The Online Ethics Center Glossary

A text search on a term will find all occurrences of it. Therefore, to search for the definition of a widely used term, use a case sensitive text search on the term in all uppercase letters. If you are searching for the name of an organization associated with an abbreviation or acronym, go to the list of abbreviations.

Entries Beginning with A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

ACADEMIC HONESTY and ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: Behavior such as cheating on examinations and lab reports, or plagiarism of course papers and homework assignments are the most often cited violations of academic integrity or academic honesty. Except for the fact that faculty generally do not take examinations, such violations of academic integrity are indistinguishable from violations of research integrity--see research ethics. The only difference is that the perpetrators are students, rather than faculty. Other matters of honesty are sometimes considered under the heading of academic integrity, and not only the actions of students. Among these are honesty in writing letters of recommendation and in reporting institutional statistics.
ACCOUNTABLE: Answerable, being required to answer for one's actions. Sometimes the term "accountable" is used with a moral connotation ("normatively") meaning morally required to answer for one's actions without specifying to whom one is accountable. More often "accountable" is used descriptively to describe the sociological fact that a person or organization in question is required to answer to a particular party by some rules or organizational structure. For example, "the principal is accountable to the school board" gives a description of the social facts without suggesting anything about the ethical legitimacy of the organizational structure. One factor that causes confusion about this term is that, sometimes, the term "responsible" is used as a synonym for "accountable," especially in discussions of official responsibilities. When "responsible" is used as a synonym for "accountable," it is used with the preposition "to" as in "each staff employee is responsible/accountable to a supervisor." To avoid confusion in materials created for Online Ethics Center the term, "responsible" will never be used as a synonym for "accountable" and "accountable" will be used only descriptively. See responsibility. Being a responsible person, that is, the sort of person who fulfills one's moral responsibilities, is an ideal of character, a virtue. Being accountable is not a moral virtue but only a fact about one's social or organizational situation. Although it is often argued that people are more likely to behave responsibly if they are held accountable for their actions, there is no necessary link between being responsible and being accountable.
ADMINISTRATIVE LAW: The body of regulations, rules, orders and decisions to carry out regulatory powers created by administrative agencies. In ordinary use, as contrasted with technical legal use, people often speak of administrative law as "regulation." For example, it is often pointed out that it is easier for regulatory agencies, such as OSHA & the EPA, to update their regulations than it is to get Congress to pass new laws. It is said that such regulation "has the force of law." In the technical legal sense regulation is law.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Positive steps to enhance the diversity of some group, often to remedy the cumulative effect of subtle as well as gross expressions of prejudice. When numerical goals are set, they are set according to the group's representation in the applicant pool rather than the group's representation in the general population. For example, a medical school with an affirmative action program would seek to admit members of an underrepresented group in proportion to their representation in the population of those who had completed pre-medical requirements and wished to attend medical school. Affirmative action should be distinguished from reparations.
APPLIED RESEARCH: The investigation of some phenomena to discover whether its properties are appropriate to a particular need or want. In contrast, basic research investigates phenomena without reference to particular human needs and wants.
ASSENT: A variation of the concept of Informed Consent specifically used in reference to research subjects such as children or other persons without the full competence to provide informed consent. For instance, because children are below the legal age of consent, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) requires additional protections when children are involved as subjects. Assent is defined as "a child's affirmative agreement to participate in research. Mere failure to object should not, absent affirmative agreement, be construed as assent" (45 CFR 46 Subpart D). In addition, the federal regulations require the permission of one or both parents or guardians, depending on the nature of the research to be performed.
AUTHENTICITY: The character trait or virtue of authenticity is that of being genuine, honest with oneself as well as others. Therefore "authenticity" connotes not only candor, but an absence of hypocrisy or self-deception.
AUTONOMY: See Right of Self-Determination.

B

BASIC RESEARCH: The investigation of the natural phenomena as contrasted with applied research.
BIAS: An inclination that influences judgment. The term "bias" may be used in a merely descriptive way to mean an inclination, but more often it is used as a term of evaluation to mean an inclination that influences judgment and ought not to. "Prejudice" is a synonym for bias in this pejorative sense. However, bias that cannot be completely eliminated in the work of scientific investigators, in contrast to bias or prejudice that can and should be eliminated, is also an important topic in research ethics. For example, the way disciplinary training inclines people to interpret the results of an experiment in terms of the established categories of that discipline is a feature of research, and one that must be taken into account in assessing responsible behavior in research. Since undertaking research requires undergoing advanced training in a discipline, it is impossible to eliminate all preconceptions from one's interpretation of the data. Of course, researchers may hold disciplinary biases and still be unbiased in other respects. For example, they may be impartial on the question of the truth or falsity of a particular research hypothesis.
BIOTECHNOLOGY: As defined by the U.S. government, this refers to any technique that uses living organisms (or parts of organisms) to make or modify products, to improve plants and animals, or to develop microorganisms for specific use. Biotechnology focuses on the practical applications of science (as opposed to doing "science for science sake"). Historically, biotechnology has had an impact in three main areas: health, food/agriculture and environmental protection. Biotechnologists try to solve problems in these and other areas such as the need to cure or prevent illness, for clean water, and to preserve food.
BRIBE: Something that is given or offered to a person or organization in a position of trust to induce that agent to behave in a way that is inconsistent with that trust. As C.E. Harris points out, it is important that bribery be distinguished from capitulating to extortion (that is, capitulating to a demand under coercion or intimidation). It may be ethically justified to pay extortion in some circumstances, even though it would be wrong to offer a bribe. Bribes are paid to obtain something to which one does not have a right, such as a special advantage in awarding a contract. In contrast, extortion is paid to secure something to which one has a right, such as the return of expensive equipment one has legally brought into a country but which a corrupt customs official claims has been "lost".

