Customer Reviews

Ethics of Emerging Technologies: Scientific Facts and Moral Challenges

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This book closely resembles (and perhaps is intended to be) a textbook. For someone without interest in the topic, the text and layout may seem a bit dry. Ethics is an interesting, and often overlooked subject.

For anyone with an interest in the topic (which should be many, many people), it is great. I have an engineering degree and graduate degree, and yet was never required to take an ethics course (nor was one even offered). This book made me realize a lot of the ethical challenges that the scientific community faces.

Highly recommended for science, engineering, and technology majors, along with a host of other people whose lives/jobs/decisions are influenced by emerging technologies. (Even if *not* required as part of your degree program...)

In the days of stem cell research and cloning and online maps with pictures that show private citizens and residences, one wonders if a text like this should be mandatory reading for everyone in science and technology.

As other reviewers have noted, this textbook, being a textbook, is a bit dry, and a bit neutral. It focuses on giving information, not livening it up for a lay audience. Anyone considering this for recreational reading should probably think twice, unless they're an academic who reads this sort of material all the time.

My own two complaints about the book are as follows:
1) They really, really strained to get their Four As. It'll be hard for students to remember at first, because they're not all verbs or all nouns, and frankly it just feels clumsy.
2) Some of the example ethical quandaries aren't quandaries at all, but more shooting fish in a barrel. It makes it easy to find at least one thing to castigate the characters for, but it also detracts from the reality.

Despite those complaints, i do wish that this had been the text for a business ethics course i took a few years ago.

Exhaustive and detailed. Excellent as a reference too. Most situations are not black-or-white. Instead they require asking the right and often difficult questions, and answers may not always be straightforward. Technology can often help, but exacerbate the issues at hand at times.

While the Preface states that the book should be useful for just about anyone interested in pursuing a "career in various areas of the engineering, medical, chemical, and biological sciences", the presentation and organization of the book is academically oriented and should not be confused with a pulp-business thriller.

The title of the book is "Ethics of Emerging Technologies", and it is the last chapter in the book which actually deals with such fast emerging areas in technology as Nanotechnology, Neuroenhancements, Deep Brain Simulators, Brain-Computer Interfacing, Psychopharmacalogy, Human Space Exploration, and even a section on "Ethics in Colonization of the Moon and Mars". These can be considered the "emerging" technologies even within the broader category of "emerging technologies".

So what are the earlier chapters all about then?
There is an introduction, where the authors lay out their framework using which solutions to ethical issues and issues prevented: "Acquire Facts", "Alternatives", Assessment", and "Action". Then there is a chapter on the general ethical issues surrounding scientific research, "Responsible Authorship", "Stealing and Copyright", "Conflicts of Interest, etc...

The other chapters are devoted to Information Technology Ethics, Business Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Ethics of Genetically Modified Organisms, Medical Ethics, Human Experimentation, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Stem Cell Technologies, and Enhancement Technologies.

To take two examples:
In the chapter on medical ethics, the following are discussed:
- conflicts of interest can arise in several situations. The three specific areas the authors outline are opportunity for personal gain beyond ordinary reimbursement, when "providing care for patients who are undergoing research procedures when the physician has an interest in the outcome other than that of acquiring unbiased scientific data...", and "between a physician's goal of providing the best care and the goal of the health care organization to make the most profit"
- ethics of futile care, where the treatment is "unlikely to result in the improvement in the condition of the patient"
- patients' right to information: where informed consent is considered a must
- issues of confidentiality, and the resultant laws passed in the US to protect patient data, or ownership of patient data
- refusal or treatment, where questions that arise are whether coercion should be an option, the patient's family should be involved, whether manipulation is ok, and so on.

A controversial chapter may well be the one on animal experimentation. Why? Because attitudes towards animal experimentation, at least in some parts of the world, have been informed for millennia by religious beliefs. Sample this:
"Controversy in this area dates back to biblical times and the story of creation:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. .... replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." [page 289]
The utility of animal experimentation cannot be denied under certain circumstances, but in other cases the "knowledge gained does not warrant this malfeasance." [page 290]
Today, federal laws (in the US and elsewhere) have been drafted since 1966 to regulate the use of animals in research, and ameliorative options such as animal imaging, transgenic animals, mircoarrays, etc...

