Definition of Terms

Ethics (or morals): 1. standards of conduct (or behavior)

that distinguish between right/wrong, good/bad, etc. 2. the
study of standards of conduct. the study of how human beings
treat each other and the natural environment; it is
the systematic examination of the attitudes and behaviours of
people. ethics is about
carefully studying the values that actually do guide our
attitudes and behaviours in given
contexts, and it is about exploring what values ought to guide
our attitudes and behaviours.
E t h i c s , a p p l i e d : t h e s t u d y o f   e t h i c s  i n s p e c i f i c s i t u a t i o n s ,
professions, or institutions, e.g. medical ethics, research
ethics, etc.
Ethics, meta-: the study of the meaning, truth, and
justification of ethical statements.
Bioethics: the study of ethical, social, or legal issues
arising in biomedicine and biomedical research.
Health ethics is the branch of ethics that deals with
ethical issues in health, health care,
medicine and science. It involves discussions about
treatment choices and care options that
individuals, families, and health care providers must face. It
requires a critical reflection upon
the relationships between health care professionals and
those they serve, as well as the
programmes, systems, and structures developed to improve
the health of a population.
Ethical dilemma: A situation in which two or
more potential actions appear to be equally
justifiable from an ethical point of view, i.e. one must
choose between the lesser of two evils or the greater
of two goods.
Autonomy: 1. the capacity for self-governance, i.e.
the ability to make reasonable decisions. 2. A moral
principle barring interference with autonomous
decision-making. 
 Examples of health ethics issues include:

 Making decisions about end-of-life care

 Determining whether to allocate funds to the treatment
of disease or the promotion of
health
 Critically examining the discrepancies in health status
between populations and our
ethical obligations to ensure equitable access to health
services
 Ensuring ethical conduct in health research
 Deliberating upon the ethical implications of genetic
cloning technology
Professional ethics are principles that govern the
behaviour of a person or group in a business
environment. Like values, professional
ethics provide rules on how a person should act
towards other people and institutions in such an
environment. Professional ethics are often codified
as a set of rules, which a particular group of people
use. This means that all those in a particular group
will use the same professional ethics, even though
their values may be unique to each person.
Advance Directive: A written statement that provides
direction about a person’s health care choices and/or appoints a
Health Care Agent is an advance directive. The most common
forms are the Health Care Proxy (sometimes called a Durable
Power of Attorney for Health Care) and the Living Will.
Autonomy: The principle of ethics that states that one’s actions
are independent from the will of others. Adult competent
patients have the right to make informed choices, free from
coercion, about the medical treatment they wish to
receive/refuse. This right extends to those who have lost capacity
and those who have never had capacity through surrogate
decision-making. Also referred to as self-determination.
Beneficence: To do good. To act in the person’s best interest.
Under this principle, failure to increase the good of others when
one is knowingly in a position to do so is morally wrong.
Nonetheless, the principle is usually understood restrictively: in
most theories, one is obligated to act to benefit others when one
can do so with minimal risk, inconvenience or expense. 
Confidentiality – The principle that one should keep one's
promises about information (re)disclosure.  In science,
confidential information typically includes: private data
pertaining to human subjects, papers or research proposals
submitted for peer review, personnel records, proceedings from
misconduct inquiries or investigations, and proprietary data. A
subset of duties of fidelity.
Censorship: taking steps to prevent or deter the
public communication of information or ideas. In
science, censorship may involve prohibiting the
publication of research or allowing publication only in
redacted form (with some information removed).
Clinical trial: an experiment designed to test the
safety or efficacy of a type of therapy (such as a drug).
Competence: the legal right to make decisions for
one’s self. Adults are considered to be legally
competent until they are adjudicated incompetent by a
court. 
Fidelity – The principle that one should keep one's
promises
Falsification: changing, omitting, or manipulating 
data or results deceptively; or deceptive manipulation
of research materials or experiments.
Fraud: knowingly misrepresenting the truth or
concealing a material (or relevant) fact to induce
someone to make a decision to his or her detriment.
Some forms of research misconduct may also qualify as
fraud. A person who commits fraud may face civil or
criminal legal liability.
Informed consent: the process of making a free and
informed decision (such as to participate in research).
Individuals who provide informed consent must be legally 
competent and have enough decision-making capacity to
consent to research. Research regulations specify the types
of information that must be disclosed to the subject. See
also Assent.
Assent: a subject’s affirmative agreement to participate in
research. Assent may take place when the subject does not
have the capacity to provide informed consent (e.g. the
subject is a child or mentally disabled) but has the capacity
to meaningfully assent. 
Justice: 1. treating people fairly. 2. An ethical
principle that obligates one to treat people fairly.
Distributive justice refers to allocating benefits and
harms fairly; procedural justice refers to using fair
processes to make decisions that affect people; formal
justice refers to treating similar cases in the same way. 
Living Will: A written statement in which a person
gives specific instructions regarding the medical care or
treatments that he/she would or would not want. This
can assist clinicians and the health care agent or family
in making a “substituted judgment” for the patient.
Plagiarism: misrepresenting someone else’s creative
work (e.g. words, methods, pictures, ideas, or data) as
one’s own. 
Placebo: a biologically or chemically inactive
substance or intervention given to a research subject
which is used to control for the Placebo effect.
Placebo effect: a person’s psychosomatic response to
the belief that they are receiving an effective treatment.
Researchers may also be susceptible to the placebo
effect if they treat subjects differently who they believe
are receiving effective treatment.
Prima Facie: Literally “At face value”. In ethics refers
to the primary duty or overriding principle ethically
when evaluating a given situation or patient case.
Based on the first impression; accepted as correct until
proved otherwise.
Paternalism: Telling people what is best: a style of
management, or an approach to personal
relationships, in which the desire to help, advise, and
protect may neglect individual choice and personal
responsibility. In medicine refers to the stance that
“the doctor knows best.”
Veracity – The principle that one should tell the
truth ("honesty is the best policy"). The principle of
ethics that a competent patient must be provided
with the complete truth about his or her medical
condition and choices.
Nonmaleficence – Moral principle that one should
refrain from harming others ("first, do no harm")
Proxy Consent: Voluntary consent given on behalf
of another who is unable to give it himself/herself.
Codes of conduct -Professional codes of conduct draw
on these professional ethical principles as the basis for
prescribing required standards of behaviour for members
of a profession. They also seek to set out the expectations
that the profession and society have of its members. The
primary value of a professional code of conduct is not as a
checklist for disciplining non-conforming members,
although breaches of a code of conduct usually do carry a
professional disciplinary consequence. Rather, its primary
value is to act as a prompt sheet for the promotion of
ethical decision-making by members of that profession.
 Prevalent Bioethical Issues

