Ethical rationales for past and present military medical practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 165 (4) ◽  
pp. 273-278
Author(s):  
Edmund Howe

This paper reviews changes in the ethical challenges that have arisen in military medicine over the past four decades. This includes the degree, if any, to which providers during the Vietnam conflict have carried out what we now refer to as harsh interrogation measures in an attempt to extract information from captured enemy soldiers, the extent, if any, to which the USA used medicine as a means to try to win over the hearts and minds of civilians in occupied territory and how providers should treat service members who return from the front with combat fatigue. An issue that arose during the first Gulf War in 1991 is discussed, namely US service persons being required to take botulism vaccine without their consent. Finally, present challenges are discussed including interrogation measures such as waterboarding and the ethical issues posed in the recent past by the exclusion of gay service members and those posed presently by the inclusion of transgender members. Two ethical values are suggested that have remained constant, namely giving priority to the individual needs of service personnel over those of the unit when there are no urgent combat needs and the reliance on individual virtue when what they should do is morally unclear.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 419-422
Author(s):  
Senthil Kumaran M ◽  
Bedanta Sarma ◽  
Arun Kumar S

The increasing demand to dispose of the cases swiftly, police often resort to third-degree methods to extract information from the individual; and in the process violate the fundamental rights to life and personal liberty stated under article 21 of the constitution of India. With the development of science and technology quickly eliciting the information is possible by adopting methods of polygraph, brain mapping, and narco analysis. In the past various experts, committees and judgements in courts have recommended these technologies to be used. Though there is a demand, it also raises serious legal, ethical and medical issues. Through this article we attempted to analyze the issues from various angles, and should take steps in the future to implement them. Keywords: Deception Detection Test (DDT), polygraph, brain mapping, narco analysis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 893-911
Author(s):  
Akos Rona-Tas

Abstract Predictive algorithms are replacing the art of human judgement in rapidly growing areas of social life. By offering pattern recognition as forecast, predictive algorithms mechanically project the past onto the future, embracing a peculiar notion of time where the future is different in no radical way from the past and present, and a peculiar world where human agency is absent. Yet, prediction is about agency, we predict the future to change it. At the individual level, the psychological literature has concluded that in the realm of predictions, human judgement is inferior to algorithmic methods. At the sociological level, however, human judgement is often preferred over algorthms. We show how human and algorithmic predictions work in three social contexts—consumer credit, college admissions and criminal justice—and why people have good reasons to rely on human judgement. We argue that mechanical and overly successful local predictions can result in self-fulfilling prophecies and, eventually, global polarization and chaos. Finally, we look at algorithmic prediction as a form of societal and political governance and discuss how it is currently being constructed as a wide net of control by market processes in the USA and by government fiat in China.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Garaventa

Abstract:The concept of business ethics has continued to remain a major item on the agenda of corporate America for the last twenty years. Regrettably, this longevity of interest has not been matched by equal attention to the pedagogical methods and techniques used to address these issues. The current mode of teaching business ethics generally involves reliance on “war stories,” case studies, and seminars. Today’s dynamic environment creates pressures for higher levels of ethical behavior by business. Many ethical challenges faced by contemporary managers are not easily resolved by existing guidelines, and require managers to expand their scope of analysis in attempting to arrive at satisfactory resolutions. Literature can be an especially alternative source of insights, as authors are able to highlight behaviors that may not be available from traditional sources. Historically, the use of literature in examining business ethics has been focused primarily on novels such as The Jungle, Babbit, and The Great Gatsby. Plays are more useful than novels in attempting to inculcate moral and ethical values since they more sharply address the interactions of characters, and the reader becomes more involved in their situations. The plays selected for analysis, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, have intense plots and characters and allow the reader to observe a wide range motives, emotions, and traits. This untraditional approach to teaching business ethics enhances the ability to relate to the increasingly complex ethical issues facing the individual and the organization.