C

CANDOR: Candor is the quality of being frank or open. The original sense of the term was of the virtue of purity or innocence, but that use is now obsolete. Although being open and unbiased is a positive quality, in some circumstances it is better to be discreet rather than candid with some party on a particular topic. Certainly, there are some matters in which a person is morally required to keep something confidential, and therefore being candid with the wrong party about some matter would be an ethical breach. See also Authenticity.
CHALLENGE STUDY: Studies in which researchers intentionally give subject/patients pharmacological agents in order to induce and study psychiatric symptomology.
CIVIL LAW: The body of law relating to contracts and suits as contrasted with criminal law. Civil law covers suits of one party by another for such matters as breach of contract or negligence. The standard of proof in civil cases is preponderance of evidence - a greater weight of evidence for than against, which is a weaker standard than absence of a reasonable doubt.
CIVIL RIGHTS: The rights that go with citizenship, that one acquires simply by being a citizen. Not all of these are inalienable rights, however - see rights. For example, a citizen may lose the right to vote if convicted of certain crimes.
COMPLAINANT: Anyone who raises a concern inside or outside their organization about something that he believes to be amiss. The term does not have the negative connotation of "complainer." The complainant is one who speaks up in some way about a problem. This speaking up may or may not include filing a formal charge. See also Whistle-Blower.
CONFIDENTIAL: That which is done or communicated in trust. Confidential information is information entrusted to another. The implication is that it is information that for some reason (from personal privacy to competitive advantage) the person entrusting the information does not wish at least some others to know. Thus confidential information is information to be shared only with a very limited group who are involved with furthering certain ends which the one entrusting the information wants served, such as treatment of a disease, or development and manufacture of a new product. Most professions recognize some duty to keep confidential a client's information, although such a duty has limits when the confidential information concerns a danger to others.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: A person has a conflict of interest when the person is in a position of trust which requires her to exercise judgment on behalf of others (people, institutions, etc.) and also has interests or obligations of the sort that might interfere with the exercise of her judgment, and which the person is morally required to either avoid or openly acknowledge. (The lesser requirement of open acknowledgment is usually adopted when it seems too burdensome to require that the person in a position of trust to divest herself of the interest that conflicts with her position of responsibility. For example, some journals require that authors disclose any substantial financial interests that might have biased their research assessment. Requiring investigators to divest themselves of investments that they may have made on the basis of their scientific judgment would be too burdensome, and might even suppress publication.) Dictionary definitions frequently apply the term only to conflicts between a person's private interests and those of a public office the person holds, and by extension with that person's professional obligations and responsibilities. However, there can also be conflicts of interest in which private interests do not enter. For example, the American Bar Association specifies as part of a general rule on conflict of interest that "A lawyer shall not represent a client if the representation of that client may be materially limited by the lawyer's responsibilities to another client or to a third party, or by the lawyers own interests, unless

the lawyer reasonably believes the representation will not be adversely affected, and
the client consents after consultation. When representation of multiple clients in a single matter is undertaken, the consultation shall include explanation of the implications of the common representation and the advantages and risks involved." ABA, 1989

There is no similar rule requiring engineers or engineering firms to avoid, say, building manufacturing facilities for, or supplying parts to, two companies that directly compete in the same market, although the engineering firm might need to be especially careful to avoid disclosing the proprietary information of one company to the other. This example illustrates the point that one needs to look carefully at the nature of a professional's or public official's obligations and responsibilities in order to know when conflicting interests become a conflict of interest, that is, when a situation that requires discretion to handle the actual or potential conflict fairly is one that he is morally required to avoid altogether, or at least to disclose to all parties. Policies requiring financial disclosure, that is disclosure of financial interests that might conflict with judgment as a researcher or as public official, is very commonly called a "conflict of interest policy," although such financial conflict of interest is only one specific type.

CONTRACT: As used in ethics, the term "contract" means an explicit agreement which is freely entered into. Only a small number of these would qualify as legal contracts. A legal contract is a legally binding agreement among two or more parties. Breach of contract is the failure to fulfill a legal contract).
COPYRIGHT: A legal right (usually of the author or composer or publisher of a work) to exclusive publication production, sale, distribution of some work. What is protected by the copyright is the "expression," not the idea. Notice that taking another's idea is plagiarism, so copyrights are not the equivalent of legal prohibition of plagiarism.
COSTS AND BENEFITS (or risks and benefits): To use cost-benefit analysis (or risk-benefit analysis) requires that one consider only those consequences or the probability of consequences that can be treated as arithmetic quantities, such as risk of death, number of days of illness or cost in dollars. If one uses the terms cost and benefit in the technical sense that requires quantification, other terms, such as harm and boon, need to be used for consequences that may not be representable as arithmetic quantities. Cost-benefit analysis is a technique taken from economics that weighs alternative actions in terms of such consequences. It is not suited for consideration of consequences, such as the loss of moral integrity, that do not lend themselves to quantification. See also Risk.
CRIMINAL LAW: Governs crimes (felonies and misdemeanors). Crimes are offenses against the state. Civil law deals with private offenses, such as violations of contracts, and failure of professional duty. The standard of proof for crimes is higher than for civil proceedings. For major crimes guilt be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

D

DATA SELECTION: When legitimate, as contrasted with falsified, data is selected for presentation on the basis of clear criteria for thinking it is least subject to confounding influences or "noise."
DEFENDANT: Party being sued in civil proceedings, or accused of a crime in criminal proceedings.
DILEMMA: A forced choice between courses of action (usually two) which are equally unacceptable. Sometimes people will call any challenging "moral problem" a dilemma, but this is a misleading use of the term. Only a few moral problems are dilemmas in the true meaning of the term. Calling moral problems "dilemmas" is confusing because it implies that the only possible responses are the two obvious (and unacceptable) ones, and tends to discourage real problem solving.
DISCRIMINATION: One form of behavior that shows prejudice, but not the only form. Discrimination is the failure to treat people in the same way because of a bias toward some of them because of some characteristic - such as race, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, disability - which is irrelevant to their suitability for something (e.g., to occupy housing or to perform a job).
DUE PROCESS: The procedure or process required for a given judgment to be fair. Fairness here is specified in terms of the process rather than the outcome. For example, although it is desirable that those and only those who are guilty of a crime be punished for it, infallibility of judgment by the law courts cannot be guaranteed. The feasible goal is to try to ensure everyone a fair trial. Similarly, although it is hoped that important research does not go unrecognized, it is impossible to guarantee that the contributions of those who are "ahead of their time" will be recognized. The feasible goal is to ensure fair process (e.g., in the reviewing of research proposals for funding or research results for publication).
DUTY: See obligations.

