Academic literature on the topic 'Ethics; Law and ethics; Right and wrong'

RIGHT/WRONG: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics by Juan Enríquez. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020. 304 pages. Hardcover; $24.95. ISBN: 9780262044424. *Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics made me angry, made me think, made me research, made me discuss, made me agree, made me disagree ... and it turns out that is what the author was hoping for. His goal was to get people interested in ethics again. His point was that "technology provides alternatives that can fundamentally alter our notion of what is right and what is wrong." Ethics, he believes, often do (and should) evolve, and technology is increasingly becoming the catalyst for this evolution. He states that this book is not the classic "scholarly" book that provides answers, but one that he hopes will incite debate and provoke questions regarding the status quo. *As a computer scientist, I expected "technology" to be digital technology, but Enríquez uses a broader, and probably more proper, definition. Though he doesn't provide a formal definition, it appears to be something like "applied scientific knowledge." His definition of technology encompasses birth control, medications, gene editing, machines from the industrial revolution, and lab-grown beef, among other examples. *Enríquez begins the book with examples of what he means by technology influencing what we see as ethical. One example is the advent of birth control. The use of birth control afforded women more opportunities in education and career development. This, in turn, allowed them more financial independence which lessened their need to stay in abusive marriages. Even without the aspect of divorce, today many would look back and see the lack of education and career opportunities for women as unethical treatment. Birth control allowed for and encouraged more-ethical treatment of women. *Enríquez also looks to the future with the more contemporary example of gene editing. Many people today are appalled at the idea of editing a baby's DNA, even with the intent of preventing future diseases. They see it as unethical. Could it be that in the future our kids and grandkids will be appalled at how unethical we were for not editing their genes to avoid the cancer that they now face? *A third example of technology influencing our ethics is related to meat production. Currently, almost all of the meat we consume is a result of raising and slaughtering animals. Present-day technologies, however, allow for lab-grown beef. When this product becomes more affordable and perhaps the norm, will future generations regard us as unethical for the "cruelty-ridden" steaks and burgers that we consumed? *Throughout the book, Enríquez addresses controversial issues, including the educational system, mass incarceration, drug legalization, mental health, climate change, and warfare. There are plenty of topics to use as conversation starters. Unlike other books that help us to see the potential ethical dangers of technology, Enriquez focuses on the ways that technology enables us to become more ethical--if we are willing to adapt. *I love the passion that Enríquez brings to the discussion. He believes that technology without ethics is a recipe for disaster, and he wants people to pay more attention to what is right and wrong. He wants us to be open to re-evaluating what we believe to be right actions if we are given new information or possibilities through technology. At the same time, he wants us to be humble, recognizing that it can be hard to decipher right from wrong in new situations and that it can take time for a society to make the changes necessary to produce more-ethical actions. Hindsight is often 20/20, and people that went before us--even if decent people--made mistakes. We will also make mistakes. Furthermore, there are deterrents to making changes: inconvenience, shame, loss of status, and other costs. He wants to encourage us to be aware, kind, civil, and open when we are considering what is right and wrong given new technology. To all of this, I heartily agree. *In keeping with the author's hopes (that the book would also cause us to disagree, but discuss), I also wanted to mention a few things from the book which troubled me. As previously noted, he tells us that this is not a scholarly book, one meant to prescribe or give answers. Yet, he states that the current healthcare system is unethical, the cost of college is unethical, it is unethical to restrict gay marriage, and the ethical thing to do with autonomous cars is to make them available as soon as they can save more lives than with our current system. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, he is prescribing. He does provide plenty of "answers" throughout the book. *In chapter 3, Enríquez addresses those who would absolutely claim to know right from wrong. One of his main areas of focus is religion. He speaks specifically to people of faith who claim to know right from wrong because they know God's word. He then attempts to show how religious principles too have evolved. He declares, "The religions that survive long-term tend to evolve." Of interest to Christians, he states that "the Bible, the word of God, and hence Christian ethics, has evolved, or been reinterpreted, since the good old days of the Old Testament." He cites examples in which Christian ethics have changed over time. Interpretations of passages in the Bible have altered as our society has changed, and as technology has allowed us to communicate more broadly. He cites how Pope Francis has revised how he speaks about various issues. Agree or disagree, these are interesting topics for research and reflection. *But in his zeal to make his point, Enríquez makes certain statements (e.g., "None of the Gospels were written while Jesus was alive, and none by someone who actually met him") that I don't believe would be accepted by mainstream Christians. Yes, the Gospels were not written when Jesus was on Earth, but it appears that most Christian scholars believe, for example, that the Apostle John wrote the book of John. (Although Enríquez does admit in the references that his citation supporting this statement is from a rather controversial book.) *Finally, the author is trying hard to make this ethics book interesting, far from one of those stodgy, dry ethics theory books "that alienate the general reader" (his words). He accomplishes that, but some help from ethicists could be very beneficial. Very early in the book Enríquez states, "Because we never thought we could come close to doing what we take for granted today, we have no framework to deal with changing ethical norms." The truth is, ethicists have several frameworks available, and Enríquez even uses or suggests a couple of them--perhaps without knowing it. *Near the end of the book, he admonishes the reader to "bring front and center several core principles: modesty, generosity, empathy, civility, humility, compassion, decency, truthfulness ... That is what underlies what we eventually discover to be ethical" (p. 221). This essentially describes what is known as a virtue-ethics framework. Those "core principles" he mentioned are virtues. The virtue-ethics framework simply asks: what would a virtuous person (someone who is compassionate, generous ...) do in this new situation? The second framework is utilitarianism, which asks the question: What would produce the best outcome for the most people? He applies this approach to the authorization of autonomous vehicles and to the discussion of which types of healthcare developments should be prioritized. Both frameworks can be helpful tools for informing tough ethical decisions. *Enríquez brings a wealth of interesting scenarios to this discussion of the future of ethics because of his life experience and work in cutting-edge science. I truly appreciate his desire to write a book that will hold our attention and that is far from a dry textbook on ethics. But the work of those who think about these ideas every day ought to inform the discussion. In glancing through the references, I found only two of hundreds of references that looked to me to be directly related to ethics research. In writing about computer ethics as someone trained in computer science, I have certainly found the literature from those trained in ethics to be enlightening. *This book is an interesting read for those thinking about right and wrong, and this includes people who might not normally be inclined to do so. It can help us realize that we need to re-evaluate frequently and be willing to listen to other points of view with humility. But there is very little information on how to make those tough ethical decisions that we will be continually asked to make. For that, the reader will need to look to other resources. *Reviewed by Lori Carter, Professor of Computer Science, Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, CA 92106.

