Some ethical questions

Monetisation raises some ethical questions - e.g. on putting value on safety and loss of Ufe, and whether it is representative for the companies and society s attitude towards risk to use the expected values when dealing with safety risks or enviromnental risks, or if we should be more risk averse for such consequence categories. 

There are major problems with this individualistic approach to energy policy, however. The ideal market of economic theoiy exists nowhere in reality. Further, even market defenders acknowledge cases in v hich markets fail. Significantly, some paradigmatic examples of market failure, such as the externality of pollution and monopolistic control of production, are associated with the production of energy. More importantly, perhaps, crucial ethical questions can be missed if we only consider the perspective of individual values and choice. 

Garcia, J., "African-American Perspectives, Cultural Relativism and Normative Issues Some Conceptual Questions.," In H.F. Flack and E. Pellegrino (eds.), African-American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics. Washington, DC Georgetown University Press, pp. 11-66 (1992). 

I believe that the biggest and greatest challenge my generation will face will be ethical dilemmas created by scientific discoveries and advances. There has been a boatload of things discovered in this century, especially in the time period of the last few decades. Humankind is able to avail itself of a plethora of opportunities it heretofore was unable to take advantage of But some very difficult ethical questions have been raised by these opportunities. They have given us new power over nature, hut this power can easily be abused and misused. 

I have referred to several ethical questions in Chapter 6 and this appendix, and I close with a more personal one. Were it not that someone in the Legislature might revive the ancient cry of the ultra-Protestant, Would you have celibacy practiced in the open streets a case could be made for academic celibacy. As C. S. Lewis remarks somewhere, academics do not work hard, they just work all the time, and this can put an enormous burden on a spouse, particularly if he or she is not an academic. No doubt there are some who, like Euler, can write their papers in the midst of the domestic hubbub, but most of us get increasingly irritable and obsessed as a deadline approaches or a book is nearly finished (or abandoned). I must admit that I have, at times, been oblivious to the distress I have caused my wife, whose loyalty and support have ever been beyond my desserts. It is one of the blessings of retirement that, busier than ever although one may be, there are not the pressures that one feels in the thick of a career and no excuses for neglecting a relationship without which the career itself would be little worth. 

What are some of the ethical questions that would arise if (a) one attempted to implement a screening program to detect carriers of Gaucher disease that employed a biochemical test with a diagnostic specificity of 0.95 (b) a woman was encouraged to undergo amniocentesis to determine if the fetus was affected ... 

Recommendations that involve the protection of individuals and the environment are less easily evaluated. Typically the ethical questions of the value of human life and company reputation or prestige are involved. Some insight can be obtained by the legal and financial issues that would evolve in such cases. 

Each new scientific discovery brings new questions. Some of these questions concern ethical matters that can t be answered by science alone. Find out about a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. What did the person do to win this honor What ethical questions arise from his or her work ... 

It has been suggested that tissue samples be taken from all convicted felons to allow for identification of their presence at future crime sites by DNA fingerprinting (Section 13.7). This may seem very desirable, but some ethical and constitutional questions must first be answered. Nevertheless, DNA testing has been used to determine whether people currently in custody might have been involved in unsolved crimes. One crime frequently examined in this way is rape, because body fluids are usually left behind. Many unsolved crimes are being solved, and some convicted prisoners are being found innocent. In at least one bizarre case, a felon was found innocent of the crime for which he was in jail, only to be rearrested in a few weeks because his DNA matched samples found on rape victims in three other cases. 

In what follows, when 1 refer to some engineering decision, action, or practice as raising an ethical issue, it should be clear from context which of these three kinds of claims is being made that non-obvious harmful consequences may be involved that merit scrutiny from an ethics perspective, that some action or practice is ethically questionable and needs to be addressed, or that there is disagreement among those who care about it regarding its harm- and well-being-related consequences and/or intrinsic ethical acceptability. 

Analysis FEREl is relevant to this case. It is clear that manipulation and misrepresentation of data is apt to cause harm to other researchers, by virtue of the time, money, and energy they expend trying fiitilely to replicate the claimed findings in papers based on that data. But what about the ethically questionable research practices to which Schon and some of his co-authors were linked Did they violate any of the FEREs Let us discuss each of the abovementioned three practices. 

It is the lack of any substantive treatment, none the less recognition, of the social context of the situations with which we confront our students in these scenarios that is the source of my unease. The focus on the individual agent, hanging there, alone, confronting some identifiable ethical question ,] stfikes me as too simple a representation of what an engineer faces in practice. ... 

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