Pre-Employment Screening Among Health Care Workers—Ethical Issues

Occupational health practitioners deal with the questions of confidentiality, relation between the right to work and the right to health, between individual freedom and the risks other can run. An audit of pre-employment health assessment of health care workers, in the United Kingdom and in France, discussed the efficiency of pre-employment screening. Screening tests and medical examinations should not be used as a pretext to avoid implementing effective preventive measures. The pre-employment examination has mostly to be used for education of the future employees and for collection of baseline data. Appropriate procedures such as developing preventive policies, health promotion, and control of hazards in the work environment are efficient for the promotion of equal employment rights for women, older workers, or people with disabilities.     

可持续发展观中的和谐环境伦理意蕴

从把握可持续发展观中的和谐环境伦理意蕴入手,就找到了解读可持续发展观内涵的一个很好的突破口。可持续发展观内涵中具有丰富的和谐环境伦理思想。可持续发展观主张“人与自然的协调发展”与和谐环境伦理意蕴是趋同的;可持续发展观主张“经济发展与资源开发利用的协调发展”与和谐环境伦理意蕴是一致的;可持续发展观主张“人类世代永续长存”与和谐环境伦理是相符的;可持续发展观主张可持续发展应成为“全球性问题”与和谐环境伦理意蕴是相适应的。     

环境立法目的之伦理思考

通过对环境立法目的的伦理思考,探索完善我国环境立法目的的有效途径,以期推进我国环境立法,实现环境、经济、社会可持续发展的最终目标。     

试论我国环保集中控制权学说与职业伦理体系

环境职业伦理学是一门知行统一的极为重要的但长期以来被忽视的学科，本文从我国环保职业道德意识中存在的问题与原因分析入手，提出应对确立我国环保集中控制权的重要地位并在此基础上架构职业伦理本位学说理论体系框架加以研究和界定。     

有效防灾减灾体系新构建——从灾害共同体走向责任共同体和伦理共同体

中国幅员辽阔,人口众多,灾害多发,因此自然灾害问题对中国来说无疑具有更为重要的意义。结合对自然灾害的科学研究、应对管理以及深层的伦理思考,我们已经形成了灾害共同体,并且,在应对自然灾害上正在逐渐走向责任共同体和伦理共同体。     

Exclusion by Inclusion? On Difficulties with Regard to an Effective Ethical Assessment of Patenting in the Field of Agricultural Bio-Technology

In order to take ethical considerations of patenting biological material into account, the so-called “ordre public or morality clause” was implemented as Article 6 in the EC directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions, 98/44/EC. At first glance, this seems to provide a significant advantage to the European patent system with respect to ethics. The thesis of this paper argues that the ordre public or morality clause does not provide sufficient protection against ethically problematic uses of the patent system within the area of life. On the contrary, there are worrisome obstacles to any effective and comprehensive critical analysis of the ethical aspects of bio-patenting, especially in the field of agriculture. These obstacles can be seen as indirect consequences of the implementation of ethical considerations in form of the ordre public and morality clause in the EC Directive. Therefore, Article 6 of the EC Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions seems to ultimately weaken the position of ethics in the debate concerning bio-patenting because the ordre public and morality clause is usually interpreted in an exclusively bio-ethical way in the sense of an “intrinsic ethics,” which is primarily interested in questions regarding the moral status of particular entities. It is argued that an important cause of this phenomenon is that the decisive reasons against bio-patenting are concerns of social ethics, and not bio-ethics.     

罗尔斯顿环境伦理学的客观价值理论

罗尔斯顿坚持机体哲学的观点,即价值本身是某种自然资料所形成的。其属性是由自然创造的,而非人所给予的。自然资料所形成的价值是第一性的,属于自然价值。它是人意识判断的基础。由于自然资料被生态系统本身所承载,它也就是一种客观价值。     

Mitigating Natural Disasters: The Role Of Eco-Ethics

Natural disasters are complex phenomena, the causes of which lie to a large extent in human behavior that creates vulnerable communities. In order to reduce vulnerability and thereby mitigate the risk of disasters, it is important to consider underlying values, particularly with respect to how people view and interact with the natural world. Advancing an interdisciplinary, ecological paradigm, this paper argues that disaster mitigation needs to be addressed through a process that results in a greater emphasis on our interactions with and reliance upon the natural world, and the development of community resilience.     

A moral panic over cats

Some conservationists believe that free-ranging cats pose an enormous risk to biodiversity and public health and therefore should be eliminated from the landscape by any means necessary. They further claim that those who question the science or ethics behind their arguments are science deniers (merchants of doubt) seeking to mislead the public. As much as we share a commitment to conservation of biodiversity and wild nature, we believe these ideas are wrong and fuel an unwarranted moral panic over cats. Those who question the ecological or epidemiological status of cats are not science deniers, and it is a false analogy to compare them with corporate and right-wing special interests that perpetrate disinformation campaigns over issues, such as smoking and climate change. There are good conservation and public-health reasons and evidence to be skeptical that free-ranging cats constitute a disaster for biodiversity and human health in all circumstances. Further, there are significant and largely unaddressed ethical and policy issues (e.g., the ethics and efficacy of lethal management) relative to how people ought to value and coexist with cats and native wildlife. Society is better served by a collaborative approach to produce better scientific and ethical knowledge about free-ranging cats.