E

ETHICAL RELATIVISM: Ethical relativism or "relativism" is used to indicate several different views. The first, which is also called "ethical subjectivism," is the view that the truth of some ethical judgment as applied to a person's behavior depends on whether the person believes the actions to be right or wrong. This view is commonly expressed as "there is no right or wrong, it's only a matter of opinion." Acceptance of this view undermines the claim of any ethical judgment to have validity. One who believes in ethical relativism in this sense would have to agree that there was nothing objectively wrong with a person torturing or killing another person, as long as the individual committing those actions sincerely believed that they were not wrong. A second view, which is sometimes called "cultural relativism," is the view that ethical judgments and moral rules always reflect the cultural context from which they are derived and cannot be immediately applied to other cultural contexts. Some who hold this view are skeptical about even the possibility of saying that slavery is wrong in a slave-holding society and so are close to the ethical subjectivists. At the other extreme, some cultural relativists only put the burden of proof on those who think that they can generalize from one social context to another, but accept that the burden of proof is often met. Many, like Alasdair MacIntyre and Annette Baier, who do not consider themselves relativists, argue that moralities are social products constructed by particular people in particular societal contexts and must be understood in relation to those societal contexts. For example, the Hippocratic oath specifies extensive duties towards those who have taught one medicine. In this oath physicians pledge to respect and care for their teachers as for their own parents. The societal context in which these duties of physicians were formulated was very different from what it is in industrialized nations today. It is implausible that the same duties should apply to physicians in all societies, but this does not mean that they did not have validity when the oath was first formulated. What makes the difference is not a person's opinion, but the social reality in which the person participated.
ETHICS: The term "ethics" is used in several different ways. First, it means the study of morals. It is also the name for that branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of morals and moral evaluation - e.g., what is right and wrong, virtuous or vicious, and beneficial or harmful (to others). Second, the term ethics or morality is used to mean the standards for ethical or moral behavior of a particular group, such as "Buddhist ethics" or "nursing ethics" or "Roman Catholic morality" or "the professional ethics of engineers in the twentieth century United States." To give a description of such ethical codes and standards is descriptive ethics, . Descriptive ethics does not require making a judgment as to whether the code or standards of behavior have ethical justification. Examination of the adequacy of moral or ethical values, standards or judgments is normative ethics. Third, some authors even use the term "ethics" or "morality" more loosely to mean any code of behavior, even one that does not claim to have moral justification. For example, Robert Jackall in Moral Mazes describes what he calls a corporation's "ethics" or "morality" and takes it to include such judgments as "What is right is what the guy above you wants from you."(p. 6) Such a judgment is about the best (i.e., most effective) way to survive in the organization, but does not pretend to be a statement about what is morally/ethically justified. It may be important to examine such codes of behavior and see how they affect the opportunities for moral action, but not every code of behavior has, or is even claimed to have moral/ethical justification. The term "moral" tends to be used for more practical elements, such as "moral problems" and "moral beliefs", and "ethical" tends to be used for more abstract and theoretical elements, such as "ethical principle", but the distinction is by no means hard and fast. Some philosophers and theologians have drawn a distinction between the moral and the ethical. They have drawn such a variety of different distinctions, however, that to use any one of them invites confusion with the others. Therefore the terms "ethical" and "moral" are used interchangeably here.
EVALUATION: Normative evaluation is a judgment as to whether something is good or bad in some respects, a value judgment ; Evaluation of the results is assessment of what test results indicate about some natural phenomena, or about the performance of some human artifact.
EXPLANATION: Explanations of human actions typically make reference to the agent's reasons or motive for some action. For example, Chris went to the bookstore to buy a text book. Causes are usually cited only for human actions that are not intentional, such as falling. A person's falling might be causally explained by the slipperiness of the road surface, the person having been pushed, or drugged, or having a heart attack. A person's falling with acceleration a would be explained in terms of the gravitational field in which the person was falling. Notice that in certain contexts, notably ordinary life and law, it is often the unusual that is explained, but scientific explanation is usually explanation of typical behavior.

F

FABRICATION: In research ethics the term, "fabrication" means making up data, experiments or other significant information in proposing, conducting or reporting research. In engineering, the term "fabrication" has a benign connotation, meaning to make something. Sometimes it is used to refer to an intermediate stage in going from designs to manufacture or construction.
FALSIFICATION: In research ethics the term "falsification" means changing or misrepresenting data or experiments, or misrepresenting other significant matters, such as the credentials of an investigator in a research proposal. Unlike fabrication distinguishing falsification of data from legitimate data selection takes judgment and an understanding of statistical methods.
FRAUD: A fraud is an intentional deception perpetrated to secure an unfair gain. Financial fraud, that is, a deception practiced on another party to cheat them out of money, is the most commonly discussed type of fraud. The term "research fraud" or "scientific fraud" is also used to mean an intentional deception about scientific results, a type of research misconduct. In this case there is no financial transaction, there need not be a financial transaction to obtain a financial benefit which the perpetrator receives, and there need not be an injured party. It is useful to sort out the characteristics of a fraudulent act. For this it is instructive to look at the legal definition. In a civil law suit charging fraud there is a plaintiff who brings the charge against a defendant.

To win the suit the plaintiff must prove five points

the defendant made a false representation
the defendant knew that the representation was false or at least recklessly disregarded whether it was true or false.
there was intent to induce belief in the misrepresentation
the plaintiff had a reasonable belief in the misrepresentation
the plaintiff suffered damage as a result.

