what was the first formal ethics course

by Michel Beatty 10 min read

What is the history of formal ethics?

The best way to test whether a formal logical principle is correct is to see whether { 1 } - it's formulated using only variables and logical terms. - we can derive false or absurd results from it. - it's intuitively evident. If it can be formulated this way, then it's a formal logical principle -- but not necessarily a correct one.

When did business ethics become an academic field?

Professional Ethics. Business or Professional ethics in a nutshell: Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the meaning of all aspects of human behavior. Theoretical Ethics, sometimes called Normative Ethics, is about discovering and delineating right from wrong; it is the consideration of how we develop the rules and principles ...

What is ethical training and why is it important?

Mar 23, 2017 · President Trump’s team recently nixed a White House ethics course. AP Photo/Alex Brandon. Media reports said the Trump team saw the decision to scrap the ethics training, previously adopted by ...

When was the first book on Business Ethics published?

For State Officials. California law requires state officials to complete an ethics training course within six months of being hired. If your service is ongoing, you must complete the course once during each two-year period. The two-year period begins with an odd-numbered year, for example, 2017-18, 2019-20, etc.

What was the first formal ethics code?

The 1948 Nuremberg CodeThe 1948 Nuremberg Code is the first ethical code to establish the basic standards for when human beings may be enrolled in scientific studies, including informed consent, a balancing between plausible benefits to humanity and harm to individuals, and the individual's right to disenroll at any time.Nov 9, 2014

When did ethics in research begin?

The Declaration of Helsinki was developed in 1964 by the World Medical Association as an international statement of ethical principles to guide medical professionals conducting research involving human subjects.

What was the first code to guide ethical practice in human research?

The Nuremberg Code, the first international code of ethics for research on human subjects, is adopted.

How did research ethics start?

Out of the horrors of World War II came the Nuremberg Code, the prototype for human research protection. We can trace today's research ethics principles directly to the inhumane experimentation on prisoners in the Nazi death camps during World War II.Jul 12, 2009

Who introduced research ethics?

Bentham, J (1781): An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

Who is father of ethics?

Socrates: The Father of Ethics and Inquiry (Greatest Greek Philosophers) (Library Binding)Jul 30, 2015

What is the history of ethics?

Ethical philosophy began in the fifth century BCE, with the appearance of Socrates, a secular prophet whose self-appointed mission was to awaken his fellow men to the need for rational criticism of their beliefs and practices.

When was the Nuremberg Code first published?

August 1947The Code was formulated 50 years ago, in August 1947, in Nuremberg, Germany, by American judges sitting in judgment of Nazi doctors accused of conducting murderous and torturous human experiments in the concentration camps (the so-called Doctors' Trial).Nov 13, 1997

When did Bioethics begin and how did it originate?

Members of different disciplines had begun to discuss the ethical aspects of science and medicine by the late-1960s, but the term 'bioethics' did not emerge until 1970. It was first coined by the biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter, who used it to describe an ethics derived from biomedicine.Dec 13, 2011

What is business ethics?

Business ethics as a movement refers to the development of structures internal to the corporation that help it and its employees act ethically, as opposed to structures that provide incentives to act unethically. The structures may include clear lines of responsibility, a corporate ethics code, an ethics training program, an ombudsman or a corporate ethics officer, a hot or help line, a means of transmitting values within the firm and maintaining a certain corporate culture, and so on. Some companies have always been ethical and have structured themselves and their culture to reinforce ethical behavior. Johnson & Johnson's well-known Credo was written and published by General Robert Wood Johnson in 1943. But most companies in the 1960s had paid little attention to developing such structures. That slowly began to change, and the change became a movement when more and more companies started responding to growing public pressure, media scrutiny, their own corporate consciences, and, perhaps most importantly, to legislation. We have already seen that big business responded to criticism in the 1960s by turning to corporate social responsibility, and the movement can be traced back to that period.

Is business ethics an academic field?

The concern for ethics in business continues. Business ethics as an academic field contributes discussion forums, research and teaching that inform both ethics in business and the business ethics movement. The business ethics movement is responsive to the other two and in turn has interacted with them.

What is professional ethics?

Professional Ethics. Business or Professional ethics in a nutshell: Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the meaning of all aspects of human behavior. Theoretical Ethics, sometimes called Normative Ethics, is about discovering and delineating right from wrong; it is the consideration of how we develop the rules and principles (norms) ...

What are the three approaches to ethics?

All three approaches to ethics described above are principally focused on the individual: the singular conscience, rationally reflecting on the meaning of duty or responsibility, and in the case of Virtue ethics, the ethical athlete practicing and inculcating the capacity to achieve the state of eudemonia.

Who is Immanuel Kant?

Immanuel Kant is the quintessential deontological (duty based) ethical theorist. Kant, who lived in eighteenth century Prussia, was one of the most amazing intellects of all time, writing books on astronomy, philosophy, politics and ethics.

