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This chapter focuses on the modern organization as a unit of life experience that is taken for granted yet little understood, showing how organizational culture shapes and sustains integrity (or doesn't). Considering a number of root metaphors for the organization, including machine, organism, person, and family, the chapter looks at the various ways ethics are cast in each case. Reviewing the typical ways that organizations engage ethics, including through codes of ethics, ethics officers, and the movement toward corporate social responsibility, the chapter concludes that all of them are valuable yet limited in scope. By showing how ethics can be woven into the entire fabric of messages and interactions in an organization, the chapter advances a wider perspective on virtue and culture in organizational life.

This chapter describes ethical issues in social research including discussion of the NASW Code of Ethics, Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes, and requirements for the protection of human subjects. In addition, quantitative research methods; qualitative research methods; mixed-methods research designs; experimental, quasi-experimental, explanatory, exploratory, and descriptive research; program evaluation; and the relative merits of disparate models of research are also presented. The requirements of rigor in both quantitative and qualitative studies and evaluating the degree of fit between research strategies and problems under investigation are also discussed.

This chapter describes the transformation of the American Medical Association's (AMA) instrument of ethical self-regulation—the 1847 Code of Medical Ethics—from an icon of professional pride into a loathed instrument of inquisition. It traces the origins of a revolt by an alliance of specialists, sanitarians, and scientists, who, led by the Medical Society of the State of New York, opted out of the AMA rather than submit to its code of ethics. As the balance of power and prestige in medicine shifted from general practice to hospital, public health, and specialist medicine, these rebels took charge of the AMA and substituted purely advisory laissez-faire principles for the “tyranny” of the AMA's code of ethics. The principle of laissez-faire was eventually adopted as organized medicine's approach to non-intrapractitioner medical ethics and this lasted through most of the twentieth century.

This chapter discusses the challenges faced by American medical societies in the antebellum period, including their attempts to develop common standards of practice, differentiate between legitimate and quack physicians, and develop common fee scales. It examines the impact of these struggles on municipal, county, and state medical societies' codes of ethics, and the use of language and concepts borrowed from the writings of Thomas Percival in these codes. Part of the appeal of Percival's rules lay in their perceived utility in addressing a dark side of the Scottish heritage—flyting—a form of disputation in defense of one's status, reputation, and honor in which perceived affronts are disputed until one side or the other either secures an apology or demonstrates to an audience that the opponent is somehow contemptible or dishonorable. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American medicine and medical societies were plagued by gentlemanly flytes. The chapter also describes medical societies' efforts to address another feature of the darker side of the Scottish medical-moral heritage—body-snatching and grave robbing by medical students, with the complicity of the faculty.

This chapter recounts the story of the creation of a national medical society and a national code of medical ethics. It highlights the role played by four key actors: Nathan Smith Davis (1817–1904), John Bell (1796–1872), Gouverneur Emerson (1796–1874), and Isaac Hays (1796—1879). It describes the drama surrounding the Kappa Lambda Society of Hippocrates, a fraternity that became America's first national medical society and a direct precursor to the American Medical Association (AMA). Through Kappa Lambda, Bell, Hays, and Emerson began a decades-long process of adapting Percival's code of medical ethics to the needs of American practitioners. They refashioned Percival's code of medical ethics as an explicit social contract between physicians, their patients, their fellow practitioners, and society. The AMA adopted the resulting four-chapter, eleven-article, fifty-section social contract as its official Code of Ethics in 1847.

This chapter discusses how the values which individuals hold will help to frame choices and so influence the choices that are made. If ethical issues in finance have limited ‘moral intensity’ in comparison to other industries, banks will more often than in other industries fail to recognise an ethical issue and to engage in ethical behaviour. Therefore the primary task of ethics management in banking is to ensure that norms of behaviour make reference to values, and to develop tools to help management and employees to recognise ethical issues. The chapter suggests that the financial services industry would benefit from using deliberative polls, a newly developed decision-making tool. It gives an example of an ethics training programme and considers codes of ethics.

As professionals, engineers live by codes of ethics that ascribe to them a paramount obligation to protect the safety, health, and welfare of the public, an obligation that frequently implies whistleblowing. Yet, as employees of corporations, their obligation is to respect the authority of managers who sometimes give insufficient attention to safety and who also severely punish whistleblowers for their alleged disloyalty and damage to the corporation. The upshot is a clash of professional obligations to employers and to the public, as well as conflicts between codified professional duties, personal ideals, and personal well-being. The voluminous literature on whistleblowing has neglected the relevance of personal commitments to professional responsibilities. This chapter examines personal rights and responsibilities in deciding how to meet professional obligations; increased personal burdens when others involved in collective endeavors fail to meet their responsibilities; the role of virtues, especially personal integrity and self-respect, as they bear on “living with oneself”; and personal commitments to moral ideals beyond minimum requirements.