As is illustrated in the case of "research fraud," the term "fraud" is often used informally to mean a misrepresentation that satisfies only the first three criteria.

G

GLASS CEILING: A barrier to advancement within an organization experienced by members of certain groups because of prejudice (including discomfort in their presence). This term is most often used when the organization does bring in members of the group affected by the ceiling and often does promote them through the junior ranks on a comparable basis to the most favored group. If members of a group tend to leave the organization soon after entering, this is termed a "revolving door" rather than a "glass ceiling." The barrier in an organization may be different for different groups that are commonly victims of prejudice and usually is strongly influenced by so-called `corporate culture.'
GOOD: The good is what it is rational to want. Therefore a good knife is one that has characteristics that are rational to want in a device with one blade used for cutting. When one considers what makes a good person, or good character, the matter becomes more complex, because it then becomes important to ask whether the traits under discussion are those that people would want in themselves, or those that they would want in others, and whether those are the same, or in what sort of society those would be the same.

H

HUMAN RIGHTS: See rights.

I

INHERENTLY SAFE: A term that is applied to processes and means that they minimize the use of hazardous materials or the time between creation and use of hazardous materials. In contrast, the notion of inherently dangerous or unreasonably dangerous is a legal notion that applies to products as well as processes. It applies to hazards in normal or reasonably foreseeable use of a device, construction, process, etc., and is a condition of strict liability in tort.
INFORMED CONSENT: A term used to describe the obligation of physicians or researchers to allow patients or subjects to be active participants in decision regarding their care or participation in research. Informed consent, then, is rooted in the concept of autonomous choice or the right of self-determination.

disclosure (of information to the patient/subject)
comprehension (by the patient/subject of the information being disclosed)
voluntariness (of the patient/subject in making his/her choice)
competence (of the patient/subject to make a decision)
consent (by the patient/subject)

But many theorists, like Beauchamp and Childress, believe a more robust definition is needed. Beauchamp and Childress describe three main aspects of informed consent and explain the elements needed for each aspect.

Threshold Elements (preconditions)

competence (to understand and decide)
voluntariness (in deciding)

Information Elements

disclosure (of material information)
recommendation (of a plan)
understanding (of 1 and 2)

Consent elements

decision (in favor of a plan)
authorization (of the chosen plan; with an understanding that it is an authorization)

The elements described above represent the characteristics necessary for agents to make real choices. Lacking relevant information or being coerced, for example, undermine autonomous decisions. (Some information for this definition was taken from Tom L. Beauchamp and Ruth R. Faden, "Meaning and Elements of Consent," in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, vol. 3, ed. Warren Thomas Reich. (New York: Simon and Schuster MacMillan, 1995): 1238-1241.)

L

LEGAL CONTRACT: See Contract.
LEGAL RIGHT: See Rights.
LIABLE: Being obligated by law to make satisfaction, compensation or restitution.
LIABILITY: A legal notion meaning a legal debt or obligation. The liabilities most often discussed in the Online Ethics Center are those to compensate for injury (to one's person, property, finances, or reputation) or to clean up toxic contamination. Legal liability to compensate for an injury or to clean up contamination does not necessarily require that one have caused the injury or contamination, or that one is guilty in a moral sense. Under the doctrine of strict liability a party may be liable without having been guilty of negligence, for example.
LIBERTIES: See Rights.

M

MORAL: Synonym for "ethical." See ethics.
MORAL AGENT: A being whose actions are capable of moral evaluation. We may say that an avalanche killed three people, but the avalanche is not open to moral evaluation. The avalanche is an amoral force. A competent and reasonably mature human being is the most familiar example of a moral agent. In contrast, most so-called "lower" (that is, non-human) animals are generally understood to be amoral (although this is open to debate regarding species that have complex and flexible social relations, like primates and dolphins.)
MORAL INTEGRITY: Moral integrity is a complex and subtle ethical notion. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas has argued, it is central to all the other virtues but more fundamental than any single virtue. The root of the term integrity is wholeness. Moral wholeness rather than rigidity best captures the idea of moral integrity. For example, a person might discover that some long-held ethical belief, attitude or rule of conduct was mistaken because the person came to see that it was incompatible with other, more fundamental ethical commitments. A person's moral integrity is central to a person's sense of meaning. Philosophers like John Ladd have argued that a person's moral integrity is a central aspect of that person's well-being. Therefore, leading another person to compromise her moral integrity is a fundamental injury to that person. Some professional codes of ethics uphold the right of a member to refuse work that would compromise that person's ethical commitments even if the act in question (say, performing an abortion or developing weapons systems) is something that the profession as a whole has not ruled morally objectionable. This is a concern for the moral integrity of the members. It should be distinguished from respecting another's right of self-determination. Respecting another person's right of self-determination is done without regard for the motives of the person in exercising her right. She could be acting on whim or on moral conviction, for example. Concern for a person's moral integrity is a concern to support that person's actions in ways that are consistent with what her moral convictions and commitments, or at least to counter any attempt to force her to act otherwise.
MORAL STANDING: A being's moral standing determines the extent to which its well-being must be ethically considered for its own sake. To say that some group of beings have moral standing is to say that, as a moral matter, their well-being must be given some consideration. It does not decide the question of whether they have the same moral standing as people (and thus have "human" rights). The welfare of such beings, for example cattle, might be considered for prudential reasons, too, but that would not require that they have moral standing. For example one might judge that it would be important to feed one's cattle, just as one might decide it was stupid to throw one's stamp collection into the river, thinking of the stamps or cattle as an investment without believing that either the cattle or the stamps deserve better treatment. In that case one would not be considering the moral standing of the cattle.
MORAL VALUES: See Values.
MOTIVE: A motive is that which moves a person to action. Typically these are emotions, desires or concerns. So people say such things as, "The motive for the crime was revenge." However, it is often common to hear someone speak simply of the intended result as "the motive." For example, any of the following sentences might be used to convey the same thought: "Lee's motive in arising early was to avoid traffic." "Lee arose early to avoid traffic." "Lee arose early because he wanted to avoid traffic." In such cases we assume that a desire or concern to realize the intended state is the implied motive. The expressions "mixed motives" is used most often to suggest, not just any combination off emotions, desires, and concerns but more specifically a mixture of selfish and altruistic concerns.