The chapter on Information Technology ethics has a sort of a blooper, on page 82. An email joke has been doing the rounds for several years now that starts off with a customer trying to order a pizza over the phone. Since the pizza chain has access to all sorts of information about the customer, including his eating habits, medical history, his brushes with the law, etc... the joke is on how a lack of information privacy has intruded into peoples' lives. This email is fictional, but all that the book describes it as is "Anonymous e-mail".
Other areas covered in the chapter are invasion of privacy, loss of confidential data, poss of privacy as a result of monitoring, selling and other unauthorized uses of personal information, ethics of camera surveillance, misuses of intellectual property, hacking, hoaxes, fraud, censorship, spam, and more. One topic that could have been covered is the ability available now to stalk someone as a result of programs like those offered by Google to allow users to publish their locations via cell phones on to the net. Working in this industry, while I felt the information on this topic could have been more detailed, I also realize that this topic is perhaps worthy of a separate book(s) itself.

This book is written in a very accessible manner, and should be required reading for graduate students.

This is a textbook designed for an ethics course but makes fascinating reading for anyone who is interested in the ethical dilemmas that come with advent of technology. It made me think of business school where Ethics was a required course and a majority of the students voted for it as the best course they took during business school. What made this course so very powerful and personal was that it was designed around real cases and moral dilemmas (e.g. Enron, Fortune companies overlooking child labor). Through discussion we realized what paths were possible and what paths were actually taken by the leaders of the companies. At the end of the class the professor always left us with a question hanging in the air "What would you do if you were in this situation?". It was always sobering as the class sat in silence, minutes after the professor left, reaching deep into their psyche to determine what they might have done given similar circumstances. The answers were not always pleasant and differed based on cultural differences (cultural relativism)or "duty ethics", some of the concepts discussed in this book. It was a life defining course for me, and helped me understand how small business decisions can have far reaching consequences.

I gave so much background about my business school experience to make the argument that ethics should be a mandatory course for any undergraduate and graduate college. And this book is a good text book for such a course. Although it focuses on technology and will be especially relevant to technical students - engineering/medical, it should be required for all colleges as technology touches us in every aspect of life.

Often we make decisions which concern technology even in our daily lives - to use material found on the web in our write up, or to send spam mail, without thinking about ethics and consequences of our actions. This book lays out the basic premises in the beginning and then delves into each of the emerging technology topics one by one. The "Problem Sets" at the end of each chapter are designed so that they can be undertaken before you delve into the chapter. Some of them require legwork, such as, going to a store and asking them how they will use the information acquired when signing up for the club card. Or email sites who do not have an explicitly stated privacy policy. Others require research - such as forming an opinion on the Kyoto protocol or discuss how far they would go to implement projects that have environmental impact. This is the first book I have seen on this subject and although some technologies may have already advanced beyond what is stated in the book, the fundamental questions remain the same.

Here is how the book is laid out:
-Ethical Principles - At the beginning the book defines the various principles as applied to reasoning/decision making.
- Ethics in Scientific Research
- IT Ethics
- Business Ethics
- Environmental Ethics
- Ethics of genetically modified organisms
- Medical ethics
- Ethics of human and animal experimentation
- Ethics of assisted and reproductive technologies
- Ethics of stem cell technologies
- Ethics of Enhancement technologies (Gene therapy etc.)
- Ethics of Emerging technologies
As you can see from this list there is no subject that you may have not thought about as all of these touch us in our daily lives, if only through media hype. This is a good text book and will give college students the right material to delve into the ethics of the decisions they will be making in their future lives.

