This paper explores the influence of group context on the ethical predispositions of group members. Results indicate that groups exert a powerful influence on individuals' ethical frameworks, and that the patterns of these influences differ depending on the type of ethical framework involved. Individuals' ethical utilitarianism was affected by both leadership style and group cohesiveness. Ethical formalism was most affected by the leadership style in the group.

This paper explores the relationship between organizational size, structure and the strength of organization members'' ethical predispositions. It is hypothesized that individuals in smaller, more flexible, organic organizations will display stronger ethical predispositions. Survey results from 209 individuals across eleven organizations indicate that contrary to expectations, larger, more rigid, mechanistic structures were associated with higher levels of ethical formalism and utilitarianism. Implications of these findings are discussed.

This article examines the assertion that human embryonic stem cells patents are immoral because they violate human dignity. After analyzing the concept of human dignity and its role in bioethics debates, this article argues that patents on human embryos or totipotent embryonic stem cells violate human dignity, but that patents on pluripotent or multipotent stem cells do not. Since patents on pluripotent or multipotent stem cells may still threaten human dignity by encouraging people to treat embryos as property, patent agencies (...) should carefully monitor and control these patents to ensure that patents are not inadvertently awarded on embryos or totipotent stem cells. (shrink)

Those objecting to human DNA patenting frequently do so on the grounds that the practice violates or threatens human dignity. For example, from 1993 to 1994, more than thirty organizations representing indigenous peoples approved formal declarations objecting to the National Institutes of Health's bid to patent viral DNA taken from subjects in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Although these were not patents on human DNA, the organizations argued that the patents could harm and exploit indigenous peoples and violate (...) their cultural values. NIH eventually dropped one of its patent applications.On May 18, 1995, 180 religious leaders, led by biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin, held a press conference objecting to DNA patenting in Washington, D.C. In their “Joint Appeal against Human and Animal Patenting,” these leaders decried any attempt to patent nature. Some of the more outspoken members of the Joint Appeal likened DNA patenting to slavery, while others objected to treating human beings as marketable commodities. In his recent book, The Biotech Century, Rifkin rehashed the objections to DNA patenting voiced by members of the Joint Appeal. (shrink)

In addressing objections to the theological voluntarist program, the consensus response by defenders of theological voluntarism has been to affirm a restricted theological voluntarism on which some, but not all, important normative statuses are to be explained by immediate appeal to the divine will. The aim of this article is to assess the merits and demerits of this restricted view. While affirming the restricted view does free theological voluntarism from certain objections, it comes at the cost of committing the theological (...) voluntarist to the view that no theses about the divine nature itself could alone be sufficient to motivate a theological voluntarist thesis about any normative status. And when we examine the case for a theological voluntarist account of any particular normative status – say, rightness, or obligatoriness – there are severe difficulties with that case as it stands. It is thus unclear whether the theological voluntarist program of providing good reasons to affirm a voluntarist explanation of non‐trivially‐theistic normative statuses has borne fruit. (shrink)

This essay is a revision of ?Rudiments of an Ethics of News Reporting,?; which won honorable mention in the 1985 Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii/ AEJMC Prize for Student Papers on Journalism Ethics. It argues that news reporting suffers from a misplaced faith in individual autonomy, a faith that resists a sense of social duty on the basis of negative freedom; therefore, journalism stands in need of a moral theory that recognizes community and personhood as fundamental human characteristics essential to ethical (...) decision?making. (shrink)

Abstract. For the past two decades, I have been developing an integrative Christian marriage theory, based in part on a grounding concept of natural law and an overarching theory of covenant. The natural law part of this theory starts with an account of the natural facts, conditions, interests, needs, and qualities of human life, interaction, and generation—what I call the “premoral” goods or realities of life. It then identifies the natural inclinations of humans to form enduring and exclusive monogamous marriages (...) and to preserve these units as the central site for intimacy, procreation, and nurture of children. In this paper, I first summarize this natural law theory of marriage and then compare it to the formulations of other modern Christian thinkers. I also defend this theory against various modern critics of natural law—in part by reinterpreting some traditional natural law teachings that in my view have been misunderstood, in part by looking at the interesting convergences between the insights into sex, marriage, and family life offered by contemporary Christian theological ethicists and by evolutionary biologists and biological anthropologists. (shrink)