The Issue of Ethics

One of the first analyses of the ethical connotations of the objectives of green chemistry was carried out by a professor of philosophy/ who showed how those objectives have an intrinsic ethical value. Very recently, the entire issue of climate change is viewed as an urgent ethical question of our times. 

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While the issue of the ethical conduct of clinical trials in pediatric psychopharmacology is addressed comprehensively elsewhere in this book, it is important to present an FDA perspective on this important matter. It is also important to have the issue of ethics discussed in the context of the scientific needs for trials presented to the FDA in support of new drug applications. These trials must be adequate and well-controlled (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). What this requirement essentially means is that, in order to support an efficacy claim, the trials must be interpretable and must be able to document efficacy. For treatments that are intended to improve symptoms, as is almost always the case for psychotropic drugs, placebo-controlled trials are the usual standard. This is especially true when there is a substantial failure rate in placebo-controlled trials for the drugs known to work in a particular therapeutic area, as again is the case for most psychotropic drugs. Where that is true,... 

Finally, the need for additional pharmacologic or therapeutic research brings up the issue of ethical justification for conducting research. The investigators proposing smdies and instimtional review committees approving human smdies must assess the risk-benefit ratio of each study to be fair to children who are not in a position to accept or reject the opportunity to participate in the research project. 

The obligations of mentors and mentees to each other are explored in subsequent chapters, and the issue of corrfidentiaUty in particular is returned to in Chapters 10 and 11. Overall, the literature is remarkably devoid of references to ethical issues in business mentoring. It is highly likely that this will be the focus of academic and practitioner concern in years to come as mentoring is established as a common framework for handling ethical dilemmas in business. 

Besides asking mentors about business problems that can be solved analytically, mentees tend to discuss ethical issues with their mentors. It is on these occasions that mentors can contribute to the health of society they should raise mentees ethical and moral sensitivity. They ought to demonstrate the value of ethical behaviour for business success and depict the downside of unethical actions. 

The single best source for quick and reasonably thorough access to the body of knowledge associated with computer ethics is Deborah Johnson s Computer Ethics (3rd edition, 2001). The first edition of that work [17], the first book listed under computer ethics in the Philosopher s Index, provides a conceptual framework for the issues of privacy, liability, ownership, and power. Despite its very early appearance in the short history of computer ethics, much of the analysis retains its value. 

The previous sort of question is relevant to the matter of computer use and the issue of privacy. In fact, computer use may have altered the way we think and should think of privacy. Before the advent and prevalence of computers, intrusions into an individual s privacy were largely time- and place dependent. The intrusion could be done but only on a small scale. As Johnson [15] notes, however, computers have changed the nature of intrusion into privacy as well as the scale of intrusion into privacy. The result is a demand to rethink privacy and rethink the framework of applied ethics, especially because the scale of intrusion may change the qualitative nature of the offense. 

Current research ethics do not adequately address the issue of international research on the diversity of the human genome. Under current research standards, this research will widen the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. New ethics standards for this research should frame this research so the market value of property rights from such research fosters the development of research institutions, a scientific workforce, and access to investment and venture capital within underdeveloped countries. The 1992 CBD offers just such a foundation. 

Richard C. Alkire, University of Illinois at Urbana Your economic examples here are good ones because they take us out of our box and make us think from another perspective. The impact of all of this information, not only on science and engineering but on our ability to determine the way we will live in the future, is so great that, like economics, it goes beyond economic principles. It gets into issues of ethics. 

As Schulte and Sweeney (1995) state, scientists like to think of gathering and interpreting data as being independent from the social and political context...But where controversies surround the issue of health risks, as they do in the case of biomonitoring data, the communication and ethical aspects cannot be divorced from the use of the data. 

Describe how the issues proffered in this chapter fit within the context of ethical business management. 

The unifying issue for this chapter is ethical decision making. An appreciation of the role of ethics in managerial decision making is essential to effective... 

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