The Budingers wrote this textbook to help students, professionals, and interested laypersons develop a ethical framework for evaluating the moral issues that arise from emerging technologies. Chapters address the ethics of scientific research, information technology, business , environmentalism, genetic modification, medicine, human and animal experimentation, reproductive technologies, stem cell technologies, enhancement technologies, etc. The opening chapter lays out a framework for moral analysis referred to as "the Four A's": acquisition of facts, alternatives, assessment, and action. It also defines and outliens the strengths and weaknesses of various traditional ethics, from deontology to utilitarianism, concluding that no one ethical "school" is adequate to solve every ethical dilemma.

On the upside, this book is fairminded, comprehensive, includes numerous case studies in each chapter, and has extensive bibliographies. On the downside, it's written like a textbook (dry, academic language); and it would've benefited from a bit more focus, say, by focusing on emerging technologies in medicine, rather than emerging technologies as such. Nonetheless, if you're looking for an introduction to ethical debates about emerging technologies, this book is a must have, whether you agree with its authors' analysis and assessments or not.

Even though this book is written for graduate studies in science & engineering discipline, it is also very useful read for professionals and business leaders who are (or will be) involved in making decisions in the emerging technologies. Ethics and moral challenges are addressed in B-Schools and corporate management development trainings. But when it comes to technologies (& research) like Stem Cell, Assisted reproduction, human & animal experimentation, etc., one has to know lot more than just the business side of such decision-making.

The authors of this book are very talented people. Their writing style is simple, data-based, and above-all thought-provoking & convincing. The first chapter is on general ethics & second on ethics in scientific research. All subsequent chapters then address a specific emerging technology and the ethical issues there.

Authors first educate you by providing the basic knowledge of a particular technology, slowly taking you to advanced level and then present the relevant ethical issues. Then there are lot of case-studies and examples to make one aware of the decision-making process and its pros & cons.

I think anyone, no matter whether a scientist, or manager, or business leader, who plans to get into the new technologies of futuere must read this book.

This is a really good book. VERY in depth and VERY detailed about a heck of a lot of pressing issues today. It really is a nice reference to have without having to google and search through a lot of filler material, this book gets straight to the point of all the current emerging issues.

Examples, graphs, statistics, equations, and a lot of references help you to understand not only what the issue is about, but most importantly the differing points of views that may exist, the moral dillemas, and possible solutions.

I not only enjoyed reading a lot of these just for my own pleasure in order to quench my appetite for some subjects and also strengthen my own arguments should I ever get into a discussion about the topics; but being in medical school, I know a lot of these issues WILL come up in practical scenarios and must be addressed, this book will help me do that in many ways.

Ethics & Emerging Technologies provides the reader with many controversial questions. I was not surprised when I discovered that this was intended to be a student textbook. The book presents many situations in which ethics come into play: Such as stem cell research, life support, etc. All the topics are well researched and documented and the information is presented in a non-judgemental way.

That being said, this is long book and not particularly exciting. However, if you read it bit by bit, it is quite thought-provoking.

This book was published in 2006 and is written as a textbook for use in college courses. It contains problems at the end of the chapters. The book seemed very comprehensive and discussed pretty much all of the scientific ethics and moral challenges facing us. It includes chapters covering emerging technologies, stem cells,animal experiments, computer technology, alternative energy, medical, and other topics relevant to today.

The text is interesting to read and the book never seems to bore.

'Ethics of Emerging Technologies' will be a valuable resource-tool for scientists, technicians, engineers, businessmen, academics, politicians, doctors and, of course, for philosophers. This volume is important because it addresses the plethora of moral questions that have arisen, or will arise, as a consequence of recent scientific innovations and advancing technologies. Such topics as the Ethics of Stem-Cell Research, of Cloning, of Human and Animal Experimentation, of the Environment and of Emerging Technologies, are placed under the "microscope" of ethical scrutiny. Ultimately, the analysis of these controversial topics yields tons of scientific facts that are necessary for the solution of these issues in light of both progressive ideologies and traditional moral beliefs. The text is clear in its presentation of the facts, highlighting key points, providing detailed charts, tables and graphs. Also included is an exhaustive bibliography, pointing to relevant sources and a definitive and comprehensive glossary elucidating major terms. Overall, 'Ethics of Emerging Technologies' should be standard text-book reading at universities, hospitals, institutions and all general professions in the work-force.