infonet-economy

Three Problems make ethical life difficult for us, and explain the importance of an ‘ethics review’ of scientific research. The first is that we lack a table of weights and measures which would enable us to evaluate the relative importance of our different values and rights - such as rights to life and liberty. The second is that we lack a dictionary which can tell us what ‘life’ and ‘liberty’ mean, given than these words can have rather different senses, and which one we chose may well affect our conclusions about the value of research or of different public policies. Finally, we have no handbook, which tells us what to do when our values and rights conflict. Worse still, it is not as though we can wave some magic wand and make these problems vanish, nor can we make them go away by ‘trying harder’, ‘being less selfish’, or ‘more sensitive’ or ‘reading more’. Hence, the aim of this talk is to clarify the nature of these three problems, their significance for ethical review, and the ways in which a democratic approach to ethics might help us to address them.