Ethical Defensibility Research Articles

"Keep it a secret": leaked documents suggest Philip Morris International, and its Japanese affiliate, continue to exploit science for profit.

The tobacco industry has a long history of manipulating science to conceal the harms of its products. As part of its proclaimed transformation, the world's largest tobacco company, Philip Morris International (PMI), states it conducts "transparent science". This paper uses recently leaked documents from PMI and its Japanese affiliate, Philip Morris Japan (PMJ), to examine its contemporary scientific practices. 23 documents dating 2012 through 2020 available from Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Library were examined using Forster's hermeneutic approach to analysing corporate documentation. Thematic analysis using the Science for Profit Model was conducted to assess whether PMI/PMJ employed known corporate strategies to influence science in their interests. PMJ contracted a third-party external research organisation, CMIC, to covertly fund a study on smoking cessation conducted by Kyoto University academics. No public record of PMJ's funding or involvement in this study was found. PMJ paid life sciences consultancy, FTI-Innovations, ¥3,000,000 (approx. £20,000) a month between 2014 and 2019 to undertake extensive science-adjacent work, including building relationships with key scientific opinion leaders and using academic events to promote PMI's science, products and messaging. FTI-Innovation's work was hidden internally and externally. These activities resemble known strategies to influence the conduct, publication and reach of science, and conceal scientific activities. The documents reveal PMI/PMJ's recent activities mirror past practices to manipulate science, undermining PMI's proclaimed transformation. Tobacco industry scientific practices remain a threat to public health, highlighting the urgent need for reform to protect science from the tobacco industry's vested interests.Implications: Japan is a key market for PMI, being a launch market for IQOS and having the highest heated tobacco product use globally. Our findings, in conjunction with other recent evidence, challenge PMI's assertion that it is a source of credible science and cast doubt on the quality and ethical defensibility of its research, especially its studies conducted in Japan. This, in turn, brings into question the true public health impacts of its products. There is urgent need to reform the way tobacco-related science is funded and conducted. Implementation of models through which research can be funded using the industry's profits while minimising its influence should be explored.

The Ethical Defensibility of Harm Reduction and Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are mental illnesses that can have a significant and persistent physical impact, especially for those who are not treated early in their disease trajectory. Although many persons with eating disorders may make a full recovery, some may not; this is especially the case when it comes to persons with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa (SEAN), namely, those who have had anorexia for between 6 and 12 years or more. Given that persons with SEAN are less likely to make a full recovery, a different treatment philosophy might be ethically warranted. One potential yet scarcely considered way to treat persons with SEAN is that of a harm reduction approach. A harm reduction philosophy is deemed widely defensible in certain contexts (e.g. in the substance use and addictions domain), and in this paper we argue that it may be similarly ethically defensible for treating persons with SEAN in some circumstances.

Forever young? The ethics of ongoing puberty suppression for non-binary adults

In this article, we analyse the novel case of Phoenix, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression (OPS) to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way...

Making Veterinary Ethics More Ethical

Abstract Andrew and Clair Linzey’s Animal Ethics for Veterinarians collects numerous recent articles in the Journal of Animal Ethics. It offers readers a diverse set of chapters covering key issues relating to veterinary ethics: animal agriculture, animal research, veterinary oaths, complementary and alternative medicine, animal cruelty, and more. This review article discusses the book’s themes within the larger context of veterinary medicine and veterinary ethics. Compared to existing works in veterinary ethics, the book is less focused on clinical and professional issues and more focused on the ways in which veterinary medicine intersects with fundamental topics in animal ethics. Its contributors challenge veterinarians to rethink traditional stances on the moral status of nonhuman animals and the ethical defensibility of numerous practices with which veterinarians are commonly involved. As the profession has historically been conservative on animal welfare issues, the book is a welcome addition to the literature.

Questioning the Ethics of Promoting Weight Loss in Clinical Practice

This case study considers the ethical defensibility of recommending weight loss as a treatment for patients with higher body mass indexes. Recommending weight loss may be motivated by clinicians’ biases toward people living in larger bodies, misperceptions about weight and its relevancy to overall health, and a failure to consider other ethical factors such as those related to equity and the social determinants of health.

Grounds for Ambiguity: Justifiable Bases for Engaging in Questionable Research Practices.