N

NEGLIGENCE: Failure to be sufficiently careful in a matter in which one has a moral responsibility to exercise care is negligence. Some careless mistakes are negligent, as when a surgeon sews up a patient with surgical instruments inside. Others are not, as when one dribbles soup down the front of one's sweater. A private or civil wrong or injury is called a tort, the prosecution of which tries to recover for a loss caused by someone's failure to fulfill a recognized duty owed to another, or by acting with less care than a reasonably prudent person would do under the same circumstances.
NORMATIVE: When something, such as a standard or a judgment or evaluation, is normative, it concerns respects in which something is good or bad. Therefore, value judgments are normative, but the judgment that X is greener, or heavier, than Y is not. A standard of excellence is normative, in this sense, but a standard of measurement or a statistical norm is not. "Normative" is sometimes used more broadly to mean that which establishes or reflects any sort of standard or norm, even a statistical one. Such usage is not common in discussions of ethics, however, and will not be found in the materials of this Center. This second sense of "normative"makes it a close synonym for "prescriptive," that which "makes or gives rules." Rules need not be normative in the sense in which we use it; rules may only establish order. For example, the statement "Put out your trash for collection on Tuesdays" is a prescription about when to put out trash, but does not suggest or establish that there is anything in Tuesday trash collection that is superior to collection on some other day.)

O

OBLIGATIONS: Requirements arising from a person's situation or circumstances (e.g., relationships, knowledge, position) that specify what must or must not be done for some moral, legal, religious, or institutional reasons. For example, students have an obligation see their advisor on or before Registration Day. People have a moral obligation to keep their promises. Notice that usually statements of obligations specify what acts are required or forbidden without reference to the consequences of performing the act (except in so far as these consequences are a part of the characterization of the act itself - for example, killing is an act that results in death). However, occasionally you will see such statements as "engineers have an obligation in their work to ensure the public safety," which mean that engineers are morally required to ensure the public safety but which do not specify what acts they should or should not perform in order to ensure safety. A legal obligation is a legal requirement that specifies what types of actions are permitted, forbidden, or required on legal grounds. Often legal obligations are monetary debts. When we speak of an obligation without specifying its nature we will mean a moral obligation.
OFFICIAL RESPONSIBILITY: See Responsibility, Official.

P

PATENT: A (special, alienable, prima facie) legal right granted by the government to use, or at least (in the case there are other patents which your use of your patent would infringe) to bar others from using a device, design or type of plant that you have created. (In the US restrictions last for 17 years for useful devices, and 14 years for designs.) To patent a device one must prove that it is useful, original and not obvious. Patents are subject to challenge in court and may be upheld or overturned.
PATERNALISM: Derives from the Latin word for father (pater). Acting like a parent towards those who are not one's children may or may not be justified in particular circumstances. Parents need to make judgments about every area of their young children's lives, but adults assume the responsibility for making those decisions for themselves. Paternalism may be roughly defined (following Gert and Culver) as violating a moral rule of conduct toward someone or limiting that person's self-determination (and hence often infringing that person's rights) for what is perceived as being that person's own benefit. Paternalism may be justified or unjustified, but the paternalistic treatment of adults always requires justification because of the infringement of the person's right that it entails. Paternalism in the treatment of clients most commonly arises in professional contexts where the professional has a face-to-face relationship with those whose well-being they seek to ensure and in professions where practitioners are in positions of greater power than their clients. The question of paternalism often arises in medicine and health care with respect to the treatment of patients. Because many engineers and scientists in industry must protect the safety and health of anonymous members of the public rather than identified clients, and usually do not occupy positions of greater power than the clients they do have, paternalism is not a frequently discussed topic for engineers in industry. Issues of paternalism often do arise for engineers and scientists in relationships among co-workers and in educational contexts, however.
PLAGIARISM: To appropriate the writings, graphic representations or ideas of another person and represent them as one's own, (that is, without proper attribution). Plagiarism is a form of intellectual property violation.
PLAINTIFF: Injured party suing to be compensated for an injury or loss.
PREFERENCES: A statement of a preference is a statement about the person who has the preference. If statements of preference are false it is because they are not true about that person. Such statements of preferences should be distinguished from value judgments which are statements about the thing which is judged good or bad. Economists usually avoid getting into substantive value discussions by only considering what people want or prefer and how much they prefer those things over other things. What makes this confusing is that they sometimes speak about what people "value" but they mean only what people prefer, and not what people have reasons for thinking are good or bad in some respect. It is of course possible for someone to prefer something because they judge it to be good. However, many factors other than value judgments enter into people's preferences, such as their early conditioning, habits, and vivid personal experiences. (If this were not the case, there would not be such a large market for cigarettes, for example, since even most smokers do not judge smoking to be a good thing to do.)
PREJUDICE: Bias for or against someone or something that fails to take true account of their characteristics.
PRINCIPAL: A principal in an engineering firm (or other company) is a co-owner, that is, a partner or stock holder.
PRIVACY: It is common to distinguish three species of privacy: physical, informational, and decisional. In addition, philosopher and legal theorist Anita Allen distinguishes dispositional privacy. Physical privacy is a restriction on the ability of others to experience a person through one or more of the five senses; informational privacy is a restriction on facts about the person that are unknown or unknowable; and decisional privacy is the exclusion of others from decisions, such as health care decisions or marital decisions, made by the person and his group of intimates. Finally, dispositional privacy is a restriction on the ability of others to know a person's states of mind. The claim to privacy finds moral justification in the recognition that people need to have control over some matters that intimately relate to them in order to function as people and be responsible for their own actions. Foremost among these are rights to one's own body. If, for example, people were permitted to drug one another at will, that would effectively undercut the rest of moral life. Just what a person is expected to do in order to respect another's privacy varies with culture. For example, expectations that people will knock on the door before entering certain sorts of areas assumes the existence of both doors and of expectations about the amount of so-called "private space" to which a person is entitled. In some contemporary cultures, parents oversee their children's affairs much more closely than in others. In traditional Chinese families, for example, it is expected that parents will do such things as read the mail addressed to their adolescent children as part of their responsible oversight of their children, whereas in Anglo-American culture such acts would be viewed as intrusions on the adolescent's privacy. Questions of privacy have become particularly prominent as computers and other technological innovations have made it possible to collect, assemble, and transmit quantities of information in ways that previously were impossible. Once the questions of appropriate levels of privacy protection have been decided upon, the question of how that level of privacy can be practically ensured is a matter of security.
PROFESSION: An occupation, the practice of which directly influences human well-being and requires mastery of a complex body of knowledge and specialized skills, requiring both formal education and practical experience.
PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING: In the United States a "professional engineer" ( P.E.) is a person who is licensed to practice engineering in a particular state or US territory after meeting all requirements of the law. To practice in multiple states or territories, the P.E. must be licensed in each state in which he or she wishes to practice.
PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY: See Responsibility, Professional.
PROPERTY: Very different sorts of things are regarded as property. Individual rights to property (other than clothing and other personal effects), especially the right to own land, is a major innovation in so-called modern thought. Land was one important kind of property, physical objects that constitute "the fruit of one's labor" was another. It was a short step from physical property to intellectual property, the fruit of one's intellectual labor which was given some recognition in the U.S. Constitution. See trademark, trade secret, copyright, patent. (Notice that "ideas" cannot be owned by these means but only some "expression," design, or device.) The advent of electronic information has raised new issues and problems about intellectual property and rights to such property, because of the extreme ease with which electronic information can be copied and transmitted.
PROPRIETARY/ PROPERTY RIGHTS: Proprietary rights, claims, etc. are the rights, claims, etc. of owners. Sorting out the rights that go with property ownership is rather complicated, both because of the variety of types of property and because of the problem of sorting out conflicting claims regarding property and conflicts between property rights and other rights.
PRUDENCE OR PRUDENTIAL JUDGMENT: See Values and Value Judgments.

