SpringerBriefs in Ethics – serie

​This book offers a clear analysis of Foucault’s work on scientific knowledge and its relationship to individuals and society. It suggests a way of using Foucault’s tools for science criticism and resistance, while avoiding the pitfalls of vulgar relativism or irrational anti-science views. Two cases of scientific conflict are considered. The first considers left-handers as subjects of science, in particular studies which purport to show that left-handers die on average younger than right-handers. The second case considers Icelanders as subjects of science in the context of a partly failed attempt to construct a genetic database encompassing the entire nation.The book will be of interest to bioethicists and philosophers who are concerned with the interaction between science and its human subjects, as well as scholars concerned with Foucault’s work on science.

After examining the Anglo-American criminal legal system’s treatment of responsibility as intentional agency, she critiques Hans Jonas’s concept of responsibility as ontological care and Hannah Arendt’s notion of communicative responsibility.

This book addresses the morality of engaging in weapons research, a topic that has been neglected but which is extremely important. What is wrong with weapons research is that it is the first step in the production of weapons, weapons are the means to harm, and harming without justification is always wrong.

This book provides an up-to-date description of cross-cultural aspects of end-of-life decision-making. The work places this discussion in the context of developments in the United States such as the emphasis on patient informed consent, “right to die” legal cases, and the federal Patient Self-Determination Act. With the globalization of health care and increased immigration from developing to developed countries, health care professionals are experiencing unique challenges in communicating with seriously ill patients and their families about treatment options as well as counselling all patients about advance medical care planning. While many Western countries emphasize individual autonomy and patient-centered decision-making, cultures with a greater collectivist orientation have, historically, often protected patients from negative health information and emphasized family-centered decision-making. In order to place these issues in context, the history of informed consent in medicineis reviewed. Additionally, cross-cultural issues in health care decision-making are analysed from the perspective of multiple philosophical theories including deontology, utilitarianism, virtues, principlism, and communitarian ethics.  This book is a valuable addition to courses on end-of-life care, death and dying, cross-cultural health, medical anthropology, and medical ethics and an indispensable guide for healthcare workers dealing with patients coming from various cultural backgrounds.

This book is both a workbook and process guide for making ethical system-level decisions. The conventional approach only considers formal policies as worthy of ethics analysis, and the method of analysis leaves a number of key ethically significant dimensions of the system-level decision process unaddressed.

This open access book provides an extensive review of ethical and regulatory issues related to human infection challenge studies, with a particular focus on the expansion of this type of research into endemic settings and/or low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

This open access book introduces the reader to the foundations of AI and ethics. Throughout, the authors use examples to illustrate the issues at hand and conclude the book with a discussion on the application areas of AI and Robotics, in particular autonomous vehicles, automatic weapon systems and biased algorithms.

This book explores major bioethical issues emerging from the development and use of artificial intelligence in medical settings. The authors start by defining the past, present and future of artificial intelligence in medical settings and then proceed to address the resulting common and specific bioethical inquiries.

This open access book offers a unique and practically oriented study of organisational and national conditions for implementing Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) policies and practices.

This is the first book to explore the epistemology and ethics of advanced imaging tests, in order to improve the critical understanding of the nature of knowledge they provide and the practical consequences of their utilization in healthcare.

In this context the book is of great interest to a broad audience, such as those interested in VMBE and novel conceptions of morality, andthose with an interest in the historical development of morality and happiness, in philosophy (specifically, ethics) and in post-humanity.

The primary objective of the book is to provide the readers with an original view on moral enhancement, whilst proposing a novel conception of moral enhancement that is informed by new biotechnological developments.

This book is open access. This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint ownership rights, and proposes a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies.Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation.

This open access book offers four ways to enrich traditional research methods in business ethics. The book showcases what kind of practical and ethical wisdom is embedded in business jokes and howthis knowledge can be made productive in the context of business ethics.

What is pediatric suffering, and how is the suffering of sick children different from that of sick adults? This book attempts to answer these pressing questions. Through philosophical engagement with a clinical case, the essays in this book approach the problem of pediatric suffering from a set of unique perspectives reflecting diverse philosophical traditions, disciplinary formations, and clinical experiences.Previously published in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics Volume 41, issue 4, August 2020Chapter “Valuing life and evaluating suffering in infants with life-limiting illness” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This open access book tackles the pressing problem of integrating concerns related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics into higher education curriculums aimed at future AI developers in Africa and beyond. For doing so, it analyzes the present and future states of AI ethics education in local computer science and engineering programs.

This open access book offers unique insights into the key ethical issues faced by practitioners and discussed by ethicists in the field of genomics and incidental findings, with a focus on the Islamic moral tradition.

This book provides an overview of how the intricacies of the Trolley Problem shed light on various aspects of medical ethics.

Aimed at supporting their emancipatory project, this book explores strategies for resisting dominance and enhancing agency within the caring professions.