Author(s):  
Rosa Ghasemi Nejad

Although ethics in translation is not a new realm of study, it is almost intact for official translators in Iran. This study aims to evaluate translators’ familiarity and commitment to universally accepted ethical issues. Moreover the present study attempts to shed light on the relationship between translators’ educational levels and work experience and their familiarity and commitment to universally accepted translation ethical issues. The Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT) has published a code of ethics for the members and obliges them to observe the principles. The first five principles are related to “Professional Conduct”, “Confidentiality”, “Competence”, “Impartiality” and “Accuracy”, which were obtained to conduct the present research. The instrument utilized in this study was a questionnaire containing 35 items presented to official translators in three populated cities in Iran, Tehran, Mashhad and Kerman. The multiple-choice researcher-made questionnaire was constructed in Persian to reduce any possible ambiguity. The present study conducted in 2016 on certified official translators and interpreters, either male or female, aged between 25 to about 52. However, it does not take age and gender into account. The study findings reveal that work experience and level of education have significant relationship with commitment and familiarity. SPSS and One-Way ANOVA were utilized to analyze the data.1.INTRODUCTIONEthics in translation is such a new subject in Iran that most of the official translators cannot avoid expressing their shock as they hear the term ethics in translation. Although ethics has been already introduced in many translation centers in many countries such as Australia and the USA, It is still new in Iran and degree of official translators’ familiarity with the principles and their commitment to them is unknown. Not observing the principles equals maximizing ethical challenges faced by translators and interpreters since they have a crucial role in many different situations related to human interactions (Baker, 2016). A study seemed necessary to evaluate their performance that can lead to an improvement per se since observing ethics is so important that philosophy believes it is a main source of making decisions arbitrarily unless the actions would be “aimless”, (Rupani, 2015). Such a study can introduce the necessity of ethics to translators, if it is then determined unknown and required. Afterwards, a comprehensive and culturally appropriate code of ethics will be proposed to Iranian Association of Certified Translators and Interpreters.AUSIT (Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators) published one of the most accredited codes of ethPublishedby Australian


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Niles

Results from the 2005 National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) indicate that over half of employees observed at least one type of misconduct in the workplace during the past 12 months, with nearly 40% observing two or more violations (http://www.ethics.org). The President of the Ethics Resource Center, Dr. Patricia Harned, has stated that this statistic has not changed much over the past 5 years even though there is a rise in the number of companies that have implemented ethics programs (http://www.ethics.org) Business faculty has the opportunity to provide business students with ethical reasoning opportunities to meet these ethical challenges successfully.  AACSB has stated in their 2004 Ethics Education in Business Schools that…business education must encourage students to develop an understanding of the challenges surrounding business ethics and provide students with the tools to recognize and respond to ethical issues, both personally and organizationally (9). This paper outlines a proposed undergraduate business ethics education model that is developed in compliance with AACSB standards.


This volume brings together original essays exploring the intersections of clinical practice, policy, and bioethics in women’s healthcare. Including but moving beyond the familiar theme of reproduction, it aims to both broaden areas of scholarship in feminist bioethics and to respond to ethical challenges that many women experience in accessing healthcare. Some of the contributions overlap with concerns that feminist scholars have voiced in the past, such as the medicalization of women’s bodies, but address new procedures (e.g., female cosmetic genital surgery). Other chapters expand into new fields that are underexplored in the bioethics literature, such as ethical issues concerning the care of Indigenous women, uninsured refugees and immigrants, women engaged in sex work, and those with HIV and perinatal mental health disorders. The richness of the collection lies in the multitude of disciplines represented. Contributors range from those who are in active clinical practice—medicine, nursing, and ethics—to philosophers contemplating new conceptual issues. Topical and contemporary, this book provides a valuable resource for physicians, nurses, clinical ethicists, and researchers working in the areas of women’s health and applied ethics.