R

REPARATIONS

Benefits given to some group to make amends for damage done by previous injustice. For example, Japanese-Americans who were placed in internment camps during the World War II were recently given a monetary payment (of about $20,000) as reparations. Because children may be damaged by injustice done to their forebears, say because poverty undermines their health or limits their educational opportunities, arguments are made for reparations to descendants of those who were first injured, if the consequences of the injury are of the sort that pass from one generation to the next.

RESEARCH ETHICS or the RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH CONDUCT

This term is used broadly to include many ethically significant issues that arise in research, from fair apportionment of credit among members of a research team, to responsible behavior in submitting or reviewing grant applications, to responsible treatment of research subjects. Since the U.S. government and institutional regulations regarding the treatment of human and animal research subjects predated the increased attention and regulation of matters of research integrity (including fair credit) that began in the 1980s, some sources on the responsible conduct of research address only issues of research integrity and not the treatment of research subjects. Similarly, laboratory safety has long been regulated by OSHA, and is not a matter of research integrity. Therefore, it too is often omitted from discussions of responsible behavior in research. For example, On Being a Scientist, Responsible Conduct in Research, put out by the National Academies (NAS, NAE, IOM), in both its first and second edition omits any discussion of the treatment of research subjects, or laboratory safety. The treatment of research subjects and laboratory safety are reasonably classed as matters of research ethics, even if they are not always included under this designation.

RESEARCH MISCONDUCT

This term is used rather narrowly. It does not include all violations of standards of research ethics. In particular, it is not applied to violations of the norms for the use of human or animal subjects.

In the U.S. the three actions that were the initial focus of misconduct definitions were

Fabrication
Falsification
Plagiarism

Some argued that these four serious deviations from accepted practices did not exhaust the ones that should be considered research misconduct. Others disagreed. A new (U.S.) government-wide definition of research misconduct has been pending since fall 1999--See Proposed Federal Policy on Research Misconduct To Protect the Integrity of the Research Record. A few agency differences seem to be holding up adoption. For example, the National Science Foundation's Office of the Inspector General does consider authorship disputes among former colleagues to be contexts in which valid accusation of plagiarism may arise, but the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (which includes the National Institutes of Health [NIH]) does consider charges of plagiarism made by previous collaborators. The term "scientific misconduct" is sometimes used as a synonym for "research misconduct," although there is a great deal more to scientific practice than research.

RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH CONDUCT or the RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH

See RESEARCH ETHICS

RESPONSIBILITY

The moral and forward-looking sense of responsibility is the sense in which one is responsible for achieving (or maintaining) a good result in some matter. The idea is that one is entrusted with achieving or maintaining this outcome, and expected to both have relevant knowledge and skills, and to make a conscientious effort. However, despite one's best efforts, the result may not be achieved. For example, patients of responsible physicians may die, and the work of a responsible engineer may result in an accident because the accident was not foreseeable, it was not possible to compensate for the factors causing the accident, or because others were unwilling to heed the engineer's warnings.The moral and backward-looking sense of responsibility is that in which a person or group deserves ethical evaluation for some act or outcome, that is deserves moral praise for a good outcome or blame for a bad one. The moral sense of responsibility should not be confused with the causal sense of responsibility for some existing or past state of affairs. For example, when we say that "the storm was responsible for three deaths and heavy property damage," meaning that it caused these outcomes, we do not mean to attribute moral responsibility to the storm. Storms do not have moral responsibilities, and are neither responsible or irresponsible in the moral sense. However, when a moral agent is causally responsible for some outcome, that is some reason to think that the agent is morally responsible for it. Causal responsibility is not conclusive evidence of moral responsibility, however. If one's actions cause a terrible outcome only because of bad moral luck, in the form of a freak accident, then one is not morally responsible for the outcome. Forward-looking responsibilities are often specified in terms of the outcome to be achieved rather than the acts to be performed. It takes judgment to figure out what acts will achieve a given outcome. For this reason you will hear the phrase "the age of responsibility" or "the age of discretion" used to mean an age at which a person is sufficiently mature to exercise such judgment. Such practical wisdom is not required in order to fulfill many obligations which are often specified in terms of the acts to be performed or to be avoided. For example, contrast the engineer's responsibility for the safety of the public with a citizen's obligation to testify when witness to a crime. Notice that "obligation" would never be used in the way "responsible" is, to refer to a virtue of a person. That is, you would not say that so-and-so was an "obligatory" person, though you may say she was "responsible." Sometimes "responsibility" is used to mean an act one is required to perform, as in "It is your responsibility to take minutes for this meeting." In this Center, the term "responsibility" will be used only for matters that require some exercise of discretion and judgment and required acts will just be called "obligations." Sometimes "responsible" is used in a phrase of the form "responsible to (some other party), in which the term "responsible" is used as a synonym for "answerable" or "accountable." An example would be: "This citizens' group was accountable/responsible/answerable to its parent organization." This use of the term "responsible" is easily distinguished from the present one which is "responsible for (some matter for which one must exercise discretion)."