In this reform era, public policy has become an essential matter for every citizen. Therefore, the government must be able to make public policies that are pro-society. Here the government is required not only to make right or wrong policies based on law but also to see the ethical and moral dimensions in society. An act that is law-abiding is not inherently moral and ethically correct. This study aims to clarify the importance of morality and ethics for decision-making officials by offering an overview of public policy ethics in Indonesia in general.

The publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology provoked a great controversy, for in that work Wilson claimed that ethics was rooted in human biology. On the first page of the book, he asserted that our deepest intuitions of right and wrong are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved via natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural environment. In 1998, the publication of Wilson's Consilience renewed the controversy, as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments.

In 1977, the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie published the book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. In it, he notably argued that objective ethical standards simply do not exist. He acknowledges that the existence of God would undermine moral skepticism, but assumes an atheistic position, and therefore concludes that objective morality is an intellectual incoherence. The debate, therefore, does not hinge on the existence of God, but rather on whether or not ethics are an objective reality without referring to God as their basis. From the standpoint of Catholic social teaching, the objectivity of ethics is a reality that should be defended over and against the claims of moral skepticism that Mackie argues are valid. In fact, the existence of objective ethics not only provides a defense of the system of Catholic social teaching, but illustrates its value to those who may be skeptical of its claims. With this defense of objective ethics as the goal, this paper claims that Mackie’s argument fails due to his deficient epistemological approach. Assuming the proper epistemic sense, natural law theory is a functional system of objective ethical truth, drawn out through a Thomistic understanding of the human pursuit of what is good.

