ETHICS IN PROGRESS
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Ethical AI in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review Addressing Privacy, Security, and Fairness
Full text linkThe integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into healthcare presents both transformative potential and profound ethical challenges. This paper examines how ethical principles, such as transparency, fairness, accountability, and privacy, are applied and operationalised in healthcare AI. Using a structured narrative review approach, we analysed over 70 peer-reviewed empirical studies, policy documents, and regulatory frameworks that span applications in clinical decision support systems, diagnostics, mental health interventions and personalised medicine. Particular attention is given to the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, data scientists and regulators. We assess fairness using demographic parity and equalised odds and evaluate transparency via explainability metrics and auditability practices. Our findings highlight the persistent issues of demographic bias, lack of stakeholder participation, and regulatory fragmentation. We propose a typology of responsible AI metrics, including data representativeness indices, fairness-accuracy trade-off scores, and human-AI oversight benchmarks, that can guide the ethical evaluation and deployment of AI models. By emphasising intersectionality, contextual equity, and co-designed governance, this study moves beyond generic ethical appeals to concrete implementation strategies. Our contribution offers a practical and interdisciplinary roadmap for aligning AI innovation with patient-centred values, institutional accountability, and evolving EU regulatory standards in the healthcare sector
Harmonized Alignment in Ethical Leadership: Synthesizing Maimonides’ Rational Allegiance and Dessler’s Giving Paradigm
Full text linkThis article offers a comparative analysis of leadership paradigms articulated by Maimonides and Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, emphasizing their enduring relevance to contemporary ethical and organizational leadership. Maimonides’ Dual Allegiance model integrates intellectual rigor, ethical autonomy, and social responsibility into a rational, duty-bound framework. In contrast, Rabbi Dessler’s Giving Paradigm, as presented in Strive for Truth, centers on relational ethics, moral intentionality, and the transformative power of altruistic giving. Despite their differing emphases – cognitive clarity versus emotional insight – both approaches converge in promoting a multidimensional, ethically grounded vision of leadership. This study introduces Harmonized Alignment, a synthesis that balances intellect, empathy, and moral action, grounded in classical Jewish thought. The model offers practical guidance for leaders navigating ethical dilemmas and striving to foster sustainable, value-driven organizational cultures in complex modern environments
Reproducing Binary Sex: The Post-pandemic Theories from a Gender and Normative Perspective
Full text linkDuring the notorious collective experience of COVID-19 pandemic, the prospect of a better future was featured in public interventions in the light of the recent painful circumstance. The theories of the post-pandemic world were prominent in this debate. This article attempts to examine some of them in order to investigate how broader social theories integrate the gender perspective. From the approximately forty English-language monographs by important scholars and thinkers which have characterised the relevant body of work, only ten of them have been found to contain explicit gendered references. Those were the selected sample of an analysis which was conducted from a social constructionist point of view articulated with a (neuro)feminist perspective. Despite the epistemological and methodological advances in the study of gender relations, the long dominant approach of binary sex constituted the basic framework of the analyses in the examined post-pandemic theories. This is a choice that does not advance the public debate on gender relations, since it de facto ignores and silences the multiplicity of gender identities and intersectional premises
Attitudes towards Medically Assisted Reproduction among Students in Three Euro-Mediterranean Countries
Full text linkHuman reproduction has traditionally been an important issue in medical ethics. Advances in medical technology and the development of medically assisted reproduction (MAR) procedures are creating new bioethical dilemmas. This study is based on a quantitative approach using the survey method on a convenience sample of students (N=1097) from five universities from four fields of study – Medicine, Law, Theology and Philosophy – in Croatia, Greece and Italy. The aim of this study was to investigate students’ attitudes towards various aspects of medically assisted reproduction. Three hypotheses were tested using t-tests and ANOVA to examine differences in attitudes based on variables such as country, field of study, gender, year of study, religiosity, political orientation, financial status and size of their place of residence. Despite sharing a common Mediterranean cultural heritage, students from Italy showed a greater disapproval of MAR, but due to the small effect size, this difference should be interpreted with caution and the hypothesis could not be fully confirmed. In addition, Theology students had statistically significantly more negative attitudes toward MAR. Regarding differences in students’ socio-demographic characteristics, women, older students, individuals who are not religious and those who are politically left-oriented tended to have more liberal attitudes toward MAR. The results enable further reflection on the concept of Mediterranean Bioethics. These findings highlight how disciplinary background and religiosity shape ethical attitudes toward MAR within the Mediterranean context