The current study sought to determine research scientists' sensitivity to various justifications for engaging in behaviors typically considered to be questionable research practices (QRPs) by asking them to evaluate the appropriateness and ethical defensibility of each. Utilizing a within-subjects design, 107 National Institutes of Health principal investigators responded to an invitation to complete an online survey in which they read a series of research behaviors determined, in prior research, to either be ambiguous or unambiguous in their ethical defensibility. Additionally, each behavior was paired with either an ostensibly sound or unsound reason for the behavior. Consistent with hypotheses, the results indicated that scientists perceived QRPs as more appropriate and defensible when paired with a justifiable motive relative to when paired with a clearly unethical motive, particularly for QRPs that are more ambiguous in their ethicality. In fact, ambiguous QRPs were perceived as categorically defensible when given a justifiable motive. This suggests scientists are sensitive to contextual factors related to QRPs' appropriateness, which could inform how institutions develop appropriate training modules for research integrity.

In Defense of the Questionable: Defining the Basis of Research Scientists' Engagement in Questionable Research Practices.

National Institutes of Health principal investigators reported their perceptions of the ethical defensibility, prevalence in their field, and their personal willingness to engage in questionable research practices (QRPs). Using ethical defensibility ratings, an exploratory factor analysis yielded a two-factor solution: behaviors considered unambiguously ethically indefensible and behaviors whose ethical defensibility was more ambiguous. In addition, increasing perceptions that QRPs affect science predicted reduced acceptability of QRPs, whereas increasing beliefs that QRPs are normative or necessary for career success predicted increased acceptability of QRPs. Perceptions that QRPs are risky were unrelated to QRP acceptability but predicted reduced extramural funding (i.e., researchers' lifetime extramural grants and total funding secured). These results identify risk (i.e., beliefs that QRPs are normative to stay competitive in one's field) and protective factors (i.e., beliefs that QRPs have a significant negative impact on society) related to QRP endorsement that could inform educational interventions for training research scientists.

An argument for ethical physical geography research on Indigenous landscapes in Canada

AbstractIn Canadian physical geography, the ethical implications of research occurring in Indigenous spaces and places have historically been overlooked. Physical geographers, particularly those working in northern Canada, are beginning to recognize that our research takes place in a sensitive social space and the knowledge we pursue has ethical and moral implications. The Canadian Geographer recently published a special issue (56:2) that documents the many challenges and opportunities of community‐based participatory research involving Indigenous peoples in Canada. Throughout that issue, the 2010 Tri‐Council Policy Statement, Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2), was referenced as important in directing a shift towards ethical interactions with Indigenous peoples in research. Drawing on material from the special issue and the TCPS2, this article gives an overview of the authors' experiences in attempting to execute an ethically sound physical geography study in traditional Dene territory in northern Saskatchewan. The viewpoint concludes with thoughts on what bridges and barriers exist when attempting physical geography research that is sensitive to the ethical responsibilities of working in Indigenous spaces. From our perspective, physical geographers can strengthen the ethical defensibility and overall quality of their research by enhancing involvement with indigenous communities that are potentially impacted by their research findings.

Contours of Pacificism: Ramsden Balmforth’s Advocacy of Peace in the Union of South Africa and Beyond

Among the many dimensions of Christian pacifism in South Africa which remain underexplored is the ministry of the Unitarian minister Ramsden Balmforth (1861-1941). For approximately four decades beginning shortly after his arrival in Cape Town in 1897, this Christian socialist devoted part of his time to efforts to promote peace both in southern Africa and on a broader, almost global, scale. It is argued that Balmforth was not at any time an absolute pacifist, and that the distinction between “pacifism” and “pacificism” which was advanced by inter alia the British historians A.J.P. Taylor and Martin Ceadel is particularly useful for interpreting Balmforth and placing him on the spectrum of positions with regard to the ethical defensibility of taking up arms.

The Ethics of Health Barriers to Immigration: Morality Among Neighbours

Many countries encourage immigration, yet almost without exception they impose medical conditions on the admissibility of prospective immigrants. This paper examines the ethical defensibility of this practice. It argues that the neighbourhood principle, which states that we owe a greater duty to neighbours than to strangers, when properly understood, extends to all human beings, that economic and safety considerations play only a limited role in ethically underwriting an exclusionary policy, and that medical immigration criteria should be harmonized with treatment eligibility criteria for citizens of the relevant countries themselves.

Animal suffering and distress – what are the limits of ethical defensibility?

Animal suffering and distress – what are the limits of ethical defensibility?