a. )Abortion is defined as the expulsion of a fetus from the

uterus before 28 weeks' gestation, the arbitrarily established
time of viability. 
An abortion is a procedure to end a pregnancy. It uses
medicine or surgery to remove the embryo or fetus and
placenta from the uterus. The procedure is done by a
licensed health care professional.
b.) Euthanasia, also called mercy killing, act or practice of
painlessly putting to death persons suffering from painful and
incurable disease or incapacitating physical disorder or
allowing them to die by withholding treatment or withdrawing
artificial life-support measures.
 Prevalent Bioethical Issues

c.) Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death.

d.) Clinical Death is when your heart stops pumping blood
and the person stops breathing. Without CPR, Biological
Death begins to set in about 4-6 minutes later. This results in
oxygen not entering the body and the organs, especially the
brain, which affects brain function. Biological Death is
where the victim's brain is damaged and cells in the victim's
heart, brain and other organs die from a lack of oxygen. The
damage caused by Biological Death is irreversible. If this
condition is not quickly corrected, then biological death will
occur which is when the brain has been deprived of blood and
oxygen long enough and the cells begin to die.
 Prevalent Bioethical Issues

e.) In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a method of assisted

reproduction in which a man's sperm and a woman's eggs are
combined outside of the body in a laboratory dish. One or
more fertilized eggs (embryos) may be transferred to the woman's
uterus, where they may implant in the uterine lining and develop.
f.) In stem cell transplants, stem cells replace cells damaged by
chemotherapy or disease or serve as a way for the donor's immune
system to fight some types of cancer and blood-related diseases,
such as leukemia, lymphoma, neuroblastoma and multiple
myeloma. These transplants use adult stem cells or umbilical cord
blood. Studies have discovered that stem cell therapy can help
enhance the growth of new healthy skin tissue, enhance collagen
production, stimulate hair development after incisions or loss, and
help substitute scar tissue with newly developed healthy tissue.