Author(s):  
Henrik Vogt ◽  
Bjørn Hofmann

Rationale and aims: Precision medicine (PM) raises a key question: How can we know what works when the number of people with a health problem becomes small or one (n=1)? We here present a formative case from Norway. The Norwegian Board of Health Supervision was faced with a cancer patient, who had improved after treatment with a drug in the private health sector but was refused continued treatment in the public health service due to lack of clinical trial evidence. The Board overturned this decision, arguing that the drug had been unambiguously documented to work in the individual case. We aim to provide an in-depth analysis of this case and The Board´s decision and thereby to illustrate and elucidate key epistemological and ethical issues and developments in PM. Method: We provide our analysis and discussion using tools of critical thinking and concepts from philosophy of science and medicine such as uncertainty, evidence, forms of inference and causation. We also examine the case in the light of the history of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Results and discussion: The case reflects an epistemological shift in medicine where PM puts greater emphasis on evidence that arises in individual patients after the treatment is provided over preexisting population-based evidence. PM may rely more heavily on abduction to decide what works and qualitative, rather than quantitative judgments. The case also illustrates a possible shift in the concept of causation from regularity accounts to mechanistic and process accounts. We discuss ethical implications of a shift from more “traditional” to “personalized EBM”. Conclusion: A framework that is more based on abductions and evidence arising in the individual case has problems in creating quantifiable, reliable, and generalizable evidence, and in promoting transparency and accountability. PM currently lacks clear criteria for deciding what works in an individual, posing ethical challenges.


Author(s):  
H. Kohl

High-Resolution Electron Microscopy is able to determine structures of crystals and interfaces with a spatial resolution of somewhat less than 2 Å. As the image is strongly dependent on instrumental parameters, notably the defocus and the spherical aberration, the interpretation of micrographs necessitates a comparison with calculated images. Whereas one has often been content with a qualitative comparison of theory with experiment in the past, one is currently striving for quantitative procedures to extract information from the images [1,2]. For the calculations one starts by assuming a static potential, thus neglecting inelastic scattering processes.We shall confine the discussion to periodic specimens. All electrons, which have only been elastically scattered, are confined to very few directions, the Bragg spots. In-elastically scattered electrons, however, can be found in any direction. Therefore the influence of inelastic processes on the elastically (= Bragg) scattered electrons can be described as an attenuation [3]. For the calculation of high-resolution images this procedure would be correct only if we had an imaging energy filter capable of removing all phonon-scattered electrons. This is not realizable in practice. We are therefore forced to include the contribution of the phonon-scattered electrons.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (50) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Marcelo Da Silva Leite ◽  
Celeste Gaia

Over the past decade due the expansion of globalization there has been an increasing emphasis on internationalization among faculty, administration and accrediting agencies in the Higher Education.  Although to promote internationalization in the Higher Education, costs are a big challenge, one way to have the international actions with low cost, it is seeking for grants from different governmental agencies and foundations.The Fulbright Scholar program provides a long-standing and externally-funded means for internationalizing college and university curriculum. This article is going to share the perspective   of a Brazilian Fulbright Scholar at an American college and the institution perspective of the Fulbright scholar participation at the College.


Author(s):  
Mikhail Konstantinov

The aim of the article is to concretize the concept of political ideology in the aspect of its matrix structure and in the context of the cognitive-evolutionary approach. Based on Michael Frieden's morphological approach to the analysis of ideological consciousness, the concept of cognitive-ideological matrices is introduced, which allows us to describe the process of transition from proto-ideological to ideological concepts proper, especially at the level of individual consciousness. The identification of the ideological concept as the main “gene” of conceptual variability and inheritance made it possible to describe the main parameters of the evolution of political ideologies and associate it with changes taking place at the individual consciousness level. The described concept was tested in a series of sociological studies of youth consciousness conducted in 2015-2016 and 2018-2020. As a result of the study, it was possible to first identify the “zero level” of ideology, at which the minds of young respondents are potentially open to the influence of diverse and often mutually exclusive ideological orientations, and second, to pinpoint the changes that have occurred in the cognitive ideological matrices of Rostov-on-Don students over the past five years. This study was conducted by scientists from the southern Federal University.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document