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A Code of Conduct for the Life Sciences: A Practical Approach

Ye

Concept of Dharma in Shashi Tharoor’s Novel show business (1991)

Dharma is the total cosmic responsibility, including gods, a universal justice for more inclusive, wider and profounder than any western equivalent, such as duty. What is Dharma? This is the question that Shashi Tharoor explores repeatedly in his novel; though the situations, settings and characters are sufficiently varied each time to make quests dissimilar. His preoccupations are essentially abstract. The choice that a man has to make to remain true to himself, the corrosion of values in a world that puts premium on material success, the human price of ambition in a competitive society, and the possibility of making an authentic decision in a set up where an individual is allowed very little freedom-these are the recurrent concerns running through his novel – Show Business. Shashi Tharoor shows his socio-Moral vision and mourns for the lack of Dharma in modern times. In a Post Modernistic world, where all moral values are gone with the wind, there are very few committed artists with the philosophic vision, who can wage a strong war against the advent of basic human values. Tharoor considers his art as a medium through which he tries to resurrect the lost dignity of the human being. Art therefore seems to turn into a didactic weapon by which he reinstates the lost glory of the world

Unfamiliar habits: James and the ethics and politics of self-experimentation

The article critically surveys William James's understanding of habit in the light of his wider ethical and political concerns, showcasing its import for a contemporary philosophical usage of the term

Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology

The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section “Plasticity in the Human Mind,” we cover some of the main results suggesting that one’s environment can influence one’s psychological states, as well as recent work on inducing illusions of embodiment. Then, in Section “Illusions of Embodiment and Their Lasting Effect,” we go on to discuss recent evidence indicating that immersion in VR can have psychological effects that last after leaving the virtual environment. In the second part of the article, we turn to the risks and recommendations. We begin, in Section “The Research Ethics of VR,” with the research ethics of VR, covering six main topics: the limits of experimental environments, informed consent, clinical risks, dual-use, online research, and a general point about the limitations of a code of conduct for research. Then, in Section “Risks for Individuals and Society,” we turn to the risks of VR for the general public, covering four main topics: long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, risky content, and privacy. We offer concrete recommendations for each of these 10 topics, summarized in Table 1