Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In philosophy, an ethical dilemma, also called an ethical paradox or moral dilemma, is a situation in which two or more conflicting moral imperatives, none of which overrides the other, confront an agent. A closely related definition characterizes an ethical dilemma as a situation in which every available choice is wrong.
Medical ethics tends to be understood narrowly as applied professional ethics; whereas bioethics has a more expansive application, touching upon the philosophy of science and issues of biotechnology. The two fields often overlap, and the distinction is more so a matter of style than professional consensus.
Principlism is an applied ethics approach to the examination of moral dilemmas centering the application of certain ethical principles. This approach to ethical decision-making has been prevalently adopted in various professional fields, largely because it sidesteps complex debates in moral philosophy at the theoretical level.
Ethical issues also arise about whether a person has the right to end their life in cases of terminal illness or chronic suffering and if doctors may help them do so. [148] Other topics in medical ethics include medical confidentiality, informed consent, research on human beings, organ transplantation, and access to healthcare. [146]
An applied ethics approach to the examination of moral dilemmas can take many different forms but one of the most influential and most widely utilised approaches in bioethics and health care ethics is the four-principle approach developed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress. [9]
The Potter Box is a model for making ethical decisions, developed by Ralph B. Potter, Jr., professor of social ethics emeritus at Harvard Divinity School. [1] It is commonly used by communication ethics scholars. According to this model, moral thinking should be a systematic process and how we come to decisions must be based in some reasoning.
The Heinz dilemma is a frequently used example in many ethics and morality classes. One well-known version of the dilemma, used in Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, is stated as follows: [1] A woman was on her deathbed.
A related field is the ethics of artificial intelligence, which addresses such problems as the existence of moral personhood of AIs, the possibility of moral obligations to AIs (for instance, the right of a possibly sentient computer system to not be turned off), and the question of making AIs that behave ethically towards humans and others.