Ronald M. Green

Can we develop ethically universal embryonic stem-cell lines?

Human embryonic stem-cell (hESC) research faces opposition from those who object to the destruction of human embryos. Over the past few years, a series of new approaches have been proposed for deriving hESC lines without injuring a living embryo. Each of these presents scientific challenges and raises ethical and political questions. Do any of these methods have the potential to provide a source of hESCs that will be acceptable to those who oppose the current approaches?

When is “Everyone's Doing It” A Moral Justification?

The claim that “Everyones doing it” is frequently offered as a reason for engaging in behavior that is widespread but less-than-ideal. This is particularly true in business, where competitors’ conduct often forces hard choices on managers. When is the claim “Everyones doing it” a morally valid reason for following others’ lead? This discussion proposes and develops five prima facie conditions to identify when the existence of prevalent but otherwise undesirable behavior provides a moral justification for our engaging in such behavior ourselves. The balance of the discussion focuses on testing these conditions by applying them to a series of representative cases in business ethics.

Whose Gene Is It? A Case Discussion About Familial Conflict over Genetic Testing for Breast Cancer

A multidisciplinary group of genetic and other professionals discuss a complex case of familial conflict over access to genetic information. One twin wishes to know the results of her deceased mothers tests for BRCA1 mutations; a second twin objects to researchers making this information available. As the case discussion unfolds, the apparent “facts” of this case are called into question and the lines of ethical certainty become less clear.

Guiding Principles of Jewish Business Ethics

This discussion develops six of the most important guiding principles of classical Jewish business ethics and illustrates their application to a complex recent case of product liability. These principles are: (1) the legitimacy of business activity and profit; (2) the divine origin and ordination of wealth (and hence the limits and obligations of human ownership); (3) the preeminent position in decision making given to the protection and preservation (sanctity) of human life; (4) the protection of consumers from commercial harm; (5) the avoidance of fraud and misrepresentation in sales transactions; and (6) the moral requirement to go beyond the letter of the law. Although these Talmudic principles are clearly obligatory only for “Torah-obedient” Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, many Jews share a sensibility informed by them. Non-Jews, too, may be instructed by Jewish teachings about business ethics.

Centesimus Annus: A critical Jewish perspective

The author reviews a series of deep affinities between the Catholic social teaching embodied in Pope John Paul IIs recent encyclical,Centesimus Annus, and traditional Jewish teachings about economic justice. At the same time, the author maintains that from a Jewish perspective there is a “disquieting” feature to this recent papal letter. It presents twentieth century history in ways that mute or conceal the role some earlier papal teaching played in the rise of corporatist states, with their authoritarian regimes and xenophobic nationalism.Centesimus annus thus obscures the complex contribution Catholic social teaching made to the events leading up to the Holocaust of European Jewry.

Overseeing research on therapeutic cloning: a private ethics board responds to its critics.

Advanced Cell Technologys Ethics Advisory Board has been called window dressing for a corporate marketing plan. But the scientists and managers have paid attention, and the lawyers have gone along.

