Risk, double effect and the social benefit requirement

2020 ◽  
pp. medethics-2019-106034
Author(s):  
Robert C Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Social Benefit ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Doctrine Of Double Effect ◽  
Medical Benefit ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Risk ◽  
Research On Human Subjects

Many ethicists maintain that medical research on human subjects that presents no prospect of direct medical benefit must have a prospect of social benefit to be ethical. Payment is not the sort of benefit that justifies exposing subjects to risk. Alan Wertheimer has raised a serious challenge to this view, pointing out that in industry, social value is not considered necessary to make dangerous jobs ethical. This article argues that Wertheimer was correct to think that the ethics of hazard pay should be the same in medical research and in business. Nevertheless, a qualified social benefit requirement should apply in both fields. For a study or a job with significant net physical risk to be ethical, it must have social value beyond the satisfaction of ordinary preferences, including the preference for money. The requirement derives from a non-absolutist version of the doctrine of double effect. If a risky study or a dangerous job has no distinctive social value, and hazard pay is subjects' or workers’ only reason to undergo risks, the very fact that they undergo risk is intended as a means to a financial end. Inviting people to enrol in such a study or to take such a job wrongfully treats people as mere means. By contrast, if a study or a job has social value, people can participate with a primary end other than money, even if they accept compensation. Researchers or employers do not intend but merely foresee risks to subjects or workers.

The Social Value of Research and Health Research Priority-Setting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.M. Wenner
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Research ◽  
Priority Setting ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Research Priority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Health Research Priority Setting

This chapter discusses the social value requirement in clinical research and its intersection with health research priority-setting. The social value requirement states that clinical research involving human subjects is only ethical if it has the potential to produce socially valuable knowledge. The chapter discusses various ways to specify both the justification for and the content of the social value requirement. It goes on to consider the implications of various accounts of the content and justification for the requirement for the ethics of health research priority-setting, showing that while some accounts of the requirement are largely silent with respect to how research questions should be prioritized, others entail robust obligations to prioritize research that might benefit particular groups. The chapter also briefly examines potential arguments for something like a social value requirement in other kinds of research, specifically social scientific research.

scholarly journals Women’s Value in a Social Capital Context: a Net Present Social Value Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Kosy Timothy Nwosu ◽  
Gerry Gatawa
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Women's Organizations ◽  
Social Benefit ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Value Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women’S Organizations

Social capital is formed from individual abilities through the social investment that contributes to value creation where individuals feel a sense of membership and commitment through their social interactions and relationships. This study aims to explore the application of social capital to women's organizations. It further explores the net social value of women's organizations and the women members to determine social capital's role as a means for value creation. At these ends, the mixed method was employed by combining qualitative and quantitative data gathering approaches. The study used key informant interviews among 11 women's organizations in Baguio City and Benguet, where a total of 284 women members were interviewed. The result of the talks was subjected to semantic analysis and net present social value analysis. The results reveal that women's organizations reflect the dimensions of social capital and bring a significant contribution to members' lives. The findings imply that women members are duly recognized in their organizations, and each member expects to receive a positive value of the social benefit. Hence, women's organizations are the embodiment of social capital that contributes to women's value creation and empowers their members to maximize their capacities.

Bodies and Buildings

2020 ◽  
pp. 393-415
Author(s):  
Corinna Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
The Body ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research On Human Subjects ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Health And Well Being

Issues around the body have tended to be seen as the concerns of medical materialists and utilitarians, but rarely medievalists. This perception is reflected in the fact that the body only features occasionally in scholarship on Victorian medievalism. However, this chapter makes the claim that medievalists were deeply invested in issues of health and death, as well as anatomy and other branches of medicine. Moreover, medievalists often evoked the past in support of views about the ethics and care of the body that were surprisingly comparable to that of their supposed sworn enemies, materialists and utilitarians. There is a strain of thought, and an aesthetics, that runs through Victorian culture, which could be called ‘materialist medievalism’. I argue that the view of a bifurcated Victorian society has obscured how often opinions between seemingly incompatible thinkers overlapped on aesthetic, philosophical, and ‘condition of England’ questions that focused on the body. It is my hope that this reconsideration will help us better understand the Victorian foundations of our modern concerns with surveillance, medical research on human subjects, health and well-being in urban environments, and memorialization and care of the dead.

scholarly journals Bioethics in crisis or the crisis of bioethics? : An Anthropology of Pandemic in the Medicalized Society

