It is still difficult to achieve the ideas of user centred systems design in organisations, and we have seen that usability is given low priority in in-house systems development. In this context, usability mentoring has the potential of being a powerful method for achieving user-centred systems design. However, when applying a method such as usability mentoring one has to consider the ethical c...

Social robotics entertains a particular relationship with anthropomorphism, which it neither sees as a cognitive error, nor as a sign of immaturity. Rather it considers that this common human tendency, which is hypothesized to have evolved because it favored cooperation among early humans, can be used today to facilitate social interactions between humans and a new type of cooperative and inter...

The Internet is an ideal tool for promoting public health goals of prolonging life, health, and improving the quality of life. There are many websites with health-related information where one can go to as an information source, for health advice, or selfdiagnosis. However, these health websites require a more acute awareness of ethical issues due to potential life threatening risks from misuse...

Ethical obligations to animals in conservation research and management are manifold and often conflicting. Animal welfare concerns often clash with the ethical imperative to understand and conserve a population or ecosystem through research and management intervention. The accelerating pace and impact of global environmental change, especially climate change, complicates our understanding of th...

Ethical challenges in public health can have a significant impact on the health of communities if they impede efficiencies and best practices. Competing needs for resources and a plurality of values can challenge public health policymakers and practitioners to make fair and effective decisions for their communities. In this paper, the authors offer an analytic framework designed to assist polic...

a r t i c l e i n f o Across four studies, we explored why a gender gap emerges in negotiator ethics, such that men set lower ethical standards than women. The male pragmatism hypothesis suggests men, more than women, are motiva-tionally biased in setting ethical standards. Experiment 1 demonstrated how negotiations' masculinity implications underlie this gender gap in ethics. Experiment 2 demo...

The Bioethics Symposium titled “A scientist’s guide to approaching bioethics” was held at the joint annual meeting of the American Society of Animal Science, American Dairy Science Association, and the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, July 12 to 16, 2009. The purpose of the symposium was to help animal scientists come to terms with the importance of grappling with...

Public health interventions usually operate at the level of groups rather than individuals, and cluster randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are one means of evaluating their effectiveness. Using examples from six such trials in Bangladesh, India, Malawi and Nepal, we discuss our experience of the ethical issues that arise in their conduct. We set cluster RCTs in the broader context of public he...

Facebook’s experimental manipulation of newsfeed content and the subsequent PNAS publication of significant findings from it (1) have drawn attention to the regulation of human participation in academic research and to the differences between commercial and academic research. Those events were recognized in an Expression of Concern in PNAS (2). In commerce and on the Internet, experimentation i...

This article analyzes the religio-ethical discussions of Muslim religious scholars, which took place in Europe specifically in the UK and the Netherlands, on organ donation. After introductory notes on fatwas (Islamic religious guidelines) relevant to biomedical ethics and the socio-political context in which discussions on organ donation took place, the article studies three specific fatwas is...