Ethics

What is right and wrong

moral och etik

Ethics research is about what is right and what is wrong and how we should act. Should we allow surrogacy, for example? Who should receive a donated organ, such as a kidney? Should western countries compensate for injustices in their former colonies? These are some of the questions that LiU researchers are studying.

The majority of ethics researchers at Linköping University are investigating moral issues within different sectors of society, i.e., “applied ethics”.

Medicine is one of these areas. In healthcare, the use of technology that can be used to monitor the patient in their home environment – such as wall-mounted fall detection devices and sensors inside and on the body. But the home is perhaps the place where we most want to be free of monitoring and supervision. Does such monitoring constitute an infringement of a person's integrity? A central question is also which principles should apply to prioritisations in health and medical care.

Asides the questions that arise in the field of medicine, here at LiU we study ethical problems in areas such as IT, politics, economics, education and research. Subjects of particular relevance at this time are migration and global justice.

 Applied ethics can be empirical. Researchers are thus investigating what individuals and groups in society feel about different ethical issues via e.g., surveys or interviews. It can also be normative in the sense that the researchers put forward critical views and constructive proposals to decision-makers in different sectors of society.

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