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Ethics is an academic discipline that is concerned with answering age-old questions about duty, honor, integrity, virtue, justice, and the good life, Philosophers, theologians, and other scholars have developed many different theories and principles of ethics. This chapter describes some influential ethical theories and principles, articulates twelve principles of ethical conduct in science, and proposes a method for ethical decision making.

This chapter presents the ethical decision explanation of organizational wrongdoing. This explanation represents a bridge between the dominant and alternative accounts of wrongdoing. It is rooted in a theoretical perspective that views organizations as collections of people engaged in complementary tasks and views organizational participants as decision-makers. The first part of the chapter characterizes early theory and research about ethical decision-making. This work largely embraced the four assumptions that characterize the dominant approach, that is, it tended to assume that people deliberate mindfully and rationally, in social isolation, make discrete decisions, and formulate positive inclinations all before embarking on wrongdoing. The second part discusses and extends recent theory and research. This work jettisons several of the assumptions that underpin the dominant approach; most importantly, the assumption that ethical decision-making is a fully rational endeavor. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the ethical decision explanation.

This chapter discusses the ethical issues connected to the care of the dying: issues of hydration and nutrition, issues of ventilation, and issues relating to capacity and decision making. It looks at an ethical framework that tackles the best approach to ethical decision making, which includes the four moral principles that govern the field of health care ethics, and discusses the influence and moral justification of the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient (LCP) in ethical decision making. The chapter also discusses withholding and withdrawing interventions and treatments at the end of life and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

This chapter discusses the different ethical issues that can be encountered when caring for the dying. It begins with the influence of the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient (LCP) in ethical decision making, before examining an ethical framework and the best approach to ethical decision making. Issues with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, hydration, and euthanasia are also discussed. The chapter ends with a discussion on advanced directives, which should be recognized as a valid means by which patients can influence the treatments they receive when they are no longer competent to make decisions.

Included in the concept of a psychologically literate citizen is an expectation that psychology baccalaureates will learn to behave ethically and humanely at work and in other everyday contexts. Moreover, guidelines for psychology education in Australia and the United States require some instruction in ethics at the undergraduate level. This chapter argues, however, based on analyses of undergraduate psychology syllabi, that there is insufficient attention on ethics instruction to ensure psychology baccalaureates are adequately prepared to manage the ethical challenges of an increasingly complex, global society. Graduates require not only a vocabulary for ethical decision making but also some basic philosophical understanding of that vocabulary if they are to negotiate successfully the ethical challenges inherent in the workplace, in relationships, and in society at large. Greater emphasis needs to be placed in undergraduate psychology curricula on fostering moral transcendentalism through ethics instruction that imparts some knowledge of moral philosophy, teaches the vocabulary of ethics, familiarises students with models of ethical decision making, encourages dialogue through which teachers and students encounter, interpret and share moral wisdom, and allows students to practise being ethical. The chapter briefly examines various, suitable techniques for exposing these storied accounts of moral wisdom, including role-play, case conferencing, moot ethics committees, analysis of film and literature, problem based learning, and other integrative techniques.

From virtue theory to moral psychology to behavioral economics, a range of disciplines have explained behavior in moral situations by states of the individual mind, such as character traits, moral stages, or social preferences. These internal explanations predict that moral behavior is stable across a range of situations and thus struggle with the common observation of inconsistencies in moral judgment and behavior. In contrast, the chapter first outlines how the same heuristic predicts systematically different outcomes, ethical or unethical, depending on differences in the environment. Behavior that appears inconsistent from an internal point of view is actually consistent when the interaction between heuristics and social environments is taken in consideration. Second, this chapter argues that the heuristics determining much of judgment and behavior in moral situations are not specifically moral rules, but morally neutral heuristics that serve particular social goals. Specifying these processes can facilitate understanding when and why humans succeed or fail in pursuing ethical goals. The approach thus emphasizes the relevance of designing better environments, not just better people, in order to effectively promote the ethical goals valued by a society.

This concluding chapter offers a summary of interrelated themes and ethical challenges that have emerged across the previous chapters. A review of the content identifies five broad, emergent themes, the first of which explores ethical decision making utilising principles, models, professional codes, and dialogue ethics in collaborative working across organisational boundaries and systems. A second theme, user–professional relationships and roles in the context of decision making, is focused on therapeutic relationships and virtuous practice; best interests; refusing treatment, and end-of-life decisions; equity; resources; and provider, professional, and user relationships. A third theme, vulnerable people, summarises the challenges that can arise in charging vulnerable older adults for their care, vulnerability to loss of personhood, protecting the claims and entitlements of future people, child protection, and protecting rights and welfare in research participation. The theme of service users summarises the case for ethical involvement of users in health and social care, and explores the benefits of services working together in relation to user involvement and outcomes. A final theme of governance and accountability links new forms of collaborative governance and their ethical justification, summarising current conflicts and challenges for governance frameworks in general, and, more specifically, in relation to research.