Fear and Trembling (review)

Reviewed by: Fear and Trembling Christopher Nelson Fear and Trembling. By Søren Kierkegaard. Edited by C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Translated by Sylvia Walsh. [Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xxxviii, 115. $55.00 clothbound; $16.99 paperback.) Kierkegaard's Frygt og Bæven, the author's meditation on the Genesis 22 narrative, has now been translated into English six times. Several years after the work's original publication, Kierkegaard proposed that, being widely read and translated into foreign languages, the text would become something of a modern classic. Hindsight fully establishes the merit of this forecast. In addition to being far and away the most translated of Kierkegaard's texts, Fear and Trembling continues to be the text through which a disproportionate number of readers are introduced to Kierkegaard, as well the text about which a disproportionate amount of scholarly literature has been and continues to be written. Fear and Trembling is also the first of Kierkegaard's works to merit inclusion in the series of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Structurally, this latest edition of Fear and Trembling compares favorably with previous editions. The editor's introduction—although it, like those of [End Page 979] previous editions, bears the unmistakable mark of its author in a number of places—is really the first to do justice to the manifold of openings that precede the advent of the three Problemata (problems regarding the teleological suspension of the ethical, the absolute duty to God, and the ethical defensibility of Abraham's silence, respectively). Calling attention to the peculiar problems attested already in the subtitle of the work, the name of the pseudonymous author, the motto, the preface, the attunement, the tribute to Abraham, and the preliminary expectoration, Evans succeeds in bringing the reader much closer to the point at which a reading of Fear and Trembling may verily be said to begin. Additionally—and while the supplied chronology and suggestions for further reading are merely adequate—the running footnotes and appended index are quite simply superb, and manage to facilitate the entire range of readings to which earlier editions had been variously catered. As to the translation itself, the translator would presumably call the reader's attention to the work's subtitle, according to which the text is a "dialectical lyric." Such a qualification borders on the oxymoronic and subsequently appeals to two divergent sensibilities on the part of any would-be translator: the technical and the poetic. Add to this the advent of the ostensive problem of (Abraham's) "translatability" in the text itself and one has all the makings of a translator's nightmare. Accordingly, one may as well amend Kierkegaard's forecast to say not only that Fear and Trembling will be translated into, e.g., English (by Payne, 1939), but that it will be translated again (by Lowrie, 1941), and again (by Lowrie, 1954), and again (by Hong and Hong, 1983), and again (by Hannay, 1985), and then, now, again. Admittedly borne upon the successes and failures of these precedent endeavors, as well as the wealth of subsequent commentary and the newly designed Danish edition, the translation supplied by Walsh is arguably the best yet—so long as this qualification is not taken to imply the ideal of the eventual "impeccable" translation daringly anticipated by Lowrie on the occasion of his significantly revised second translation. Indeed, although progressing at a markedly and appropriately slower pace than the commentary thereupon, it would seem that the translation of Frygt og Bæven is a comparably interminable endeavor. Suffice it to say, however, that the reader who thinks to wait for the next "better" edition and translation of this remarkable text will almost certainly be waiting for quite some time. Christopher Nelson South Texas College Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Uncertainty and the Ethics of Clinical Trials

A probabilistic explication is offered of equipoise and uncertainty in clinical trials. In order to be useful in the justification of clinical trials, equipoise has to be interpreted in terms of overlapping probability distributions of possible treatment outcomes, rather than point estimates representing expectation values. Uncertainty about treatment outcomes is shown to be a necessary but insufficient condition for the ethical defensibility of clinical trials. Additional requirements are proposed for the nature of that uncertainty. The indecisiveness of our criteria for cautious decision-making under uncertainty creates the leeway that makes clinical trials defensible.

Tamir, Rawls and the Temple Mount

abstract What gives ethical and political validity to a state? This is to ask what a state is for and to provide a means to determine whether or not a constitution is just. In this paper I compare the account given by Tamir in Liberal Nationalism with that of Rawls, in order to clarify the decisive differences. Although both recognize the importance of particular associations and the moral imperative to be fair, Tamir places priority on the first and Rawls on the second. I explore their practical implications in regard to the ethical defensibility of Israel's self-identification as a Jewish state and to conflicting nationalistic territorial claims for the Temple Mount (Haram esh-Sharif) in Jerusalem. I suggest that if Tamir is correct in her analysis of nationalism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a problem that is without the sort of solution that is sought by those who are both interested parties and rational agents of good will.

Information Integration in Child Welfare Cases: An Introduction to Statistical Decision Making

Workers in the field of child maltreatment are required to make many complex and far-reaching decisions every week. In this article, two general methods for formulating decision-making policies are presented, along with a discussion of the considerable research literature demonstrating the superior predictive validity of statistical decision models over clinical prediction. A series of illustrative contrasts between the two approaches highlights the desirable mathematical properties of statistical equations as well as the cognitive biases and limitations inherent in unaided human judgment. Reasons for practitioners' adherence to the clinical approach are explored, with specific reference to child welfare decision making. Finally, recommendations are provided for enhancing the efficiency, validity, and ethical defensibility of decision making that seriously impacts the lives of children and their families.