Ethics Standards of conduct reflecting what is considered pr...

2006-12-15T03:27:01.904Z

Ethics

Standards of conduct reflecting what is considered proper behaviour;
moral principles for conduct in pursuit of aims and goals;
prescriptions for behaviour based upon personal or professional values.

Ethics is the study of concepts and a branch of philosophy (sometimes known as moral philosophy) involved in practical reasoning and concerned with what is deemed acceptable in human behaviour. Amongst the concepts explored: good, right, duty, obligation, virtue, freedom, rationality, choice, responsibility, and so on – answers are sought for questions of the kind: what is good or bad, or right or wrong in human conduct in the pursuit of goals and objectives? Objectivity, subjectivity, scepticism, etc., which may attend claims made in the abovementioned set of concepts are also explored.

When actual human behaviour in social and cultural settings is under consideration, for example, with regard to issues such as abortion or in the acquisition of ethical codes for organizations, the term morality is sometimes applied.

Also, a set of rules, guidelines, or standards to which a person holds, or which governs the conduct of a person or the members of a profession – having reference to notions such as right and wrong, and proper or acceptable conduct.

Consider the ethics of imagined controlled experiments assessing the effects of smoking and heart and lung disease or child abuse and later personality development. Conducting experimental research would require that we recruit subjects, for example, teenage non-smokers or unabused children, and separate them into two groups, a control group and an experimental group, then see to it that the non-smokers in the experimental group take up cigarette-smoking to some particular level (e.g., heavy, moderate, or light), periodically verifying they are continuing to smoke while we monitor them for onset of disease or that we arrange for the abuse of the children in the experimental group and subsequently compare them with the controls on personality variables.

To act thus would be unethical in that, not surprisingly, we can have a good degree of certainty that we would be exposing the non-smokers and the children to serious harm, even though we may not be able to precisely specify how much and which individuals would be most badly affected.

Before research can begin as part of the planning process there is a decision to be made as to whether the benefits of any particular study outweigh the risks. In the imaginary case above the construction of the proposed experiments actually requires harm to be undergone by research participants. This presumes that we should consider that such voluntary (and preventable) infliction of harm to be unjustifiable in the circumstances, and that this harm could not be mitigated or excused by what we might learn from the exercise.

How ethical is it to use and/or promote putative therapeutic medicines or treatments which have not been shown by proper scientific trialling and evaluation to be both safe and effective (with a known significant effect beyond placebo)? Is it enough to respond as many proponents of ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary medicine’† do if pressed about whether their treatments and medicines have passed the same standards as scientific medicine, by saying something like: “well, no, we’ve had pilot studies (that is, small numbers, no control groups, no stringent conditions, observation, or evaluation, etc.), but the people who receive the treatments tell us they work wonderfully well and would beg us to keep on with the treatments if we were to suspend using them pending the outcome of scientific testing”. Much the same could have been said had medieval practitioners withdrawn their practice of ‘bleeding’ or ’bloodletting’.

†it would no longer be said to be 'alternative' if it were demonstrated to be safe and effective, it would simply be absorbed by and be counted as general medicine.

Ethical code

A body of guiding principles for organizations to set the standard for good practice and acceptable conduct by members of the organization with regard to such matters as relationships with clients or service users, relationships between organization members, with others in the profession or occupation, and with the world ‘at large’.

(see also: rational)

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