What is business ethics?

It is best understood as a branch of ethics called applied ethics: the discipline of applying value to human behavior, relationships and constructs, and the resulting meaning. Business ethics is simply the practice of this discipline within the context of the enterprise of creating wealth (the fundamental role of business).

What are the three parts of business ethics?

There are three parts to the discipline of business ethics: personal, professional and corporate. All three are intricately related, and it is helpful to distinguish between them because each rests on slightly different assumptions and requires a slightly different focus in order to be understood.

What are the four ethical frameworks?

From the earliest moments of recorded human consciousness, the ethical discipline has entailed four fundamental approaches, often called ethical decision-making frameworks: Utilitarian Ethics (outcome based), Deontological Ethics (duty based), Virtue Ethics (virtue based), and Communitarian Ethics (community based). Each has a distinctive point of departure as well as distinctive ways of doing the fundamental ethical task of raising and answering questions of value. It is also important to understand that all four approaches have overlaps as well as common elements, such as:

What is the virtue of Aristotle?

For Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, virtue meant the excellence of a thing. The virtue of a knife is to cut; the virtue of a physician is to heal; the virtue of a lawyer is to seek justice. In this sense, Ethics becomes the discipline of discovering and practicing virtue.

Why is kinship important in an attorney?

A sense of kinship between attorney and client can be good to the extent that the attorney is able to see through the client’s eyes and work toward the client’s goals.

Who is Cassandra Burke?

Cassandra Burke Robertson is a board member of the 11/9 Coalition, a nationwide, non-partisan, grassroots organization working for the protection of civil liberties and the rule of law.

Do people interpret their own behavior?

All the evidence points to the fact that most people tend to interpret their own behavior in the best possible light, even when their actions appear to violate their own moral convictions. This is especially true when people consider themselves to be fundamentally moral individuals, as most do.

Did the White House award an ethics course?

Earlier in March, news broke that the White House had declined to award a contract for an ethics course aimed at senior staffers, Cabinet nominees and others holding political appointments in the Trump administration.

For State Officials

California law requires state officials to complete an ethics training course within six months of being hired. If your service is ongoing, you must complete the course once during each two-year period. The two-year period begins with an odd-numbered year, for example, 2017-18, 2019-20, etc.

For Local Officials

Cities, counties and special districts in California are required by law (AB 1234, Chapter 700, Stats. of 2005) to provide ethics training to their local officials.

What are the ethical dilemmas in software engineering?

They include cases of “Mission Impossible” (being asked to create or accept a product schedule that is clearly impossible to meet), “Mea Culpa” (delivering products without key functionality or with known defects), “Rush Jobs” (delivering products of subpar quality to meet schedule pressures), “Red Lies” (telling clients or management known falsehoods about product schedule or performance), “Fictionware” (promising features that are infeasible), and “Nondiligence” (inadequate review of requests for proposals, contracts or specifications).15

What is an anti-pattern?

‘Anti-patterns’ are engineering or business habits, techniques and solutions that are generally considered substandard, likely to backfire or generate more problems, unreliable, or otherwise indicative of poor professional conduct. The term, then, represents the opposite of what are known as ‘best practices.’ Hundreds of anti-patterns have been named. Some of them are exclusive to software engineering, while others are general to business and other social institutions. Here are just some of the common anti-patterns that can affect software engineers:

Why is engineering important?

Engineering is an important and learned profession. As members of this profession , engineers are expected to exhibit the highest standards of honesty and integrity. Engineering has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people.

What is software engineering?

Software engineers are those who contribute by direct participation or by teaching, to the analysis, specification, design, development, certification, maintenance and testing of software systems. Because of their roles in developing software systems, software engineers have significant opportunities to do good or cause harm, to enable others to do good or cause harm, or to influence others to do good or cause harm. To ensure, as much as possible, that their efforts will be used for good, software engineers must commit themselves to making software engineering a beneficial and respected profession. In accordance with that commitment, software engineers shall adhere to the following Code of Ethics and Professional Practice.

What is the Errand Whiz app?

She has just downloaded a new app called Errand Whiz onto her iPhone; this app merges information from Karen’s to-do list, information on her purchasing habits from retail stores she shops at, and GPS software to produce the most efficient map and directions for running errands on her days off. Based on what it knows about what she needs to purchase and her general shopping habits, it tells Karen what locations of her favorite stores to visit on a given day, in what order and by what routes – this way she can get her errands done in the least amount of time, traveling the least number of miles. To accomplish this, the app aggregates information not only about where she lives and shops, but also tracks what she typically buys in each store, how much she buys, what she typically pays for each item. This collected data is not stored on Karen’s phone, but on a separate server that the app links to when it needs to create a shopping map. The app encourages users to log in via Facebook, as the developers have made a deal with Facebook to sell this data to third-party advertisers, for the purpose of targeting Facebook ads to Karen and her friends.