The paper is dedicated to two main issues, namely (1) the representation of general Islamic ethics, the analysis of its specific methodology of moral validation by referring to the Qur'an and Sunna, and its interconnectivity with the Islamic law – Shari’a, as well as to (2) presenting Islamic managerial ethics as a derivative from the general Islamic ethics when it comes to both building moral arguments and propagating the proper moral behavior by promoting moral virtues and normatively analyzing what is right and wrong in the particular business situation. Among the used methods, there was content analysis, comparable analysis, inference, and the evolution of the normative theories. Then, the very Islam-specific confluence of ethics and law is discussed. These data are presented and analyzed as a required context for proper understanding of applied ethics in Islam, and in the case of this paper – Islamic managerial ethics.

Ethics has existed in religion and philosophy for thousands of years and has been applied to business activities in the same way ethical values and norms have been applied to everyday life. This article summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the study of business ethics as the form of applied ethics, which studies morals, ethical principles and problems in the business environment. The main goal of the study is to analyze business ethics from the point of view of integration of general morals and ethical norms to business, a combination of key signs of the right (good) or wrong behavior while doing business, determined on the basis of expected behavior approved by the society. The study of the role of business ethics in the corporate sector of the economy allowed to determine the most general principles of business ethics, namely awareness, caring, compliance, consideration, fairness, honesty, implementation, integrity, integration, loyalty, responsibility, and trustworthiness. The methodological basis of the research is analytical, statistical and comparative methods based on the use of Google Trends. In general, in Google Books, the use of the term business ethics shows an exponential trend. The findings show that the highest search frequency of business ethics is in the “all” category, after that in the “business and industry” category, then in the “science” category, finally in the “law and government” category. On average, the highest interest frequency was in 2004 in all examined categories. The author has proved that a third-degree polynomial downward trend can be fitted to each time series. The analysis of this concept on a geographical basis showed that the interest frequency of the principles of business ethics was most significant in South and Central East Africa, in South and Southeast Asia, over and above in the Caribbean. Keywords: business ethics, principles of business ethics, Google Trends, Google Books Ngram Viewer, time series analysis.

Malaysia was recorded outnumber of accidents in the world. The traffic Police is the responsible body for ensuring to maintain the law on the road which assists the public for smooth travelling The media reports stated that the traffic police uses their power in wrong ways and is showing not profession with their duties. This happens due to lack of organizational culture among civil servants which are not practiced in the right ways according to the justice and their professions. Therefore, this article focuses on the organizational culture that should be practiced and the decisions that need to be practiced. Further, the ethical factors based decisions should be performed by traffic police. The topic selected will expect to improve the organizational culture and an ethical decision making among law’s practitioner and traffic police. In addition, the positive view can also give to the public on the ethical decision making that could be practiced by traffic police. In conclusion, the improvement of organizational culture should be refined to produce law practitioners and implementers in ethical especially for civil servants in decision-making.

Abstract AIs’ presence in and influence on human life is growing. AIs are seen more and more as autonomously acting agents, which creates a challenge to build ethics into their design. This paper defends the thesis that we need to equip AI with artificial conscience to make them capable of wise judgements. An argument is built in three steps. First, the concept of decision is presented, and second, the Asilomar Principles for AI development are analysed. It is then shown that to meet those principles AI needs the capability of passing moral judgements on right and wrong, of following that judgement, and of passing a meta-judgement on the correctness of a given moral judgement, which is a role of conscience. In classical philosophy, the ability to discover right and wrong and to stick to one's judgement of what is right action in given circumstances is called practical wisdom. The conclusion is that we should equip AI with artificial wisdom. Some problems stemming from ascribing moral agency to AIs are also indicated.

