Benefit sharing has been a recurrent theme in international debates for the past two decades. However, despite its prominence in law, medical ethics and political philosophy, the concept has never been satisfactorily defined. In this conceptual paper, a definition that combines current legal guidelines with input from ethics debates is developed. Philosophers like boxes; protective casings into which they can put concisely-defined concepts. Autonomy is the human capacity for self-determination; beneficence denotes the virtue of good deeds, coercion is the intentional threat of harm and so on. What about benefit sharing? Does the concept have a box and are the contents clearly defined? The answer to this question has to be no. The concept of benefit sharing is almost unique in that various disciplines use it regularly without precise definitions. In this article, a definition for benefit sharing is provided, to eliminate unnecessary ambiguity.
Imagine you are walking down a city street. It is windy and raining. Amidst the bustle you see a young woman. She sits under a railway bridge, hardly protected from the rain and holds a woolen hat containing a small number of coins. You can see that she trembles from the cold. Or imagine seeing an old woman walking in the street at dusk, clutching her bag with one hand and a walking stick with the other. A group of male youths walk behind her without overtaking, drunk and in the mood for mischief. It doesn't need an academic to say what vulnerability is. We can all see it, much more often than we care to.
Achieving equity in international research is a pressing concern. Exploitation in any scenario, whether of human research participants, institutions, local communities, animals or the environment, raises the overarching question of how to avoid such exploitation. Agreed principles can be universally applied to research in any discipline or geographical area, whatever methodologies are employed. This chapter introduces a collection of case studies, presenting a range of up-to-date examples of exploitation in North-South research collaborations, in order to raise awareness of ethics dumping.
Codes of ethics and conduct typically demand the highest standard of ethical behaviour from every single employee. This implies a democratic or lobbyist understanding of ethics in business. The contrasting view would argue that business ethics is an elitist undertaking that can only be instigated from the top, by managing directors or owner managers. This article looks at three types of ethical businesses, three types of approaches to ethical problem‐solving, and three possible incentives for ethical business to see which of the above is more convincing. It will be argued that the impulse for value‐driven business has to come from the top. Only top management and owner managers have the opportunity to foster major change in business practice.
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