What is the NSPE's paramountcy clause?

The NSPE’s paramountcy clause asks engineers to recognize that their primary professional duty is to ‘hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public.’ But who exactly is this ‘public?’ Of course, one can respond simply with, ‘the public is everyone.’ But the public is not an undifferentiated mass; the public is composed of our families, our friends and co-workers, our employers, our neighbors, our church or other local community members, our countrymen and women, and people living in every other part of the world. To say that we have ethical obligations to ‘everyone’ is to tell us very little about how to actually work responsibly as an engineer in the public interest, since each of these groups and individuals that make up the public are in a unique relationship to us and our work, and are potentially impacted by it in very different ways. We also have special obligations to some members of the public (our children, our employer, our friends, our fellow citizens) that exist alongside the broader, more general obligations we have to all of them.

What is privacy in software?

Along with intellectual property/copyright concerns, privacy is one of the most commonly discussed issues of ethical and legal concern with software. There are many definitions of what constitutes privacy: they include control over one’s personal information; the ‘right to be forgotten,’ to be left alone or to have a measure of obscurity; the integrity of the context in which your personal information is used; and the ability to form your own identity on your own terms. Each of these, along with many other potential definitions, captures something important about privacy. There is also increasing debate about the extent to which new technologies are changing our expectations of privacy, or even how much we value it.

Why is ethics training important?

Ethics training keeps your company profitable and helps employees make consistently good decisions in service to their colleagues, their customers, and themselves. However, not just any ethics training course will do. Developing an ethics training program for employees incorporates the following eight steps.

What is ethical workplace?

An ethical workplace has well-established codes of professional and personal conduct that not only stay in compliance with all regulations and laws that govern your business, but also moral codes of conduct that include honesty, diversity, compassion, and good citizenship.

What is the mission of Patagonia?

Consider Patagonia [1], with their mission statement: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

What is diversity training?

The goal of different types of ethics training is to teach employees to make good decisions that are consistent with your company’s culture.

Is Patagonia a good place to work?

Patagonia was ranked as one of 2018’s best places to work for new dads and is consistently cited as a company that cares about its employees [2], their actions, and their impact on the world. Turnover is, as Fortune puts it, “ freakishly low ”, and a lot of that has to do with the ethical culture of the company.

What are the advantages of eLearning?

For more extended conversations, both eLearning and instructor-led trainings have their advantages. While eLearning allows employees to complete activities and trainings on their own schedule, supplementing online activities with juicy, in-person conversations provides variety and interactions to clarify often difficult material. 4.

Is gamification a serious business?

Even though ethics are a serious business, gamification and role-playing can help lighten the mood a bit, or at least get employees thinking in a different way. 8. But, Take It Seriously. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of ethics training for employees – seems like everyone has a ready joke at hand. However, if your goal is for employees ...

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Overview

Formal ethics is a formal logical system for describing and evaluating the "form" as opposed to the "content" of ethical principles. Formal ethics was introduced by Harry J. Gensler, in part in his 1990 logic textbook Symbolic Logic: Classical and Advanced Systems, but was more fully developed and justified in his 1996 book Formal Ethics.
Formal ethics is related to ethical formalismin that its focus is the forms of moral judgments, bu…

Symbolic representation

The axioms and theorems of formal ethics can be represented with the standard notation of predicate logic (but with a grammar closer to higher-order logics), augmented with imperative, deontic, belief, and modal logic symbols.
Formal logic uses an underlined symbol (e.g. ) to represent an imperative. If the same symbol is used without an underline, then the plain symbol is an indicativeand the underlined symbol is an i…

Axioms

Formal ethics has four axioms in addition to the axioms of predicate and modal logic. These axioms (with the possible exception of Rationality, see below) are largely uncontroversial within ethical theory.
In natural language, the axioms might be given as follows:
• (Prescriptivity) — "Practice what you preach"

Notes

1. ^ Gensler, Harry J. Symbolic logic: Classical and advanced systems. Prentice Hall, 1990.
2. ^ "God" is a proper name if, for example, it is defined as "the god of Christianity". If "God" is defined in another way, might not reference a proper name. However, might still not be a universal property if the definition of "God" is evaluative, for example, "the morally perfect being". If the definition of "God" is nonevaluative (e.g. "the creator of the universe"), then is a universal property. Perhaps a l…

Further reading

• Gensler, Harry J. Formal Ethics. ISBN 0-415-13066-2

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Early history

  • Norman Bowie dates the birth of business ethics as November 1974, with the first conference in business ethics, which was held at the University of Kansas, and which resulted in the first anthology used in the new courses that started popping up thereafter in business ethics.12 Whether one chooses that date or some other event, it is difficult to i...
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