Agent-based Ethics Research Articles

Ethical Implication of Genetic Gender Manipulation for Economic Recession

A recession is a significant decline in economic activities. The effects of economic recession include general economic decline, drop in the stock market and increase in unemployment. While some have argued that bilateral relationship among nations is an ethical response to problem of economic recession but it does not solve the problem. The paper suggests genetic gender determination. Genetic gender determination is an agent-based ethics. It involves the scientific manipulation of the fetus of a woman to determine the gender of her offspring. Ethical issues linked to genetic gender determination, unbalance sex ratio, manipulation of genome, and possible spread of infectious or communicable diseases. The paper concludes that the genetic gender determination would help to cushion the effects of economic recession.

Professional Ethics and Democratic Citizenship: a Pragmatic Approach

Este trabajo interpreta el auge de los códigos éticos y de la ética profesional desde el punto de vista de su contribución a la formación de una ciudadanía democrática. Se analizan diversos aspectos de la ética profesional desde la perspectiva de una ética del agente para la que bienes, normas y virtudes resultan factores complementarios para el cultivo de la inteligencia y el juicio individual. A través de una concepción de la democracia que la vincula con los hábitos y modos de vida, la ética profesional adquiere una renovada significación como elemento central para la autorrealización personal y la emancipación social. En definitiva, bajo el rótulo del profesionalismo democrático, y de la mano de la filosofía moral y política de Dewey, se muestra que la ética profesional es más que un campo de aplicación, un elemento constituyente de una ética cívica en el marco de una sociedad democrática.

An Agent-Centered Account of Rightness: The Importance of a Good Attitude

This paper provides a sketch of an agent-centered way of understanding and answering the question, “What’s wrong with that?” On this view, what lies at the bottom of judgments of wrongness is a bad attitude; when someone does something wrong, she does something that expresses a bad, or inappropriate, attitude (where inappropriateness is understood, tentatively, as a failure to recognize the separateness of others). In order to motivate this account, a general Kantian agent-centered ethics is discussed, as well as Michael Slote’s agent-based ethics, in light of analysis of the grounding role of attitudes in the evaluation of two core cases. In light of these discussions, it is argued that there are advantages to preserving the grounding of the appropriateness of attitudes in facts about their objects (as opposed to Slote’s sentimentalism), while cutting such an agent-centered ethics away from a Kantian grounding.