This chapter describes the ethical problems in the criminal law jurisdictions. The concern of this chapter is with one particular kind of criticism — that certain conduct in criminal justice is unethical. The focus is on the pre-trial stages of criminal justice, leaving aside the substantive criminal law and sentencing. Much discussion of ethics in criminal justice takes the dilemma of the individual lawyer as the central issue. Topics covered include ethics and crime, rules and ethics, developing ethical principles for criminal justice, identifying ‘unethical’ practices, understanding ‘unethical’ behaviour, justifying ‘unethical’ behaviour by challenging the ethics, unethical standpoints, and criminal justice reform through ethics. It concludes by reconsidering the implications of codes of ethics for the practice of criminal justice.

This chapter describes ayurvedic education, beginning with the criteria for a medical student's eligibility and his ethical duties as a student. It discusses the relationship between teacher and student, and explores the formal procedures of initiation into medical studies and graduation from them. An examination of the ayurvedic physician's code of ethics as part of the initiation process and its meaning for medical practice and the physician's status in society follows. The chapter also discusses the position of ayurvedic ethics within a wider South Asian context, drawing comparisons with rules and moral concepts from Buddhist and brahmanical (i.e., orthodox Hindu) literature.

This introductory chapter addresses five major reasons for evidence-based practice and three philosophies of science that might serve to under gird it. The five reasons are ethical, legal, clinical, educational, and economic reasons. The ethical reasons found that in every major Code of Ethics for school service providers there was a mandate for staying current with the research literature. The legal reasons include both case law and federal legislation. Case law looks at three US Supreme Court rulings that define the legal standard for scientific evidence. Both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act use the same definition of scientifically based research. Clinical reasons included standards of care, avoiding harm, and optimal practice. Educational outcomes that can be improved include school behavior, academic performance, and parental school engagement. Economic reasons include greater efficiency of time, money, and resources. The major philosophies of science include positivism, constructivism, and critical realism.

This chapter deals with the two important theoretical/philosophical problems facing the human rights movement: relativism and collective rights. If the relativist idea of cultural contingency in moral standards is professed, and conversely rejected in any form of ethical universality, it is likely to support the notion that discrete societies are themselves the best source of values, guidance, and growth for individuals. On the other hand, if one admits to a universal code of ethics, one that transcends all cultures, times, and places, he or she becomes interested in protecting individuals, making cultural affiliation a matter of choice. Collective/individual rights are a legal policy outcome of one's position on cultural relativism, an outcome that is even now being contested, with the political and economic stakes increasing, in efforts to set human rights standards for indigenous peoples. To properly handle these issues, the chapter is separated in legal and policy implications of collective rights from the more philosophical and, in practical terms, insoluble questions posed by relativism.

Knowing yourself and your responsibilities requires that you understand your ethical assumptions and frameworks. This chapter identifies four major ethical theories that inform professional codes of ethics: deontology, consequentialism, ethics of care, and virtue ethics. It also provides a typology for the mental health professional’s use of self that includes (a) negative underinvolvement, (b) positive underinvolvement, (c) positive overinvolvement, and (d) negative overinvolvement. It ties each of these positions to the use of a hierarchy of professional influence, ranging from persuasion, leverage, inducement, and threat to compulsion. It also addresses the professional responsibilities of school-based mental health providers in regards to federal legislation, self-care, and their respective codes of ethics. It ends with a set of ethical guidelines and exercises for reflection.

In the concluding reflections, the research findings of the preceding chapters are summarized. The position of ayurvedic ethics within a broader South Asian context are discussed, arguing that pan-ayurvedic medical ethics are closely linked to brahmanic prescriptions, but are also influenced by Buddhist thought.

Trustworthy information is a central requirement of a working healthcare system. This chapter describes how trust is important in medical communications, both in the published word and in medical information on the internet. It discusses the peer review system in the print journals and how the same is accomplished for the certain online sources through a code of ethics. It argues that the medical internet is fundamental to the evolving healthcare system of the future. It describes the central principles of such a system, called E-care. A list of action items for physicians to establish patient trust is included.