When young law graduates enter the legal profession they will undoubtedly be exposed to difficult situations that will demand of them to make difficult decisions, often having to balance conflicting systems of belief and ideas on what ethical behaviour entails. Legal ethics training in law faculties the world over often neglects teaching aspects of morality to focus on reviews of rules of professional legal conduct. This article argues that if legal education is to adequately prepare law graduates for legal practice, it must offer more than reviews of these codes of conduct. To properly assist law students in avoiding pitfalls which may lead to disciplinary action, they must be taught to appropriately use their moral compasses.This narrative aims to show that the metaphorical moral compass, with the cardinal virtues as possible main points, may serve as the crucial and underlying guide in the avoidance of the pitfalls which may result in a person being struck from the roll, but more than that, that it may aid in the pursuit of personal dreams or goals. The article contributes to the literature on legal ethics by foregrounding the virtues that pertain to sound conduct in a lawyer, as opposed to the rules and codes, in the hope that this may help legal practitioners to decide on what is right and what is wrong.

When an act is right or wrong, there may be an explanation why. Different moral theories recognize different moral facts and offer different explanations of them, but they offer no account of moral explanation itself. What, then, is its nature? This thesis seeks a systematic account of moral explanation within a framework of moral realism. In Chapter 1, I develop a pluralist theory of explanation. I argue that there is a prima facie distinctive normative mode of explanation that is essential to moral theory. In Chapter 2, I characterize normative explanation through its formal properties. I then draw on John Mackie’s claim that moral explanations are queer to develop a powerful form of moral scepticism. In Chapters 3–4, I reject attempts to reduce normative explanation to logical necessity, metaphysical necessity, or conceptual (analytic) necessity. The failure of these accounts is taken to reinforce Mackie’s scepticism. In Chapter 5, I defend a partial analysis of normative explanation in terms of irreducible normative laws. I argue that irreducible normative laws offer a realist, though non-naturalist, answer to Mackie’s scepticism. The existence of irreducible normative laws then is defended as offering the best realist explanation of why rightness and wrongness supervene on descriptive properties. In Appendix A, I discuss the claim the normative explanation has an essential connection to the motivation of virtuous agents. I defend this claim from certain difficulties posed by Jonathan Dancy’s recent work.

How do rights relate to moral complaints? What is the relationship between our moral entitlements---the obligations that are owed to us---and the moral complaints that we can make---our claims to have been wronged?
Philosophy

What does the current focus on identity as a medium of social exchange bring into the practice of improvised music? What happens to listening, spontaneity, empathy, freedom and generosity in this social climate? Is there somehow emerging within the music-improvisatory discourse a kind of de facto constraint, perhaps superimposed on the musical language from the larger cultural field? The frameworks of music sociology, object relations theory, political philosophy, pedagogy, music history and art criticism offer a backdrop against which the complex challenges of interpersonal communication can be seen in their relevance to the here and now of music improvisation.

Human rights are commonly taken to include both behavioral freedoms, such as a right to express opinions, and safeguards against the behaviors of others, such as a right not to be tortured. I examine the claim by Allen Buchanan and others that democracy should be considered a human right. I discuss what human rights are, what they do, and what they obligate moral agents to do, comparing this framework to attributes of democracy. I conclude that while democracy itself is both too nebulous and too specific to be the subject of a human right, it may be proper to speak of a human right to state self-determination.

This thesis seeks to investigate whether the current European Court of Human Rights case-law on assisted suicide can be justified using Kantian or Utilitarian arguments. The theory, consisting of Utilitarianism and Kantianism, is applied to three key cases arguing a right to assisted suicide under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights; Pretty v. the United Kingdom, Haas v. Switzerland and Koch v. Germany. Using argumentation analysis, arguments based on the case-law in combination with the two theories are presented and discussed. In a discussion centered around concepts such as autonomy, utility and rationality, the thesis concludes that the two theories are indeed useful in justifying the case-law on assisted suicide. The observation that the two theories can justify the same actions on different grounds concludes the essay, before ideas encouraging future research are presented.

AbstractEthics is a set of moral principles of ‘what is right?’ and ‘what is wrong?’ or, in simple words, ‘what is good and what is bad?’ When the same principles are applied to medicine, the subject is called medical ethics. It is expected that a doctor should act in a particular way and follow certain rules. Medical ethics are professional standards for physicians. Bioethics is a branch of medical ethics and deals with complex issues like euthanasia, transplant medicine, genetic medicine, assisted reproduction therapy, human cloning, and medical genomics. Medical ethics and bioethics concepts are guides for physicians and to ensure patient safety.