RESPONSIBILITY, OFFICIAL

The responsibility that one is assigned as a result of one's job or office. Unfortunately, official responsibilities might require one to behave unethically -- Still, "it was my job" might be a reason, but it is not a valid excuse for immoral behavior. However, even when the requirements of an official responsibility are ethically acceptable, the concept of an official responsibility functions differently from moral responsibility. Official responsibility resembles moral responsibility in generating prescriptions for conduct - duties, or at least statements about what someone "ought" to do. As philosopher John Ladd points out, moral and official responsibility differ in at least two respects: First, official responsibilities are exclusionary - if one person has a particular official responsibility, another person does not (unless, of course, it was part of the job description of both). Second, official responsibilities, together with whatever rights, duties and requirements for accountability attend them, are all alienable (see rights) - they can be given to or taken over by someone else. In contrast, if one has a moral responsibility to inform the public about some matter, then even if one is in the position to delegate that responsibility to someone else, one still must see that the responsibility is fulfilled, because one does not get rid of a moral responsibility by giving it to someone else.

RESPONSIBILITY, PROFESSIONAL

A paradigm case of the moral responsibility that arises from the special knowledge that one possesses. It is mastery of a special body of advanced knowledge, particularly knowledge which bears directly on the well-being of others, that demarcates a profession. As custodians of special knowledge which bears on human well-being, professionals are constrained by special moral responsibilities; that is, moral requirements to apply their knowledge in ways that benefit the rest of the society.

RIGHT OF SELF-DETERMINATION

The right to choose one's own actions or course of life so long as doing so does not interfere unduly with the lives and actions of others.

RIGHTS

Claims that have some justification behind them. A moral right is a morally justified claim. A legal right is a legally justified claim. When we use the term right without specifying the nature of the justification, we usually mean a moral right. Rights specify the acts that are permitted, forbidden, or required. If they specify the acts that the rights-holder may perform (such as vote, or drive a car), they are often called licenses. If they specify acts that others may not perform (as the right to life obliges others to refrain from killing the rights holder), they are called liberties or (in law)negative rights. If they specify what the rights-holder should receive, some philosophers (such as Philippa Foot) call them claim rights. The law calls them positive rights.

Other major types of classifications of rights are

Alienable rights and inalienable rights - Alienable rights may be taken or given away. Inalienable rights cannot.
Human rights and special rights - Human rights belong to all people, or all people who are competent to exercise them. (An earlier term that is a close synonym for human rights is "natural rights.") In contrast, a right that only belongs to some people is termed a "special" right.
Absolute rights, and prima facie rights - Absolute rights cannot be outweighed by other considerations. Prima facie rights can be outweighed by other considerations. For example, many of those who oppose capital punishment say that the right to life is an absolute right, but those who believe that capital punishment is morally justified in some circumstances say it is only a prima facie right.

Propietary/Property Rights and Copyright.

RISK

Risk is colloquially used as a term for a danger that arises unpredictably, such as being struck by a car. Sometimes it is used for the likelihood of a particular danger or hazard, as when someone says, "You can reduce your risk of being hit by a car by crossing at the crosswalk." When used in technical context, such as "risk assessment" or "risk management" the notion of risk is the probability or likelihood of some resulting harm (such as the likelihood of being killed by being struck by a car) multiplied by the magnitude of the harm. One can then compare, say, the average citizen's risk of death from crossing the street with such a person's risk of death from cancer in a given period. One could also compare the risk of harms of different magnitudes. For example, two monetary risks: the rather likely event of losing a quarter in a broken vending machine, and the comparatively unlikely loss of one's wallet due to robbery at gun point. It may turn out that there is a greater risk of monetary loss from out of order vending machines than from robbery at gun point. Notice that use of the technical sense of risk requires that one be able to meaningfully quantify the resulting harms. For many harms this is difficult to do except in an arbitrary way.

RISKS AND BENEFITS

See Costs and Benefits.