This chapter examines ethical dilemmas in caring for people with complex disabilities. Complex disabilities can result in a diverse range and combination of physical, cognitive, and behavioural disorders that can impact variably on the individual, family, and society. Ethical decision making is informed by the principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Dilemmas can arise in relation to decision making for those who lack mental capacity, withholding or withdrawing treatment, confidentiality, or involvement in teaching and publication. Where mental capacity is lacking, decisions must be in the best interests of the people and the least restrictive option chosen that balances duty of care with personal freedom.

As AI systems make decisions that affect our lives, we must ensure that these systems operate according to the same constraints, guidelines, and ethical principles that a human would follow. Humans make many complex decisions that rely on their subjective preferences, but their decisions are usually also constrained by these ethical priorities. Hence it is essential to equip AI systems with the tools to evaluate whether or not preferences are compatible with these other priorities. In computer science, the Conditional Preference networks (CP-nets), which graphically represent conditional and qualitative preference relations, can be used to model, combine, and compare subjective preferences and ethical priorities. This chapter proposes that one can use CP-nets to measure the distance between an agent’s subjective preference and the ethical principles of the agent’s community in order to ensure that the decisions of an AI system are aligned with a given set of ethical priorities.

This chapter describes the two main perspectives on organizational wrongdoing, the abnormal and normal perspectives, in detail. It also describes the two main approaches to explaining wrongdoing, the dominant and alternative approaches, in depth. The chapter also establishes the link between the abnormal and normal perspectives on organizational wrongdoing, the dominant and alternative approaches to explaining the causes of wrongdoing, and the eight specific explanations of wrongdoing that form the core of the book. The eight specific explanations focus on rational choice, culture, ethical decision-making, administrative systems, situational social influence, power structures, accidental behavior, and the social control of wrongdoing. The chapter illustrates the two approaches to explaining organizational wrongdoing with a detailed description of a professional bicycle racer's experience with the use of banned performance-enhancing substances. It concludes with a few remarks about the book's overarching message.

The chapter Sleep and Unethical Behavior integrates theoretical models of ethical decision-making with the self-regulatory framework to explain how sleep can impact ethical behavior in organizations. The chapter reviews literature using a dual-process model as a guiding framework wherein sleep problems affect unethical behavior through two self-regulation mechanisms. Misregulation refers to cognitive or affective biases in moral awareness and moral judgments that may arise due to sleep problems. Underregulation refers to self-control depletion occurring due to poor sleep. Both of these processes are discussed in relation to how they influence the motivation to engage in ethical behavior at work. Other potential factors that may change the effects of misregulation and underregulation on unethical behavior are discussed (e.g., moral intensity and identity, social influences, and time of day), including suggestions for future research.

This chapter focuses primarily on the protection of human participants in D&I studies. It begins by reviewing the Belmont principles that undergird US research regulations and considering the ethical case for D&I research. It then proceeds to examine some ethical issues that might arise during the course of a public health, D&I research agenda in middle schools. It covers the ethical case for D&I research and common ethical challenges. The chapter also discusses strategies for ethical decision-making. While these strategies may be beneficial to all researchers, the authors believe they are of particular value to dissemination and implementation researchers because the nature of their work—context specific, complex, and unfamiliar to many peers, collaborators, and reviewers—means they will deal with uncertainty and conflict on a regular basis, and solutions to the problems they face will rarely be found through simple reference principles, rules, or regulations.

In this chapter Tronto's moral principles of care are applied: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust, to deliberative processes through which those subject to public policies might play a part in shaping them. The author argues the need to go ‘beyond argument’ and to encompass the embodied and emotional dimensions of experiences in the policy process. She suggests what ‘care full deliberation’ might look like and thus extend an understanding of care ethics to the public interactions between those who make policy and those whose everyday lives are impacted by them. She argues that this also emphasises the epistemological dimension of care.

This chapter draws conclusions for the actions as citizens, workers, parents, employers, and shareholders. Bringing—and keeping—body and soul together is critically important for two hugely important areas of life. An aversion to thinking about money when the topic of discussion is care has resulted to a crisis of resources in the caring sectors of the economy. On the other hand, an aversion to thinking about ethics when the topic is business has led to a crisis of responsibility in commercial life. It is believed that it will be people on the ground, working in business management or doing the work of care, who will be most helpful in breaking down the petrified eighteenth-century image of the economic machine. Additionally, it is recognized that the health of living, vital economies depends on the ethical decision making and the willingness to support relationships of care and respect.