Access to Healthcare: Going Beyond Fair Equality of Opportunity

Daniels begins his essay with the reminder that a theory of justice for health and healthcare should help us answer three questions. Is healthcare morally important in ways that justify a more equal distribution of health than many other social goods? When are health inequalities unjust? And how can we meet competing healthcare needs fairly under reasonable resource constraints? While I basically agree with Daniels’s answers to these questions, I differ in important ways with the reasoning that leads him to his answers to the arst and third questions and with some of his speciac conclusions. With respect to the arst question, I agree with Daniels that access to healthcare is a key component of a theory of justice and a just social system. However, I disagree with his effort to ground this position in the “fair equality of opportunity” requirement of Rawls’s second principle of justice. Instead, as I argued in one of the arst articles applying Rawls to this issue (1976), healthcare should be classed among the basic primary goods governed by Rawls’s arst principle of justice. These goods include rights and liberties, powers and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect. The intuitive idea is that access to healthcare, like all basic primary goods, is important because it is instrumental to the pursuit of whatever other values we might have. Because of this, the idea is likely to and a very high place in the reasoning of people who are impartially designing the basic structure of their society. Over the years Daniels has variously explained his aversion to this conceptual strategy and his preference for connecting healthcare to fair equality of opportunity. In one writing he points to the ranking difaculty posed by the inclusion of healthcare in the list of primary goods: “[I]f we simply build another entry into the index, we raise special issues about how to arrive at an approximate weighting of the index items” (1996, 192). In his current essay he reiterates his aversion to more subjective, preference-based standards and adds, “we should measure our levels of well being by publicly accessible measures.” He believes that objectivity and measurability will be achieved by linking healthcare needs to their “protection of normal functioning within the scope of the primary good of opportunity” (2001). I do not dispute that this linkage may help us achieve greater objectivity and measurability of healthcare claims. Surely, it is easier to determine whether a form of healthcare will contribute to people’s ability to work than to determine whether it is instrumental to whatever other life values they may have. But objectivity and measurability are only one virtue of a decisional approach. Adequacy is another, and it is usually far more important. The problem with using Rawls’s “fair equality of opportunity” principle to ground a right to healthcare is that, as decribed by Rawls, this principle applies only to the kinds of things that most people think of in this context: jobs, public ofaces, and publicly available social opportunities (Rawls 1971, sec. 14). But there are many important kinds of healthcare that have no relation to performance in the public sphere. Take the case of my own mother. She is nearly 90 years of age and lives a tranquil, homebound life. A year ago her life was saved by a laparoscopic gall bladder operation. That our Medicare system paid for this seems to me eminently just. Had she been denied such care, it would have been a moral wrong. Yet, it is very hard to link this service to anything like Rawls’s concept of fair equality of opportunity. Daniels is aware of this problem. To address it, he has expanded the notion of fair equality of opportunity to include “those things we need in order to achieve or maintain species-typical normal functioning” (1996, 184). The aim, as he says in his current essay, is to sustain people “as fully participating citizens—normal collaborators and competitors—in all spheres of social life” (2001). Since this consideration is no longer strictly tied to access to jobs, ofaces, and opportunities, it may explain the obvious injustice of denying useful healthcare services to the elderly or other “nonproductive” or socially isolated people. But does it? What is “normal species functioning” for a woman my mother’s age? The great majority of her peers are no longer even alive. In terms of urgent healthcare decision making today, does this concept really justify people’s right to many beneacial forms of healthcare now available for the elderly—from post-menopausal hormone therapy to hip joint replacements? Daniels can perhaps address these concerns if he imports into the idea of normal species functioning the additional value judgment that some kinds of care should be made available because impartial persons would agree that, at reasonable social cost, they help us pursue our life plans, whatever they may be. But then we are back on the terrain of Rawls’s basic social primary goods, which is

Does your religion make a difference in your business ethics? The case of consolidated foods

While the literature in business ethics abounds with philosophical analyses, perspectives from religious thinkers are curiously underrepresented. What religious analysis has occured has often been moralistic in tone, more fit to the pulpit than the classroom or the boardroom. In the three essays that follow, presented originally at a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 1989, ethicists from the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish traditions analyze a case study familiar to many who teach and research in business ethics — the Consolidated Foods Case. Each author shows how a particular religious tradition might react to the case. The authors show how insights from their traditions would affect corporations moral deliberations about policy. Specific policy recommendations are offered to CEO John Bryan.

Political interventions in U.S. human embryo research: an ethical assessment.

For more than 30 years, beginning with the Reagan administrations refusal to support and provide oversight for embryo research, and continuing to the present in congressionally imposed limits on funding for such research, progress in infertility medicine and the development of stem cell therapies has been seriously delayed by a series of political interventions. In almost all cases, these interventions result from a view of the moral status of human embryo premised largely on religious assumptions. Although some believe that these interventions are valid expressions of religious values in the public sector, it is argued here that they, in fact, contradict Rawlss conception of public reasoning. Both the prohibition of research involving the human embryo as well as bans on federal funding for embryo-related research place the particular religious views of some citizens above the pressing health needs of almost all, and thus violate the ideal of civility implicit in the Rawlsian standard.

Spy versus Spy

Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing spy versus spy as the reading material.