S

SAFETY: Freedom from danger; a property of a device or process which limits the risk of accident below some specified acceptable level.
SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT: See Research Misconduct, Fraud, Falsification, Plagiarism.
SCREENING: Testing of a large number of individuals designed to identify those with a particular genetic trait, characteristic, or biological condition.
SECURITY: The security of a system is the extent of protection against some unwanted occurrence such as the invasion of privacy, theft, and the corruption of information or physical damage.
SELF-DECEPTION: A failure to make explicit, even to oneself, some truth about oneself (often one's behavior). It may take the form of making up some rationalization for a behavior that is inconsistent with one's sense of self or it may take the form of failing to take notice of some of the features of the situation when it would be appropriate to do so (this phenomenon is one that psychologists call "denial.") Self-deception is a bar to authenticity.
STAKEHOLDER: A person or group who can affect or is affected by an action. Responsible decision making requires consideration of the effects on all stakeholders. Usually all stakeholders are not entitled to consideration of the same aspects of their welfare, however. For example, a corporate decision may affect or be influenced by employees, stockholders, customers, suppliers, communities, some government agencies, and corporate competitors. Competitors are entitled to fairness in competition, but not to the same consideration as, say, employees.
STANDARD: Something established as a basis of comparison in measuring or judging capacity, quantity, content, value, quality, etc.; a specified set of safety or performance qualities which a device or process must possess. These must generally be demonstrated by a series of tests conducted under pre-determined conditions.
STANDARD OF CARE: The standard of care is the degree of care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in the circumstance in question. In negligence law if a person's conduct falls below such standards, he may be liable in damages for injuries or damages resulting from his conduct. In professional malpractice cases, a standard of care is applied to measure the competence as well of the degree of care shown by the professional's actions . A traditional standard for a practitioner is to "exercise the average degree of skill, care, and diligence exercised by members of the same profession (or specialty within that profession), practicing in the same or a similar locality in light of the present state of the profession" (Gillette v. Tucker). See Black's Law Dictionary, 6th edition. 1404-5.

T

THERAPEUTIC ILLUSION: A condition under which research subjects falsely believe that taking part in a particular study will likely result in some direct therapeutic benefit for themselves.
THERAPEUTIC ORPHAN: A label given to children by the drug development and pharmaceutical industry. This label refers to a concern that a fear of harming individual children by exposing them to research results in harming children as a class by undermining efforts to gain knowledge about how to better treat them.
TORT: A private or civil (as contrasted with criminal) wrong or injury. Sometimes "tort law" is used as a general designation to include provisions concerning breaches of contract as well as a failure in some duty. However, the term, "tort" is commonly used more narrowly to refer only to specific failure in some recognized duty, or failure to exercise reasonable prudence or care. In this narrower sense "tort" is contrasted with with "breach of contract" (failure to fulfill such a legal agreement). (See Black's Law Dictionary.)
TRADEMARK: An officially registered and legally restricted name, symbol or representation, the use of which is restricted to its owner.
TRADE SECRET: A device, method or formula that gives one an advantage over the competition and which must therefore be kept secret if it is to be of special value. It is legal to use reverse engineering to learn a competitor's trade secret. "Know how" concerning research procedures may function as something like a trade secret.
TRUST: Trust is confident reliance. We may have confidence in events, people, or circumstances, or at least in our beliefs and predictions about them, but if we do not in some way rely on them, our confidence alone does not amount to trust. Reliance is a source of risk, and risk differentiates trusting in something from merely being confident about it. When one is in full control of an outcome or otherwise immune from disappointment, trust is not necessary. It is, of course, possible to rely on other people or on circumstances simply because one lacks other options. Basis for confidence in relying on some person may not be morally sound. Trust may be naive or otherwise ill-founded. In that case it is likely to be disappointed. Trust may also rest on a morally unsound foundation as when, for example, one party feigns trustworthiness or behaves reliably only because the other party dominates. Philosopher Annette Baier offers as a test of the moral soundness of trust relationships that they thrive rather than wither when the basis for confidence is revealed. Baier's discussion of the moral soundness or decency of trust relationships draws attention to the ethical mistake of putting the preservation of dependable behavior ahead of concern for its morality. (The question of moral soundness arises only for trust relationships, so that, for example, trust in a tow rope or in a computer program might be well-founded or ill-founded but not decent or corrupt.)
TRUSTWORTHINESS: When trust is well-founded and if trust of another person or moral agent) morally sound, then it is based on trustworthiness. Put another way, that which deserves trust is trustworthy.

V

VALUES AND VALUE JUDGMENTS

Value judgments judge things to be good or bad in some respect. Moral or ethical values are only one type of value and moral evaluation is only one type of value judgment.

Consider the following value judgments

This is a good (important, significant) hypothesis.
That is a good (insightful or informative) article.
This is a good (beautiful, masterfully executed) symphony.
That is a good (prudent or effective) strategy.
This is a bad (stupid, short-sighted) idea.
That is a good (virtuous, of high moral character) person.
This is a bad (evil, vicious) motive.
That is a good (kind, generous or right-minded) act or deed.
That is the right thing to do.

The first two are judgments of epistemic or knowledge value. The third is an aesthetic judgment. The fourth and fifth are prudential judgments. The sixth, seventh, and eighth are moral judgments. The ninth is also a moral judgment that is similar in some respects to the eighth. However, the presence of "the" rather than "a" in the ninth at least suggests that the act in question is uniquely acceptable. Assertions such as the ninth are usually justified by an appeal to moral rules, often to the exclusion of any mention of consequences. There are other types of value and value judgments that we are less likely to discuss in this subject, such as religious value. Religious terms of evaluation include "sacred" and "holy," as contrasted with "profane" and "mundane." In addition to purely religious standards, most existing religions have moral or ethical standards.

VIRTUES and VICES

Positive and negative traits of moral character, such as honesty, kindness, or being a courageous or responsible person. Notice that these terms of moral evaluation are applied to people, rather than to their actions (like rights, obligations, and moral rules) or to the outcomes they seek to achieve (like responsibilities).

W

WASHOUT STUDY: A study in which patients/subjects are removed from all psychiatric medication to study baseline states or pure effects of new drug treatment
WHISTLE-BLOWER: A person who takes a concern (such as a concern about safety, financial fraud, or mistreatment (of research animals) outside of the organization in which the abuse or suspected abuse is occurring and with which the whistle-blower is affiliated. Not all whistle-blowing is equally adversarial to the affected organization, even though it is at least an embarrassment for an organization to be exposed as one that cannot correct its own problems. There are many regulatory agencies such as OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Organization) that exist to perform oversight and to which whistle-blowers can go anonymously. Going to those charged with oversight, such as regulatory agencies, is usually seen as much less adversarial than, say, going to the media. Some people have used the term "whistler-blower" for those who raise an issue within their organization, but the more general term for a person who raises an issue inside or outside an organization is "complainant."

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