Rights and freedoms

Ethics is about values, especially shared values, in particular those we adopt as our basic societal values – they are sometimes called norms.  The nature of a value is not easy to define.   The Oxford English Dictionary defines it within the context of ethics as: “That which is worthy of esteem for its own sake; that which has intrinsic worth”.  Another way to describe values might be as “ethical organising principles” – they are principles that we can use to guide us in deciding what is ethi...

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To successfully reduce the threat of bioterrorism and biowarfare, and to protect public health, especially on a global level, we all will need to engage across boundaries that have separated us in the past. Only by doing so can we seek to ensure that the promise of our unparalleled discoveries of new knowledge in the life sciences is fulfilled and it's potential for unprecedented harm averted. Certainly, no one measure will be sufficient to ensure that science is not misused, or public...

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That we would disagree on at least some of the answers to the ethics issues posed by the new science is to be expected. But rather than bemoan our disagreements, we should welcome them, because they signal that we are engaging in “ethics talk”. That talk requires a broadly based, public conversation on the ethics that should govern scientific and technological innovation and the unprecedented powers over life it has given us.  Disagreement is also important because it's in exploring our disa...

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The code we propose is built on ethically relevant facts and the substantive and procedural principles of ethics that must govern its interpretation and application. They include nonmaleficence; beneficence; respect for life, especially human life; maintaining trust; embedding ethics in science; establishing a high ethical tone in institutions; acknowledging individual and collective responsibilities; and recognizing and fulfilling needs for ethics review and monitoring, notification of...

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Canada is typical in this regard. Front-page stories involving the lack of access to health care are reported in the Canadian press every day. In one story, a forty-five-year-old man with end-stage cystic fibrosis was called into hospital for a lung transplant, but no intensive care unit (ICU) bed could be found for him. The surgeon could not proceed because the patient could not be cared for post-operatively. The lungs available for transplantation to this desperately ill man were wasted....

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