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Sandu
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Clinical Trials ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Medical Research ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
Herd Immunity ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Record Time ◽  
Research On Human Subjects

We will discuss (…) the need for ethics in times of crisis. Many people consider ethics and bioethics and the call for principles to be bureaucratic obstacles to obtaining a rapid response from the population, for example, to achieve vaccines in record time, to immunize the population, to establish unpopular but necessary measures, such as closing borders and non-compliance with fundamental principles of the European Union, establishing public policies aimed at herd immunity or, conversely, closing most activities considered essential in the economy, to ensure social distancing and self-isolation of the population. These measures are understood as derogations from ethics or bioethics when targeting medical research on human subjects performed faster than required by standard procedure, or the implementation of innovative therapeutic practices that have not previously been studied by clinical trials to certify that there are no known side effects.

scholarly journals On Automating the Doctrine of Double Effect

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu ◽  
Selmer Bringsjord
Keyword(s):  
Human Subjects ◽  
Autonomous Systems ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Doctrine Of Double Effect ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Representation Systems ◽  
Second Mode ◽  
Software Modules ◽  
Initial Work

The doctrine of double effect (DDE) is a long-studied ethical principle that governs when actions that have both positive and negative effects are to be allowed. The goal in this paper is to automate DDE. We briefly present DDE, and use a first-order modal logic, the deontic cognitive event calculus, as our framework to formalize the doctrine. We present formalizations of increasingly stronger versions of the principle, including what is known as the doctrine of triple effect. We then use our framework to simulate successfully scenarios that have been used to test the presence of the principle in human subjects. Our framework can be used in two different modes. One can use it to build DDE-compliant autonomous systems from scratch, or one can use it to verify that a given AI system is DDE-complaint, by applying a DDE layer on an existing system or model. For the latter mode, the underlying AI system can be built using any architecture (planners, deep neural networks, bayesian networks, knowledge-representation systems, or a hybrid); as long as the system exposes a few parameters in its model, such verification is possible. The role of the DDE layer here is akin to a (dynamic or static) software verifier that examines existing software modules. Finally, we end by sketching initial work on how one can apply our DDE layer to the STRIPS-style planning model, and to a modified POMDP model. This is preliminary work to illustrate the feasibility of the second mode, and we hope that our initial sketches can be useful for other researchers in incorporating DDE in their own frameworks.

Medical Research on Human Subjects

1983 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 577
Author(s):  
William J. Curran ◽  
Robert J. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Research On Human Subjects

From the Ethics of the Research Project to the Ethical Communication of Science

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Antonio Sandu
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Research Project ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethics Of Research ◽  
Research On Human Subjects ◽  
Communication Of Science ◽  
High Level ◽  
Ethical Communication

A postmodern interference between bioethics, epistemology, and philosophy of science arises from the field of ethics of research on human subjects. Being a research with a high level of subjectivity, it will also load the researcher with the responsibility towards the social meaning of the results, the correctness of using the methodology, honesty, presenting the limits of research, including the epistemic and methodological ones, as well as the needs of the subjects participating in the investigation. The ethics of research is based on a series of principles, of which the most significant are the honesty of obtaining and presenting results, the non-harm of human subjects, the respect for the autonomy of the subjects, and the principle of beneficence.

Social Value and Sociological Perspective on Social Entrepreneurship

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdullah Yilmaz ◽  
Hande Ulukapi Yilmaz
Keyword(s):  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Social Benefit ◽  
Social Enterprises ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Social Mission ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Expression

The needs of communities are endless and unlimited like the needs of individuals. Societies have to meet their reasonable set of unlimited needs to sustain their continuity. Otherwise, social problems become unsolvable and these problems that become unsolvable can be sources of other problems. In this sense, social enterprises are the institutions that have emerged in order to meet the needs of the society and to solve the problems. The close relation of social enterprises with society and social structure and the “social” expression in the concept make it necessary to look at social entrepreneurship from a sociological perspective. In this direction, the aim of this chapter is intended to create a sociological perspective on social entrepreneurship that aims to contribute to social order and welfare rather than commercial entrepreneurship serving the purpose of individual or organizational interest in economic sense. In the context of sociological perspective, social problem, social benefit, social mission and vision, social value, social capital, and finally, social change and transformation concepts and their relation with social entrepreneurship are examined.

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