SHOULD YOU DESIGN THE PERFECT BABY?

ABSTRACTAs our technology rapidly advances, designer babies and other bioethical issues are fast becoming possible. Instead of solely being considered in economic terms, or in terms of accuracy and desirability, ethical questions should also be asked such as ‘is this a good thing to do?’. This article considers whether moral people would ‘design’ and genetically engineer their babies and applies the moral theories of virtue ethics, deontology and utilitarianism to help guide our ethical decision-making in relation to this complex issue. Even if we can do something, we should pause and consider whether or not we should.

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The Evolution of Caring Within Bioethics: Provision for Relationship and Context

Nursing Ethics ◽

10.1177/096973309600300302 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 191-201 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Donna M. deMoissac ◽

Fay F. Warnock

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Decision Making ◽

Ethical Decision ◽

Ethical Decision Making ◽

Traditional Approach ◽

Evolutionary Account ◽

Modern Health Care ◽

Bioethical Issues ◽

Traditional Approaches

Given the complexity of modern health care, there exists an urgent need to discover how best to resolve complex bioethical issues. Traditionally, principle based ethics provided the benchmark for guiding ethical decision-making. More recently, however, it has become apparent that this traditional approach is often inadequate in dealing with cur rent health care dilemmas. The notion of caring was advanced initially as an alternative to, then as a complement to, principle based ethics. In this article, caring is conceptual ized as an attitude and is viewed as integral to the advancement of a coherent and inte grated moral approach to ethical decision-making. First, a brief historical description of bioethics is presented. Next, an evolutionary account of caring within bioethics is described. Four fundamental problems associated with the use of caring within bioethics are then outlined. Finally, caring as an attitude is delineated and a case study is used to illustrate the proposed conceptualization of caring. The case study demonstrates that a caring attitude provides for relationship and context, which are elements often neglected by traditional approaches.

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Character-Infused Ethical Decision Making

Journal of Business Ethics ◽

10.1007/s10551-021-04790-8 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Brenda Nguyen ◽

Mary Crossan

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Virtue Ethics ◽

Ethical Decision ◽

Ethical Decision Making ◽

Moral Agent ◽

Future Research ◽

Organizational Misconduct ◽

Growing Body ◽

Shifting Attention

AbstractDespite a growing body of research by management scholars to understand and explain failures in ethical decision making (EDM), misconduct prevails. Scholars have identified character, founded in virtue ethics, as an important perspective that can help to address the gap in organizational misconduct. While character has been offered as a valid perspective in EDM, current theorizing on how it applies to EDM has not been well developed. We thus integrate character, founded in virtue ethics, into Rest’s (1986) EDM model to reveal how shifting attention to the nature of the moral agent provides critical insights into decision making more broadly and EDM specifically. Virtue ethics provides a perspective on EDM that acknowledges and anticipates uncertainties, considers its contextual constraints, and contemplates the development of the moral agent. We thus answer the call by many scholars to integrate character in EDM in order to advance the understanding of the field and suggest propositions for how to move forward. We conclude with implications of a character-infused approach to EDM for future research.

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Ethics, Prosperity, and Society: Moral Evaluation Using Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence ◽

10.24963/ijcai.2020/24 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Aditya Hegde ◽

Vibhav Agarwal ◽

Shrisha Rao

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Virtue Ethics ◽

Ethical Decision ◽

Ethical Decision Making ◽

Negativity Bias ◽

Short Term ◽

Social Phenomena ◽

Long Run ◽

Prior Literature ◽

New Type

Modelling ethics is critical to understanding and analysing social phenomena. However, prior literature either incorporates ethics into agent strategies or uses it for evaluation of agent behaviour. This work proposes a framework that models both, ethical decision making as well as evaluation using virtue ethics and utilitarianism. In an iteration, agents can use either the classical Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma or a new type of interaction called moral interaction, where agents donate or steal from other agents. We introduce moral interactions to model ethical decision making. We also propose a novel agent type, called virtue agent, parametrised by the agent's level of ethics. Virtue agents' decisions are based on moral evaluations of past interactions. Our simulations show that unethical agents make short term gains but are less prosperous in the long run. We find that in societies with positivity bias, unethical agents have high incentive to become ethical. The opposite is true of societies with negativity bias. We also evaluate the ethicality of existing strategies and compare them with those of virtue agents.

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