This chapter looks at when the American Medical Association (AMA) introduced content into the yet-to-be defined concepts of “professionalism” and “professional ethics” that it inherited when it adopted Percival's language for its code of ethics. It first examines the scientific, moral, and social basis of the AMA's campaign to criminalize prequickening abortion, and then explores how the AMA interpreted the term “professional”. The AMA interpreted this in terms of traditional ideals of gentlemanly honor, creating a conception of a professional who, like an honorable gentleman, was engaged in a noncommercial, secular enterprise dedicated to high ideals of science and health, and who was white and male. In the post-Civil War period, this concept of professionalism and of the AMA's code of ethics became a lightning rod for controversy and an instrument of exclusion, wielded not only against “irregulars” but also against African-American and female physicians and specialists.

In this chapter, I will explore core tensions for social workers underlying their roles as policy implementers in welfare agencies, and consider the ethical questions this tension raises in implementation of or resistance to policies with which they don't agree. I will look at two ethical hunches that seem to swirl-around in this area. First is the idea that professionals — like all other public servants — must follow policies and procedures because they should respect the democratic legitimacy of policy. The second intuition is that professionals should follow their own commitments, act autonomously and disregard policies with which they disagree. Both intuitions have something important to say, but neither alone can provide a satisfactory account. The answer seems to lie in the relationship between the two in an area where one is often faced with choosing the least worst option — an area in which ideals can feel challenging, energising and distressing.

Community asset assessments are a distinctive form of community-based participatory research, with all of its rewards and challenges. This form of research, as the reader will see, has its share of tension areas that are natural points for the ethical dilemmas that are quite familiar to most social work practitioners. These dilemmas are partly tied to the tensions inherent in practicing in communities, as well as the tensions related to being “outsider” researchers. There is little question that community asset assessments have tremendous potential for helping community social workers carry out initiatives that reinforce key antioppression aspects of our mission and Code of Ethics. These rewards, so to speak, are limitless and so, unfortunately, are the challenges. This chapter highlights some of the most obvious and significant rewards and challenges. Local circumstances wield considerable influence on the rewards and challenges of community asset assessments. The reader, as a result, may well have additional examples of both that have been dictated by what is happening in their respective communities.

In this chapter, I argue that there are clear and uncontroversial cases in which an artificial agent may qualify as a moral agent. This does not relieve the creator of that agent of responsibility. When moral artificial agents are in question, what counts is their moral accountability. This is not philosophical hair-splitting. Parents, for example, may still be responsible for the way in which their adult children behave, but they are certainly not accountable. They might be bitterly blamed, but they will not go to prison if their son, now in his thirties, turns out to be a serial killer. Likewise, engineers will be responsible for what and how they design artificial agents, even if they may not be accountable. The sooner we take this on board the better.

In 1999, deCODE Genetics printed a “code of ethics” written by “a group of deCODE employees,” with the Ethics Institute of the University of Iceland listed as “Advisors.” No people were listed, just these collectivities. The twenty-page booklet with a heavy blue-paper cover was produced and mailed to the entire population of Iceland. As is often the case with ethics, and particularly codes of ethical principles, there is not a single concrete noun in deCODE's principles that signifies any specific historical, cultural, or institutional body or event; there is only a homogeneous population of bland abstractions. Biochemistry has more to do with ethics, in Halldór Laxness's view, than any theological or even humanist exegesis. “There is only one world in existence,” was the chord struck by the organist, “and in it there prevail either expedient or inexpedient conditions for those who are alive.” This elevation of “expediency” to a kind of ethical principle intrigued the author, and it kept reoccurring in Laxness's novel The Atom Station, often in tandem with biochemical references.

This chapter examines why research can give rise to ethical problems in any branch of medicine. It describes codes of ethics, randomized double-blind controlled trials, local research-ethics committees, consent, and special ethical problems of research in palliative care. Any kind of research involving human subjects is likely to raise ethical problems, but research in the palliative field is especially sensitive. Randomized clinical trials create the most ethical problems, but they are not the only research method. The consent of the participants is the key issue and must be handled with extreme care in palliative medicine. It may be possible to design randomized clinical trials that meet the ethical problems in palliative care, but practical difficulties of recruitment, compliance, and completion are likely to remain. Research on the non-autonomous patient is fraught with ethical difficulties, but it may be ethically permissible provided stringent safeguards are met.