Three Realistic Principles for Nurturing Ethical Prosocial Behavior
Full text linkThe world is in trouble with numerous significant challenges to life and society such as climate change, divisive politics, economic disparity, war, racism and discrimination, and violence. At the core of these issues is human behavior and in particular, ethical decision making. The purpose of this reflection is to underscore three practical principles to encourage more prosocial behavior by (a) embracing the reality of egoism, (b) finding ways to merge egoism with the common good, and (c) socially engineer ethical behavior that benefits society. Considering ethical decision making and nurturing prosocial behavior in a realistic manner provides at least some hope for relieving the many difficulties that our society faces
Life as Self-Maintenance
Full text linkThe article constructs the organism as a living being and – unlike an automaton – as an individual concerned with its own self-maintenance, endowed with intrinsic purposiveness, autoregulation, and with an agency of the self as well. This is done from the perspective of the philosophy of organism developed by Kant, Hegel, and Plessner, and subsequently in the light of Systems Theory. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature proves to be best suited to emancipate the contemporary, comprehensive concept of organism and its selfhood. To put it with Hegel’s words, it ‘is the Concept that comes into reality’ here
Hegel’s Theory of Love as an Attitude to Life
Full text linkFor those who see Hegel as the philosopher of the closed system or the Prussian monarchy, it may come as a surprise or even a shock that love is one of the greatest and still inspiring topics of his philosophy. Hegel’s theory of love can enrich contemporary discussions on the philosophy of emotions and the theory of feeling in many ways, provided that it is reconstructed in a philologically and hermeneutically correct, philosophically profound and astute manner. The present paper will discuss Hegel’s views on love in two contexts. The first context is the history of progress summed up in his early considerations, which he treats in the field of tension between religion and philosophy. Within the extremely broad and manifold cultural horizon of the early works, Hegel assigns an existential meaning to love not only in an individual, but above all in an inter-individual sense. It is precisely in Hegel’s treatment of love that one can recognise the first germs of his intersubjective model of human existence – including individual existence – as it appears in his mature philosophy (second context)
Deduction of the Concept of ‘Vitality’ in Hegel’s Philosophy
Full text linkIn Hegel’s philosophy, the dialectic of life is based on the expedient course of the concept. This contribution sets itself the task of conducting a hermeneutical and historical-critical reconstruction of the foundation of Hegel’s speculative-dialectical method. The aim is to reveal the philosophical genesis of the concept of ‘vitality’ and its interrelation with spirit. In such a perspective, the idea of the emergence of living matter, which is opposed to the processes of decomposition in the universe, is proposed. The hypothesis here offers a treatment of negative entropy (negentropy) in terms of Hegel’s speculative-dialectical methodology and the spiritual force of the concept that resists the decay of matter. Within such a philosophical conceptualisation arises the concept of vitality, which clarifies the relation between the form of consciousness that a subject can achieve and the energy it will expend to build and structure such a form of consciousness. Of interest is the result that the infinite growth of vitality simultaneously achieves absolute spiritualisation
The Life of/in Nature. From Hegel to British Idealism and Its Twentieth-Century Afterlives
Full text linkThis essay traces the philosophical development of the concept of organic life and nature from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature through British Idealism to the twentieth-century thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Hans Jonas. It highlights how Hegel’s idea of the organism as a self-producing, purposive unity influenced later thinkers, directly or indirectly, shaping views of nature as inherently processual, relational, and teleological. By uncovering the Hegelian echoes in British Idealism and beyond, the essay argues for the continuing relevance of speculative conceptions of life and nature. This reconstruction offers new insights into contemporary philosophical biology and environmental ethics, suggesting that the categories of organism, purposiveness, and selfhood remain vital for rethinking the place of life within nature today
The Dialectic of Life in Hegel’s Thought. An Introduction
Full text linkThis issue of Ethics in Progress titled Unfolding Life – The Dialectic of the Living in Hegel’s Thought. Philosophical Foundations and Contemporary Resonances builds upon the discussions initiated in issue no. 2/2024 of the journal, which explored the enduring relevance of Hegel’s early philosophy through the theme Nature and Spirit. While continuing along that trajectory into Hegel’s mature philosophy, the present issue narrows its focus to a central dimension of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: the concept of life in its diverse manifestations. The contributions investigate various forms of living being – plant, animal, and human – examining their underlying impulses, structural dynamics, and vulnerabilities. Together, the essays highlight how Hegelian philosophy offers critical resources for engaging with contemporary questions about the nature and conditions of life