Medical Ethics as Professional Ethics

Nursing ethics and medical ethics.

Professional ethics and publishing.

We are all troubled by ethics violations we see in the newspaper and other media outlets. Are there similar areas of concern in the sciences and in poultry science? Recently there have been a number of cases in some of the most prestigious scientific journals, including Science, of papers being withdrawn because the results were not replicable due to scientific misconduct or fabrication of resu...

Applied and Professional Ethics

The development of applied ethics in recent decades has had great significance for philosophy and society. In this article, I try to characterise this field of philosophical inquiry. I also discuss the relation of applied ethics to social policy and to professional ethics. In the first part, I address the following questions: (1) What is applied ethics? (2) When and why did applied ethics appea...

In Teaching Professional Ethics

Is it appropriate for a professional ethics instructor to divulge her own views on the choice of an ethical theory to students, or is the unbiased discussion of theories preferable? Should the instructor “narrow the field” to one or two ethical theories or should a fuller range, or a diversity of ethical theories, be introduced? As an assistant professor charged with teaching professional ethic...

Professional ethics: further comments.

Downie continues the debate over professional ethics in general, and medical ethics in particular, begun by P. Sieghart (Journal of Medical Ethics 1985 Sep; 11(3): 117-122), and furthered by Downie and Sieghart (JME 1986 Jun; 12(2): 64-66) and R. Gillon (JME 1986 Jun; 12(2): 59-60). Here Downie addresses Gillon's theses that a physician has a special obligation to his patients, that this oblig...