BACKGROUND A review of literature published a decade ago noted a significant increase in empirical papers across nine bioethics journals. This study provides an update on the presence of empirical papers in the same nine journals. It first evaluates whether the empirical trend is continuing as noted in the previous study, and second, how it is changing, that is, what are the characteristics of ...

In a recent paper, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present a novel argument against prioritarianism. The argument takes its starting point from empirical surveys on people’s preferences in health care resource allocation problems. In this paper, I Vrst question whether the empirical Vndings support their argument, and then I make some general points about the use of “empirical ethics” in ethi...

The aim of this study was to synthesize the concepts from empirical studies and analyze, compare and interrelate them with normative ethics. The International Council of Nurses (ICN) and the Health and Medical Service Act are normative ethics. Five concepts were used in the analysis; three from the grounded theory studies and two from the theoretical framework on normative ethics. A simultaneou...

BACKGROUND The concept of evidence-based medicine has strongly influenced the appraisal and application of empirical information in health care decision-making. One principal characteristic of this concept is the distinction between "evidence" in the sense of high-quality empirical information on the one hand and rather low-quality empirical information on the other hand. In the last 5 to 10 ye...

The Multidimensional Ethics Scale is an eight-item, three-subscale measure developed in Reidenbach and Robin (1990) and subsequently applied in at least ten empirical studies of business ethics. Despite two failed replication studies and two skeptical critiques, business ethics researchers continue to use the scale. Given the lingering uncertainty about the scale and its continued use in empiri...

In this paper we contribute to "sociology in bioethics" and help clarify the range of ways sociological work can contribute to ethics scholarship. We do this using a case study of an innovative neurotechnology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and its use to attempt to diagnose and communicate with severely brain-injured patients. We compare empirical data from interviews with relatives o...

We determine theoretically the relation between the total number of protons Np and the mass number A (the charge to mass ratio) of nuclei and neutron cores with the model recently proposed by Ruffini et al. (2007) and we compare it with other Np versus A relations: the empirical one, related to the Periodic Table, and the semi-empirical relation, obtained by minimizing the Weizsäcker mass formu...

Recent debate over the empirical psychological presuppositions of virtue ethics has focused on reactive behavioural dispositions. But there are many character traits that cannot be understood properly in this way. Such traits are well described by attitude psychology. Moreover, the findings of attitude psychology support virtue ethics in three ways. First, they confirm the role of habituation i...