A purely deductive medical ethics cannot properly account for the varieties of circumstances which arise in medical practice. By contrast, a purely inductive medical ethics lacks sufficient guidance from ethical principles. In resolving ethical dilemmas in medicine, most often an appeal is made to middle-level axioms and methodological rules to mediate between theory and practice. I argue that this appeal must be augmented by considerations of context, such considerations, in effect, constituting a moral rule based on the social structure of (...) medical practice. A contextual grid is proposed which assists the process of weighing values in resolving cases. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm Of Rights Harvard University Press, 1990, viii, 383pp.

As business environments become more complex and reliant on information systems, the decisions made by managers affect a growing number of stakeholders. This paper proposes a framework based on the application of normative theories in business ethics to facilitate the evaluation of IS related ethical dilemmas and arrive at fair and consistent decisions. The framework is applied in the context of an information privacy dilemma to demonstrate the decision making process. The ethical dilemma is analyzed using each one of the (...) three normative theories—the stockholder theory, stakeholder theory, and social contract theory. The challenges associated with the application of these theories are also discussed. (shrink)