This book introduces bioengineers and students who must generate and/or report scientific data to the ethical challenges they will face in preserving the integrity of their data. It provides the perspective of reaching ethical decisions via pathways that treat data as clients to whom they owe a responsibility that is an existential component of their professional identity. This book introduces bioengineers who must generate and/or report scientific data, to the ethical challenges they will face in preserving the integrity of those (...) data. It provides the perspective of reaching ethical decisions via pathways that treat data as clients to whom they owe a responsibility that is an existential component of their professional identity. The initial chapters lay a biological and philosophical foundation for ethics as a human activity. The middle chapters explore ethical problems in relevant professions. Middle chapters have two parts, a main body that deals with micro-ethics, individual behavior, and an adjunct that deals mainly with macro-ethics, policy. The adjunct consists of essay problems, and subjects for debates. It can also be used for individual study using links in the enrichment sections to access group experiences. The final chapters connect bioengineering science ethics with society via medical product development and its regulation by the FDA. The book was developed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in bioengineering. It also contains much needed material that researchers and academics would find valuable. (shrink)

In Causation, Prediction, and Search (CPS hereafter), Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and I developed a theory of statistical causal inference. In his presentation at the Notre Dame conference (and in his paper, this volume), Glymour discussed the assumptions on which this theory is built, traced some of the mathematical consequences of the assumptions, and pointed to situations in which the assumptions might fail. Nevertheless, many at Notre Dame found the theory difficult to understand and/or assess. As a result I was (...) asked to write this paper to provide a more intuitive introduction to the theory. In what follows I shun almost all formality and avoid the numerous and complicated qualifiers that typically accompany definitions or important philosophical concepts. They can be all be found in Glymour's paper or in CPS, which are clear although sometimes dense. Here I attempt to fix intuitions by highlighting a few of the essential ideas and by providing extremely simple examples throughout. (shrink)