What is to be done? – Ethical conflicts and how to handle them, with some illustrations from CITEC

Once and again, modern science and technology display irritating side-effects: they create new situations that turn out to be ethically puzzling. In these situations one simply doesn’t know whether a certain course of action is right or wrong, good or bad, obligatory, permissible, or forbidden. Still, the question is: “What is to be done?” This question gave birth to applied ethics, a new discipline of age-old philosophy. In our presentation we will give a short introduction into applied ethics and then discuss a couple of problems which were provided by CITEC members beforehand. Hopefully, at this point our presentation will swiftly develop into an interdisciplinary discussion.