Environmental Concern and Ethical Obligation Influencing the Purchase Intention of Consumers Towards Vegan Fashion Products -A Case in Hanoi, Vietnam

The fundamental purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate factors influencing Hanoi consumers' intention to purchase vegan fashion products based on the framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The ultimate result indicates that there is an outstanding factor significantly impacting the intention of Hanoi residents towards vegan fashion products: Ethical obligation (β=0.236). In addition, Environmental concern indirectly has an influence on the intention via attitudes. This study has important and practical consequences for governmental agencies and public organizations in terms of encouraging vegan fashion consumption. Based on the study’s findings, some feasible solutions are proposed to help authorities, businesses in Hanoi in particular, and Vietnam in general as well as motivating their customer intention.

Avatars

This chapter assesses the ethical issues pertaining to avatars and their users. Many of the ethical issues involve questions of customization: how much should a user be able to customize their avatar? The chapter argues that the designers of virtual worlds have an ethical obligation to afford all users the same range of customization options. Historically, avatars (and virtual worlds themselves) could be entirely text-based, but nowadays most are visual. Thus, an avatar can be thought of as a visual representation of the person using the world. This representation could, in theory, be almost anything; they may not be actually human. Virtual worlds which are not games (generally referred to as “social worlds”) contain a wide variety of humanoid representations as well. Even the human avatars may not look much like their users; when given the chance to customize their avatars, it is perhaps unsurprising that people tend to create avatars similar to themselves, but more attractive. Indeed, avatars are frequently idealizations of who we are, rather than exact copies. This is because virtual spaces are not free of social pressures or biases.

Informed Consent in Transfusion Medicine: An Ethical Obligation Or a Legal Compulsion to Avert Liabilities for Negligence to the Health Care Provider

Blood transfusion is oftentimes life-saving but associated with risks which ought to be disclosed by the health care provider as an ethical obligation and legal requirement. The practice of informed consent to transfusion medicine is quite new and few studies have comprehensively x-rayed its historical, ethical and legal implications with an in depth consideration of professional negligence using decided cases by the adversarial and arbitration systems. PubMed, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, African Journal on Line (AJOL) electronic databases were searched using combined keywords like; “Blood transfusion and informed consent” “informed choice to transfusion medicine practice”, “consent in transfusion medicine”, “health care giver and consent to transfusion therapy”, “transfusion consent and the health care seeker”, “liability and informed consent to transfusion” and “contemporary issues in medical negligence”. Relatedly, printed materials were considered. The 91 studies that met the inclusion criteria were considered with highlights showing that, informed consent to medical treatment generally is an age long practice running from roman civilization to the present but its advocated practice in transfusion medicine a recent event. The practice is also generally low in comparison with informed consent taken for other treatments in similar settings. The consequences of dereliction including infamous conduct amongst professionals or negligence with direct and vicarious liabilities in adversary systems has been set in precedent judgments. These in addition to the present day patient-centered care model as global best practice and quality in health care delivery is compelling for health care providers to imbibe the practice not as a form of defensive medicine but a repertoire to quality and responsive Medicare service.

Moral Status for Malware! The Difficulty of Defining Advanced Artificial Intelligence

The suggestion has been made that future advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that passes some consciousness-related criteria should be treated as having moral status, and therefore, humans would have an ethical obligation to consider its well-being. In this paper, the author discusses the extent to which software and robots already pass proposed criteria for consciousness; and argues against the moral status for AI on the grounds that human malware authors may design malware to fake consciousness. In fact, the article warns that malware authors have stronger incentives than do authors of legitimate software to create code that passes some of the criteria. Thus, code that appears to be benign, but is in fact malware, might become the most common form of software to be treated as having moral status.

Levinas and the ethical turn: a Nietzschean critique and response

The contentious ‘ethical turn’ in continental philosophy motivates this project. Emmanuel Levinas is among the leaders of this movement to draw renewed attention to ethics in the continental tradition. Levinas describes the transcendence that transpires in the self-Other encounter as the source of ethical obligation. However, given Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethical critique, his followers view the category of transcendence with suspicion. They think it presupposes an ontology of unchanging being. Since Nietzsche and his disciples reject ontologies of unchanging being, preferring immanence instead, they think that transcendence inevitably appeals to some imaginary world beyond the one we inhabit. Consequently, they view all philosophers of transcendence as escapist. To assess whether Levinas’ philosophical project is viable, I draw from Nietzsche’s work to mount a Nietzschean critique of Levinas. I subsequently consider a Levinasian reply to the Nietzschean critique, arguing that Levinas’ transcendence provides a compelling alternative to a Nietzschean ethics of immanence.