We all now know that the novel coronavirus is anything but a common cold. The pandemic has created many new obligations for all of us, several of which come with serious costs to our quality of life. But in some cases, the guidance and the law are open to a degree of interpretation, leaving us to decide what is the ethical (or unethical but desired) course of action. Because of the high cost of some of the obligations, a conflict of interest can arise between what we want to do and what it is right to do. And so, some people choose to respect only the letter of the law, but not the spirit, or not to respect even the spirit of the guidelines. This paper identifies and describes the new obligations imposed on us all by the pandemic, considers their costs in terms of the good life, and provides an ethical analysis of two personal and two public cases in terms of the letter and spirit of the guidance and legislation.

Over a 10-year period, a valley in Crocker Range Park in Sabah (Malaysia) has witnessed a conflict between a community located inside its boundaries – the Ulu Senagang/Mongool Baru – and the state government's parks department – Sabah Parks. Sabah Parks sought to designate the area as a co-managed community use zone (CUZ) in which sustainable practices are allowed to continue, but disagreement over how the zone was to be governed resulted in a prolonged impasse. This paper assesses whether conflict management tools could overcome the impasse. This study assessed the CUZ conflict via a systematic methodology known as ethical analysis (EA), which aims to reveal stakeholder interests, values and principles and identify barriers and bridges to negotiated settlements. First developed in the medical field and subsequently employed in the analysis of forestry disputes, this is the first time that EA has been utilized in the context of protected area management. The EA revealed significant misalignments between stakeholders’ positions that were sufficient to prevent a perfect win–win solution from emerging. As such, at least one party would have to make compromises in order for the CUZ to be established. The EA revealed that whilst both sides in this conflict were willing to move forwards with negotiations, they had been prevented from doing so by mutual mistrust and a number of misconceptions that had developed during the negotiation process. The EA tool was fit for purpose in identifying the underlying causes of the CUZ conflict, which were determined to be resolvable so long as both sides were willing to make compromises. The study concludes that other co-managements could similarly benefit from the employment of EA, which can be easily incorporated into existing protected area conflict management models and structures. We propose that the utility of EA can be further enhanced in the conservation management context by incorporating assessments of stakeholder priorities and worldviews into its analysis structure.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to explore barriers and facilitators influencing the integration of ethical considerations in health technology assessment (HTA).

Methods: The study consisted of two complementary approaches: (a) a systematic review of the literature; and (b) an eighteen-item online survey that was distributed to fifty-six HTA agencies affiliated with the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment.

Results: The review identified twenty-six relevant articles. The most often cited barriers in the literature were: scarcity, heterogeneity and complexity of ethical analysis methods; challenges in translating ethical analysis results into knowledge that is useful for decision makers; and lack of organizational support in terms of required expertise, time and financial resources. The most frequently cited facilitators included: usage of value-based appraisal methods, stakeholder and public engagement, enhancement of practice guidelines, ethical expertise, and educational interventions.

Representatives of twenty-six (46.5 percent) agencies from nineteen countries completed the survey. A median of 10 percent (interquartile range, 5 percent to 50 percent) of the HTA products produced by the agencies was reported to include an assessment of ethical aspects. The most commonly perceived barriers were: limited ethical knowledge and expertise, insufficient time and resources, and difficulties in finding ethical evidence or using ethical guidelines. Educational interventions, demand by policy makers, and involvement of ethicists in HTA were the most commonly perceived facilitators.

Conclusions: Our results emphasize the importance of simplification of ethics methodology and development of good practice guidelines in HTA, as well as capacity building for engaging HTA practitioners in ethical analyses.

Health-care workers face ethical dilemmas in their decision-making in every clinical intervention they make. In times of armed conflict the decisions may be different, and the circumstances can combine to raise ethical tensions. This article looks at the tensions in peacetime and in times of armed conflict and examines the types of cases that doctors and other health-care workers will face. It also discusses the common ethical decision-making framework and the role of communication within both clinical care and ethical analysis.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to critically examine the current guidance for conducting ethics analysis in health technology assessment (HTA) and to offer recommendations for how to improve this practice.

Methods: MEDLINE, Philosopher's Index, and Google Scholar were searched for articles and reports using the keywords “ethics” and “health technology assessment” and related terms. Bibliographies of all relevant articles were also examined for additional references. A philosophical analysis of the existing guidance was conducted.

Results: We offer three recommendations for improving ethics analysis in HTA. First, ethical and legal issues must be clearly separated so that all policy-relevant questions that the technology raises can be considered clearly and systematically. Second, analysts must make better use of ethics theory and discuss better how particular theoretical approaches and associated analytic tools are selected to make transparent which alternative approaches were considered and why they were rejected. Third, the necessity for philosophical expertise to adequately conduct ethics analysis needs to be acknowledged.

Conclusions: To act on these recommendations for ethics analysis, we offer these three steps forward: acknowledge and use relevant expertise, further develop models for conducting and reporting ethics analyses, and make use of untapped resources in the literature.

Certain developments in the agricultural and food sciences have far-reaching implications for society and the environment, which suggest the need to examine their ethical acceptability as a standard component of technology assessment. Such considerations have led to the emergence of a new academic discipline, food ethics. The present paper describes how ethical theory may be applied to the analysis of the impacts of prospective food biotechnologies to assess potential effects on four 'interest groups', i.e. consumers, producers, treated organisms and the biota (fauna and flora). The principles which structure the framework used, i.e. the ethical matrix, are adapted to the field of agriculture and food from those applied in medical ethics. Use of the ethical matrix is illustrated by applying it to the specific case of bovine somatotrophin, the genetically-engineered protein hormone which is injected into lactating cattle to increase their milk yields. Ethical analysis is seen to depend on a number of critical requirements, i.e. scientific data, non-scientific evidence and predictions, suitably-qualified assessors ('competent moral judges'), the 'world-views' of the assessors and application of the precautionary principle to cope with 'uncertainty'.