Each involves issues that cannot be resolved based simply on the scientific or technical value, but demand reflection on moral principles. Consider:.
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1. There are not enough organ donations for everyone who needs a liver transplant. How should a physician decide who gets a new liver and who does not and dies .
as a result? Should it always be the Mickey Mantles of the world who get priority treatment? (10).
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2. Nuclear waste is accumulating at temporary storage facilities all across the United States. But every proposal for the construction of a permanent storage facility is challenged by special interest groups, such as environmentalists, as favoring another interest group, such as the nuclear power industry. How are these conflicts to be resolved? (11).
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3. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." What is the meaning of this right in a world where papers and effects, not to mention persons and places, are increasingly transformed into digitalized information in cyberspace? (12).
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Ethical problems of personal and public decision making are not new. The need to undertake ethical reflection is part-indeed a central part-of what it means to be human. But as these three cases indicate, ethical decision making is increasingly engaged with advances in modern technology. .
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Even if technology does not create radically new ethical problems, as some argue, it surely constitutes a new and important domain for old-fashioned moral struggles to resist temptation and to do the good. The importance of such struggles can hardly be overemphasized, since technological change not only sets up hard problems for ethical reflection, but ethical decisions also influence how we use and live with our technologies.