The ethics of doing human enhancement ethics

Human enhancement is one of the leading research topics in contemporary applied ethics. Interestingly, the widespread attention to the ethical aspects of future enhancement applications has generated misgivings. Are researchers who spend their time investigating the ethics of futuristic human enhancement scenarios acting in an ethically suboptimal manner? Are the methods they use to analyze future technological developments appropriate? Are institutions wasting resources by funding such research? In this article, I address the ethics of doing human enhancement ethics focusing on two main concerns. The Methodological Problem refers to the question of how we should methodologically address the moral aspects of future enhancement applications. The Normative Problem refers to what is the normative justification for investigating and funding the research on the ethical aspects of future human enhancement. This article aims to give a satisfactory response to both meta-questions in order to ethically justify the inquiry into the ethical aspects of emerging enhancement technologies.INPhINIT Retaining Fellowship of the La Caixa Foundation (grant number LCF/BQ/DR20/ 11790005)Research projects funded by the State Research Agency of the Spanish Government (PID2019-104943RB-I00 and PID2022-137953OB-I00)FEDER Junta de Andalucía (B-HUM-64-UGR20)BBVA Foundation (DESASTRE project from the call “Proyectos de Investigación Científica 2021”)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (421523/2022-0

A Survey of Ethics Training in Undergraduate Psychology Programs at Jesuit Universities

Training in ethics is fundamental in higher education among both faith-based and secular colleges and universities, regardless of one’s academic major or field of study. Catholic colleges and universities have included moral philosophy, theology, and applied ethics in their undergraduate curricula for generations. The purpose of this investigation was to determine what, if anything, Jesuit college psychology departments are doing to educate psychology majors regarding ethical issues. A survey method was used to assess the psychology departments of all 28 Jesuits colleges and universities in the United States. A total of 21 of the 28 schools responded and completed the survey. Five schools (23%) reported that they offered a course specifically on ethics in psychology, and three (14%) additional schools offered related courses. Of the eight (38%) that offered ethics-related courses, only one required its majors to take it, and only if they were enrolled in the mental health or forensic psychology tracks. For two (10%) of the schools, the ethics in psychology course counted as a university core ethics requirement; for two others (10%), the class met an elective university ethics requirement for psychology majors

Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorising in international relations

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR

Wittgenstein, Meta-Ethics and the Subject Matter of Moral Philosophy

Several authors claim that, according to Wittgenstein, ethics has no particular subject matter and that, consequently, there is and can be no such thing as meta-ethics. These authors argue that, for Wittgenstein, a sentence’s belonging to ethics is a classification by use rather than by subject matter and that ethics is a pervasive dimension of life rather than a distinguishable region or strand of it. In this article, I will critically examine the reasons and arguments given for these claims. In my view, a Wittgensteinian perspective does not exclude the possibilities of doing meta-ethics and of there being a particular subject matter of moral philosophy. These alleged impossibilities are not the distinguishing marks of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy. What distinguishes Wittgensteinian moral philosophy from traditional moral philosophy is, rather, its emphasis on alternative ways of thinking about the subject matter of moral philosophy

Spinoza and the possibilities for radical climate ethics

In this commentary, I respond to the core question of Ruddick’s paper: How does the theoretical dethroning of humanity force us to reinvent ethics? In so doing, I expand on Spinoza’s profound contribution to the radical rethinking of the subject at the level of ontology. Although Ruddick invokes Spinoza, first and foremost, as a potential resource for ethics in light of climate disruption, I conclude that those resources offer only a glimmer of how to live differently. The work of re-imagination at the level of metaphysics is flourishing, but we have yet to develop its implications for ethics and politics

What is Moral Application? Towards a Philosophical Theory of Applied Ethics

The aim of this paper is to offer some philosophical remarks concerning the concept of moral application in applied ethics. In doing so, I argue in favour of a philosophical approach towards applied ethics as a unitary form of moral experience. In fact every form of applied ethics, no matter how specific, moves from a problem of application and tries to fill a gap between moral theory and practice. This essential unity of applied ethics as a moral phenomenon is of great philosophical interest, since it belongs to the core problem from which moral thinking itself originates. For this reason, what applied ethics may reveal to a philosophical inquiry could provide valuable insight into the nature of moral experience itself. This is why it is important to reflect on what applied ethics is and whether the way in which application is usually framed be ts the properties of moral experience or not. In the first section I submit some preliminary remarks concerning the theoretical requirements to any philosophical approach to applied ethics. In the second section I present how application is commonly understood in the applied ethics debate by discussing the deductive and the procedural models of application. Both models, however, draw upon a technological conception of application which fails to t the structure of moral experience. Finally, I brie y sketch out the main features and the future tasks of what seems to me to be the most promising approach to the issue, i.e., the hermeneutic concept of application

Doing Research on the Ethics of Doing Research

In the previous issue of Critical Care Chenaud and colleagues found that most intensive care unit patients who had given informed consent for their participation in a clinical trial could not recall either the purpose of the trial or its related risks several days later. These findings should remind us that informed consent is a process, not an event, but they should not be interpreted to mean that recall is, of itself, a useful criterion for evaluating either the validity or the quality of the informed consent process. On an entirely separate note, the decision of the authors not to obtain informed consent for this study itself raises interesting questions about the ethics of doing research on the ethics of doing research

In defence of agent-based virtue ethics

In 'Against Agent-Based Virtue Ethics' (2004) Michael Brady rejects agent-based virtue ethics on the grounds that it fails to capture the commonsense distinction between an agent's doing the right thing, and her doing it for the right reason. In his view, the failure to account for this distinction has paradoxical results, making it unable to explain why an agent has a duty to perform a given action. I argue that Brady's objection relies on the assumption that an agent-based account is committed to defining obligations in terms of actual motives. If we reject this view, and instead provide a version of agent-basing that determines obligations in terms of the motives of the hypothetical virtuous agent, the paradox disappears

Introduction

This chapter begins by explaining two widespread attitudes towards the methods of moral philosophy. The first common attitude is that the appropriate method for doing ethics was described by John Rawls when he formulated the reflective equilibrium method. Another common attitude is that moral philosophy has no method – anything goes in ethical theorising as long as the results are significant enough. The chapter then motivates the volume by arguing that these attitudes are not helpful. The reflective equilibrium method has its limits and yet not all ways of proceeding in ethics are equally good. For this reason, I argue that we need to be more aware of the argumentative strategies we employ in ethics. This requires being methodologically reflective and transparent and taking part in the debates about the merits and problems of different methodologies exactly in the way done in the chapters of this volume. The second half of the chapter then provides an outline of the other chapters. Here I focus on clarifying exactly how these chapters contribute to the new discussions about the methods of ethics

Newsletter: The Center for Professional Ethics, Winter 1991

Table of Contents: The Director\u27s Corner by Robert Lawry Notice Lecture: Ethics Today: Self-Esteem and Self-Respect News & Notes Doing Ethics! Ethics in the Military: Confidentiality Comments on the :Military Ethics Case by The Rev. John L. Brown Response: Fall 1990 The Director\u27s Corner Postscript: Death with Dignity - And Humor by David B. Cooper, Associate editorhttps://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/professional_ethics/1015/thumbnail.jp