for moral agency gaining prominence. There are thematic parallels between East and West in their distinct strains of institutionalism (in which neither individual moral agency nor the justice claims of individuals have much play). However, there are recent Chinese theoretical proposals – many incorporating Western sources – that address this quandary, namely the institutional overdetermination of moral agency. These proposals are joined to contributions from feminist and liberation ethics in a critical reconsideration of overridingness in formal ethics. Contemporary Chinese ethics connect moral claims to kin, community, and reciprocity networks, particularly as traditional philosophy is recovered in new theoretical syntheses. The grounding of Confucian ethics in kin and community offers an instructive contrast to formal Western ethical systems, as do radical strains of Western ethics that suggest that transcendence is found in the self's extension toward others in need. This paper considers these ethical themes in connection with hypothetical instances of interactional justice in organizations.     

Situationism and the problem of moral improvement

A wealth of research in social psychology indicates that various ethically arbitrary situational factors exert a surprisingly powerful influence on moral conduct. Empirically-minded philosophers have argued over the last two decades that this evidence challenges Aristotelian virtue ethics. John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt have argued that situationist moral psychology – as opposed to Aristotelian moral psychology – is better suited to the practical aim of helping agents act better. The Aristotelian account, with its emphasis on individual factors, invites too much risk of morally bad conduct insofar as it ignores the power of situational factors which lead us astray. Moral agents are often better off detecting and intervening on situational factors to help themselves act better. This paper offers an argument against the claim that situationism enjoys practical advantages over Aristotelian virtue ethics. There is empirical evidence suggesting that people can improve their behavior via Aristotelian strategies of deliberate self-improvement. This evidence also suggests that focusing our ethical attention on morally trivial factors may result in worse overall conduct. Accordingly, Aristotelianism may fare better than situationism on the practical issue of moral improvement.     

Making peace in gestational conflicts

Mary Anne Warren's claim that there is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin ([1], p. 63) calls attention to the vast range of moral conflict engendered by assigning full basic moral rights to fetuses. Thereby, it serves as a goad to thinking about conflicts between pregnant women and their fetuses in a way that emphasizes relationships rather than rights. I sketch out what a care orientation might suggest about resolving gestational conflicts. I also argue that the care orientation, with its commitment to the significance of the partial and the particular, cannot be absorbed within standard, impartialist moral theory.     

Using Cases with Contrary Facts to Illustrate and Facilitate Ethical Analysis

There has been increasing interest in developing practical, non-theoretical tools for analyzing ethical problems in public health, biomedicine, and other scientific disciplines so that professionals can make and justify ethical decisions in their own research or practice. Tools for ethical decisionmaking, together with case studies on ethics, are often used in graduate education programs and in continuing professional education. Students can benefit from opportunities to further develop their analytical skills, to recognize ethical issues, and to develop their moral sensitivity. One practical approach for illustrating and facilitating ethical analysis uses cases with contrary facts and circumstances, an approach which complements rather than replaces theoretical approaches to moral reasoning. Cases with contrary facts and circumstances are presented in two or more alternative ways so that the facts, circumstances, or framing of one version runs counter to that of the other version (s). Cases with contrary facts, together with practical steps for identifying and analyzing ethical issues, are likely to be useful tools for illustrating and facilitating ethics analysis and stimulating the moral imagination. The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.     

基因专利保护的伦理审视

基因专利与普通专利不同,需要兼顾资源提供者的利益.当前,基因专利保护中出现的诸多问题背离了尊重、公正、有利的普遍伦理原则.基因专利需要接受伦理的考量,道德规范是消解基因专利冲突的理性选择.