Ours is an age of pervasive political turbulence, and the scale of the challenge requires new thinking on politics as well as public ethics for our world. In Western countries, the specter of Islamophobia, alt-right populism, along with racialized violence has shaken public confidence in long-secure assumptions rooted in democracy, diversity, and citizenship. The tragic denouement of so many of the Arab uprisings together with the ascendance of apocalyptic extremists like Daesh and Boko Haram have caused an even greater sense of alarm in large parts of the Muslim-majority world. It is against this backdrop that M.A. Muqtedar Khan has written a book of breathtaking range and ethical beauty. The author explores the history and sociology of the Muslim world, both classic and contemporary. He does so, however, not merely to chronicle the phases of its development, but to explore just why the message of compassion, mercy, and ethical beauty so prominent in the Quran and Sunna of the Prophet came over time to be displaced by a narrow legalism that emphasized jurisprudence, punishment, and social control. In the modern era, Western Orientalists and Islamists alike have pushed the juridification and interpretive reification of Islamic ethical traditions even further. Each group has asserted that the essence of Islam lies in jurisprudence (fiqh), and both have tended to imagine this legal heritage on the model of Western positive law, according to which law is authorized, codified, and enforced by a leviathan state. “Reification of Shariah and equating of Islam and Shariah has a rather emaciating effect on Islam,” Khan rightly argues. It leads its proponents to overlook “the depth and heights of Islamic faith, mysticism, philosophy or even emotions such as divine love (Muhabba)” (13). As the sociologist of Islamic law, Sami Zubaida, has similarly observed, in all these developments one sees evidence, not of a traditionalist reassertion of Muslim values, but a “triumph of Western models” of religion and state (Zubaida 2003:135). To counteract these impoverishing trends, Khan presents a far-reaching analysis that “seeks to move away from the now failed vision of Islamic states without demanding radical secularization” (2). He does so by positioning himself squarely within the ethical and mystical legacy of the Qur’an and traditions of the Prophet. As the book’s title makes clear, the key to this effort of religious recovery is “the cosmology of Ihsan and the worldview of Al-Tasawwuf, the science of Islamic mysticism” (1-2). For Islamist activists whose models of Islam have more to do with contemporary identity politics than a deep reading of Islamic traditions, Khan’s foregrounding of Ihsan may seem unfamiliar or baffling. But one of the many achievements of this book is the skill with which it plumbs the depth of scripture, classical commentaries, and tasawwuf practices to recover and confirm the ethic that lies at their heart. “The Quran promises that God is with those who do beautiful things,” the author reminds us (Khan 2019:1). The concept of Ihsan appears 191 times in 175 verses in the Quran (110). The concept is given its richest elaboration, Khan explains, in the famous hadith of the Angel Gabriel. This tradition recounts that when Gabriel appeared before the Prophet he asked, “What is Ihsan?” Both Gabriel’s question and the Prophet’s response make clear that Ihsan is an ideal at the center of the Qur’an and Sunna of the Prophet, and that it enjoins “perfection, goodness, to better, to do beautiful things and to do righteous deeds” (3). It is this cosmological ethic that Khan argues must be restored and implemented “to develop a political philosophy … that emphasizes love over law” (2). In its expansive exploration of Islamic ethics and civilization, Khan’s Islam and Good Governance will remind some readers of the late Shahab Ahmed’s remarkable book, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Ahmed 2016). Both are works of impressive range and spiritual depth. But whereas Ahmed stood in the humanities wing of Islamic studies, Khan is an intellectual polymath who moves easily across the Islamic sciences, social theory, and comparative politics. He brings the full weight of his effort to conclusion with policy recommendations for how “to combine Sufism with political theory” (6), and to do so in a way that recommends specific “Islamic principles that encourage good governance, and politics in pursuit of goodness” (8).