This book offers an extensive assessment of the nature and feasibility of the metaverse and is the first to critically examine its social and ethical implications.

This is the first book to focus on the concept of human rights in African philosophy and the debates surrounding it. It provides its readers–from policymakers to scholars, from experts in human rights to experts in African philosophy–with a succinct, general guide on the key theorists, themes, and debates on human rights in African philosophy. This book thus offers the reader an alternative to the dominance of the Western perspective on human rights. It begins to make our conversations about human rights, social justice, and human dignity truly global and international.

This book provides an overview of discrimination and structural injustice in assisted dying. It differentiates between direct and indirect discrimination at both the individual and organizational levels, and it pays particular attention to indirect discrimination due to structural factors that have been systemically overlooked. Whereas bioethics literature has traditionally engaged with discrimination on the basis of disability or exclusionary legal barriers, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the cases of individuals who are not legally excluded from access, but are effectively unable to access assisted suicide for other reasons, such as being inhabitants of rural areas with no reasonable access, being prisoners, or, in certain cases, low-income individuals. A conceptual mapping of this kind provides a finer understanding of the overall architecture of the ethical debate surrounding assisted dying and clarifies its moral wrongs. Finally, this book shows the inherent political dimension of assisted dying, where the ethics of assisted dying are not only about principles of autonomy and liberty in death and dying, but also about social justice and equality. The book offers a robust normative claim ensuring fair and equal opportunity of access to assisted dying. This book is of interest to philosophers, policymakers, public health experts, and political scientists interested in the issue of discrimination in the context of assisted dying.

This book clarifies the differing roles of informed consent in healthcare as well as the guidelines, rules, and laws governing consent. The growing use of AI in health care has led to open questions about disclosure to the public as well as to healthcare consumers. There is no universal right to know whether or how AI is used in health care. The traditional right to informed consent requires disclosure of information, often based on what a reasonable person would use to make healthcare decisions, such as the risk of debilitating side effects. The system of informed consent as disclosure, understanding, and acquiescence as commonly used in patient care differs from the informed consent to release one’s data, which is governed by a web of privacy laws. Furthermore, disclosure of the role of AI in drug discovery or in medical records brings different concerns for which the traditional patient-centered informed consent is insufficient or inapplicable. It may be ethically satisfactory to disclose the use of AI for the sake of transparency when the use of AI is unlikely to be considered in the healthcare consumer’s decision making. By providing a simple explainer of medical AI, a brief history of informed consent, and arguments for the use of informed consent and against it, this book recommends using informed consent in health care, especially when a clinician is likely to unduly rely on an AI tool that poses risk. This book explores what healthcare consumers and the public should know and why. It is of interest to scholars and professionals navigating the growing use of AI in healthcare.

This book critically explores the transformation of business ethics from a reflective moral practice into a domain shaped by legal compliance and political power. Bridging legal theory, political philosophy, and corporate studies, it examines how ethics is both depoliticized through juridification and politicized through corporate sovereignty. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s concepts of political antagonism and sovereignty, the book challenges liberal frameworks and calls for a renewed, politically engaged understanding of business ethics. This book is of interest to scholars and students of business ethics, legal theory, political philosophy, corporate governance, critical legal studies, and political theology.

This book tracks the growth of environmental awareness and conservation in the United States through the major trends of the 20th century, and establishes a philosophical ground for protection of the environment.  It records a major cultural shift in the thinking of this nation, and provides guidelines for its continuation.​

This short introduction to the discipline of Ethics in its practical and professional applications teaches, in simplest form, the discipline's vocabulary and forms of reasoning.  It includes illustrative cases, clear explanations of philosophical terminology, and presents decision procedures appropriate to a hierarchy of cases.  It is meant to be a foundation for elementary work in Ethics.​

This volume tracks the development in the United States of the field of Bioethics, Ethics applied to the disciplines of medicine, nursing, and health care in general, including medical research and the complex economic and political problems surrounding the provision of medical and nursing care. It explains how the United States developed, case by case, the central rules and principles of ER ethics in the Health Care System. The discussion includes the controversies centering on birth, death, clinical research, experimental procedures (cloning, reproductive technology, organ transplants), and ends with a substantial suggestion on the provision of health care for all.

There is a diversity of ‘ethical practices’ within medicine as an institutionalised profession as well as a need for ethical specialists both in practice as well as in institutionalised roles. This Brief offers a social perspective on medical ethics education. It discusses a range of concepts relevant to educational theory and thus provides a basic illumination of the subject. Recent research in the sociology of medical education and the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu are covered. In the end, the themes of Bourdieuan Social Theory, socio-cultural apprenticeships and the ‘characterological turn’ in medical education are draw together the context of medical ethics education. ​

The book tracks the rise of Business Ethics as a discipline in the United States through a review of the basic understandings of the role of business practices in the operations of society, beginning with Aristotle and proceeding to a review of the formative concepts and cases in the history of American business.​