Science And Ethics In Dialogue

This book represents my experience teaching graduate students in Biomedical Science at Hood College. Being science majors, the students have a limited background in philosophy and ethics. Most of the graduate students are employed at area research laboratories while also pursuing a Master of Science degree. Their practical day-to-day experience in scientific research is helpful in discussions of responsible conduct of research cases. Being aware of increased cases of misconduct the United States established the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Their publication, Introduction to the Responsible Conduct of Research, defines misconduct as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Concern for the breach of public trust with repercussions in scientific funding has led to mandates for courses in ethics for students pursuing a scientific career. In addition, the Human Genome Project megaproject funded Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research (www.genome.gov/ELSI/) recognizing that the genetic information produced by the project would come with applied ethical dilemmas. Teaching can be understood as conveying knowledge from generation to generation. Likewise systems of morality are collective acquisitions built up over millennia with social norms and values that aim to maintain social order. Research does not support the premise that knowing the rules of conduct will prevent misconduct. Indeed, compliance with rules can give a false sense of security, especially if the ethical reasoning grounding the rules is not understood. Therefore, I try to sketch a path through the potential phases and avenues of a scientific career, imagining that a person may do basic research, serve on ethics committees, and engage the public in ethical use of new advances in genetics. As a result the content of this text is divided into three parts. The first part deals with foundational material on science and ethics and cases that highlight proper scientific professional conduct. The second part deals with clinical research through which a research discovery is moved to the bedside of patients and the ethical parameters of the transition. The third part sketches the ethical dilemmas evolving from progress in genetic information to clinical applications. Helping students find a moral compass, a grounding of why one ought to behave in ethical ways in their profession and more generally in life is challenging. Doing so increases their awareness and mine of potential dilemmas and how to deal with them ethically.

This book is a collection of critical engagements with Andrew Sayer, one of the foremost postdisciplinary thinkers of our times, with responses from Sayer himself. Sayer’s ground-breaking contributions to the fields of geography, political economy and social theory have reshaped the terms of engagement with issues and debates running from the methodology of social science through to the environment, and industrial development to the ethical dimensions of everyday life. Transatlantic scholars across a wide range of fields explore his work across four main areas: critical realism; moral economy; political economy; and relations between social theory, normativity and class. This is the first full-length critical assessment of Sayer’s work. It will be of interest to readers in sociology, economics, political economy, social and political philosophy, ethics, social policy, geography and urban studies, from upper-undergraduate levels upwards.

Can we trust our intuitive judgments of right and wrong? Are moral judgements objective? What reason do we have to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong? In Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve elicits answers to these questions from eleven outstanding philosophers and social scientists: Ken Binmore Philippa Foot Harry Frankfurt Allan Gibbard Daniel Kahneman Frances Kamm Alasdair MacIntyre T. M. Scanlon Peter Singer David Velleman Bernard Williams The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas about ethics. They also provide unique insights into their intellectual development - how they became interested in ethics, and how they conceived the ideas for which they became famous. Conversations on Ethics will engage anyone interested in moral philosophy.

Joining the Dialogue offers an exciting new approach for teaching academic research writing to introductory students by drawing on communication ethics. Holding to the current view that academic writing means situating ourselves in a research community and learning how to join the research conversations going on around us, Joining the Dialogue proposes that how we engage in dialogue with other researchers in our community matters. We not only read, acknowledge, and build on the research of others as we compose our work; we also engage openly, attentively, critically, and responsively to their ideas as we articulate our own. With this in mind, Joining the Dialogue is geared to helping students discover the key ethical practices of dialogue—receptivity and response-ability—as they join a research conversation. It also helps students master the dialogic structure of research essays as they write in and for their academic communities. Combining an ethical approach with accessible prose, dialogic structures and templates, practical exercises, and ample illustrations from across the disciplines, Joining the Dialogue teaches students not only how to write research essays but also how to write those essays ethically as a dialogue with other researchers and readers.

Dialogues on Fundamental Questions of Science and Philosophy presents a compilation of dialogues concerning the basic questions of science and philosophy. This book discusses the relationship between philosophy and science. Organized into two parts encompassing 10 chapters, this book begins with an argument that reality can be recognized objectively, but not that there is a conflict between science and faith. This text then examines the invalidity of the causality principle in the microworld of the elementary particle and by the lack of individual identity of the particles. Other chapters consider the argument that philosophy should also make use of scientific methods. This book discusses as well the extended version of the biogenetical law of Haeckel, which is also valid for the progress of the human perceptive faculty. The final chapter deals with the argument that the idea of good as a tenet for practical actions is religious in character. This book is a valuable resource for readers who are interested in the fields of science and philosophy.

For courses in Nursing Ethics, Health Care Ethics, or Issues/Trends in Nursing. This text seeks to prepare students to become active participants in communal dialogues about values in health care. Its presentation of multiple ethical theories helps students understand how different ethical rules and values are justified and applied as well as how community and cultural perspectives shape how participants from diverse backgrounds contribute to the ethics dialogue.

Each world faith tradition has its own distinctive relationship with science, and the science-religion dialogue benefits from a greater awareness of what this relationship is. In this book, members of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) offer international and multi-faith perspectives on how new discoveries in science are met with insights regarding spiritual realities.The essays reflect the conviction that “religion and science each proceed best when they’re pursued in dialogue with each other, and also that our fragmented and divided world would benefit more from a stronger dialogue between science and religion.” In Part One, George F. R. Ellis, John C. Polkinghorne, and Holmes Rolston III, each a Templeton Prize winner, discuss their views on why the science and religion dialogue matters. They are joined in Part Two by distinguished theologians Fraser Watts and Philip Clayton, who place the dialogue in an international context; John Polkinghorne’s inaugural address to the ISSR in 2002 is also included. In Part Three, five members of the ISSR look at the distinctive relationships of their faiths to science: •Carl Feit on Judaism •Munawar Anees on Islam •B.V. Subbarayappa on Hinduism •Trinh Xuan Thuan on Buddhism •Heup Young Kim on Asian Christianity George Ellis, the recently elected second president of ISSR, summarizes the contributions of his colleagues. Ronald Cole-Turner then concludes the book with a discussion of the future of the science and religion dialogue.

Philosophy of science used to be identified with the logical and methodological analysis of scientific theories, and any allusion to values was considered as a deplorable intromission in a philosophical investigation that should remain strictly epistemological. As a reaction against this view, an opposite «sociological» approach downplayed the usual virtues of scientific knowledge (such as logical rigor and empirical adequacy) as artificial imageries that cover the actual nature of science, that is a social product submitted to all the kinds of social conditionings and compromises. A more balanced view is badly needed today, when technoscience is permeating all aspects of our civilization and wise persons understand that we cannot survive without using science and technology but at the same time we need to steer their development in view of the real benefit of humankind. We must investigate how science, technology and values are legitimately interconnected and, in particular, how the discourses of ethics, politics and religion can enter a fruitful dialogue with science. The essays presented in this volume offer a valuable contribution to this interdisciplinary study.