MHRDIR 506: Professional Ethics, Standards and Career Development

Lecture 3

Muhammad Muinul Islam

Department of Public Administration
Jahangirnagar University
Branches of Ethics
• Meta Ethics
• Prescriptive Ethics
• Descriptive Ethics
• Applied Ethics
Meta Ethics
• Meta ethics can be defied as a branch of ethics that is concerned with the study
of the nature of ethics. It analyzes the meaning when we use words like good,
bad, right, and wrong.
• Meta ethics is more about philosophy in nature as it deals with the nature of
ethics and morality.
• Meta ethics investigates where our moral and ethical principles come from and
what is the meaning behind using them.
• Deals with questions like what is meant by being right? Or what is meant by being
wrong?
• Deals with the definition of right and wrong.
• Meta means about the thing itself.
• So, meta ethics is ethics about ethics.
Meta ethics
• For example,
• “What is meant by a wrong action?”, another example,
• When we say, ‘abortion is good’ or ‘abortion is bad’
Prescriptive ethics
• Prescriptive ethics is defined as the study of ethical action, typically
based on what is morally right and wrong.
• It applies to basic human behavior and actions.
Descriptive ethics
• Descriptive ethics can be defined as describing and explaining
people’s moral attitudes and the moral norms and practices of
societies.
• It deals with what is believed to be good, right, or virtuous and moral
practices societies do have.
Applied ethics
• Applied ethics can be defined as a branch of moral philosophy that
attempts to apply ethical principles and moral theories to real-life
moral issues.
• The most practical branch of ethics.
• Deals with ethical questions specific to practical fields.
• Includes bioethics, legal ethics, business ethics, medical ethics, etc.
• For example, is it ethical to allow euthanasia? Other examples are
capital punishment, animal rights etc.
Biothics/Medical ethics
• Bioethics is the study of the ethical issues emerging from advances in
biology and medicine.
• Bioethics are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the
relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics,
law, and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary
care and other branches of medicine.
• Bioethics also helps establish a common ground for different views,
the democratic process being facilitated by the principle of giving
equal and fair consideration to all sides or aspects of a given issue
concerning human, animal or environmental rights.
• For example, Hippocratic oath
• The Hippocratic Oath is perhaps the most
widely known of Greek medical texts. It
requires a new physician to swear upon a
number of healing gods that he will
uphold a number of professional ethical
standards.
Four principles of bioethics
Scope of bioethics
• The scope of bioethics has expanded to include the ethical questions
raised by
Artificial
Reproductive
Stem Cell Technologies
Research
Human
Genome
Project
Scope of bioethics
• The scope of bioethics has expanded to include the ethical questions
raised by
The possibility
of successful
The Synthesis reproductive
of new life- cloning
Pre- forms
implantation
Genetic
Diagnosis
5 Major Issues in Bioethics
1. Abortion
2. Euthanasia
3. Eugenics
4. Human cloning
5. Stem cell research
Case Analysis