The paper contains an overview of ethical issues related to technoscience, followed by a more detailed presentation of ethical aspects of measurement-based experimentation, publishing peer-reviewing practices. The need for increased sensitivity of scientists to this kind of issues is justified by the evolution of research institutions in the postmodern era.

The report encompasses the activity of the Committee on Ethics in Science in the year 2017.

The spread of pseudoscientific beliefs and opinions is one of the more serious problems of modern societies. Pseudoscientific beliefs and opinions question the authority of science and may lead to serious harms to individuals and whole societies. In recognition of these hazards, the Committee of Ethics in Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences submits the following statement for the consideration of researchers, teachers in higher education and primary and secondary schools, as well as institutions which are responsible for education, and the society at large. The statement characterizes pseudoscience, its main causes and forms, as well as its key ethical aspects. It also contains recommendations for scientists and academic institutions on the appropriate responses to this troubling phenomenon.

The article presents possible ways of development of decision-making processes in autonomous vehicles. The highest degree of autonomy means that it is not the driver but the system, machine or artificial intelligence that makes decisions about road activities. The total autonomy of vehicles gives them predictability, limits the number of accidents they cause, but also highlights the need to develop an ethical system that artificial intelligence will be able to refer to in a critical situation. It is not possible to foresee all the situations that will occur on the roads, so it is necessary to create robot- -human rights that will be a new and binding kind of decalogue. The key issue is that robotic-human rights should be universal, transparent and really applicable to everyone, otherwise there will be chaos on the road and the expected decrease of the number of accidents due to the introduction of autonomous vehicles will not come to pass.

It is nearly impossible to study behaviour effectively without any reference to its context. This is because it is generally known in the psychological literature that behaviour is partially a product of its environment. This suggests that many behavioural processes may be universal but there are significant variations in their manifestations. For instance, love may be a universal process but its manifestation varies from one society to another. Given that ethical decision-making is a behavioural process, it stands to reason that its manifestation will vary from one culture to another. It is against this premise that this paper seeks to demonstrate that despite the existence of the ‘universal’ normative ethical principles, ethical decisions will be expected to vary across cultural space and even evolve with time. This paper achieves this objective by employing typical ethical dilemmas that Ghanaian psychologists and other health professionals encounter to show how and why what is ethical in one culture becomes unethical in the Ghanaian context and what is unethical in the Ghanaian context becomes ethical in another culture.

In the course of his pontifi cate John Paul II delivered over 200 speeches to research workers, students, senates and chancellors of universities on various forums. As the research worker he always cared about the good of the university which he regarded as the masterpiece of culture for the sake of research efforts undertaken by it which include particular aspects of the reality and the didactic and educational activity which serves the entire mankind and the future of the young generation.

Indeed John Paul II addressed his speeches, letters and proclamations to Catholic universities but the subjects touched by him have an universal character, that is to say they relate to all universities. In the present study it has been treated of the most important aspects of the activity of the university. First of all the university ought to serve the truth. The pope considers the truth to be the greatest value from which all other values originate and to which they aim; every truth comes from God who is the Highest Truth.

John Paul II insists strongly on the ethical dimension of scientific research, especially in the subject of biogenetics and bioethics, since all scientific researches have to serve the good of the man and his development and also the respect of dignity of the human. As according to John Paul II modern universities become more and more dehumanised, therefore he insists on the restitution of their humanistic visage since the man and his good have to be the fundamentals of all knowledge. Two further arguments exposed by the pope refer to the neccessity of interdisciplinary research for the sake of fragmentation of particular scientific areas and their results, as well as the need of their synthesis and high qualifications of the professor’s staff who on the one hand have to deepen their specialistic knowledge and have to be the real authority for the young people. The university not only teaches but also educates.

Like all religions Islam, too, has substantial ethical contents. The unique character of Islamic ethics, however, comes from the fact that it is entirely rooted in religion and so cannot be separated from it. Thus it is formed by the teaching of the Quran, to which the way of life of the Prophet Muhammad (sunnah) offers explanations. Man’s behavior in this sense is an act of either obedience or disobedience to God himself. It is also true that in the Muslim world a philosophical conception of ethics has evolved mainly due to Islam’s encounter with Greek culture. The central concept of Islamic ethics is character (khuluq), which is the state of man’s soul. It is in his character that man develops a tendency to perform either good or bad actions. Such understanding of human dispositions has much to do with Aristotle’s perception of man’s inner state that guides him to good or evil actions. These preliminary basic clarifications on Islamic ethics are then followed by brief accounts of select issues of moral life. Among those there are three main virtues (justice, kindness, charity) and vices (indecency, wickedness, oppression), marriage and the family, or the sanctity of human life (implying an ethical rejection of abortion and euthanasia).

In Christian ethical and anthropological discourse, the concept of “human nature” represented one of the main criteria from which norms for social and individual ethics derived. The age of Enlightenment brought about a serious criticism of this concept refusing its metaphysical justification. New opinions prevailed in philosophical and scientific discourse of that time. They rejected existence of common anthropological determinants and supported a thesis claiming that people are primarily formed in society and that the concept of “human nature” entails a risk of abuse of power by promoting only one view of the human being. The presented paper studies the relevance of this concept today and examines it from the perspective of Jonathan Haidt’s social psychology, which, as the author claims, contributes to better understanding of human nature. Standard metaphysical and theological definitions of human nature that prevailed mostly in Christian discourse needs to be extended by including findings from social and exact sciences and use them as a suitable medium for a dialogue in a pluralistic environment, and push the limits of our knowledge about humans.

The article presents the phenomenon of increasing sharing in-formations for free on the Internet and the contemporary development of gift economy in the form of a movement most often called cybercommunism. The article points out two basic attitudes in treating information. According to the first one, information should be treated as a commodity to which property rights can be attributed and which is subject to market play. This involves such issues as copyright, fees, licenses and other ways of protecting the interests of market players. The second attitude is to treat valuable information as a common good, often with a moral imperative to share it (to varying degrees Open Source and Open Acces, the idea of copyleft, DIY, P2P network, YouTube, The Pirate Bay domain etc.). Since every concept or movement proclaiming a community of goods is called communism (in a broader sense of the word, in a narrower sense it is a specific political system, e.g. the Soviet Union), today we are dealing with digital communism on the Internet. Some researchers (Firer-Blaess, Fuchs) point to Wikipedia as an example. The Internet encyclopedia operates on the basis of principles that go beyond the capitalist way of production and represent an informational-communist way of production: in the subjective dimension, it is a cooperative work and in the objective dimension, a shared ownership of the means of production. The text also presents the division of ethics into an abstract and concrete one, applied to the behaviour of network users. If someone within the framework of an abstract ethics preaches the principle of “You will not pirate.” (copying and distributing illegally) is a corresponding principle of specific ethics that says “You will not pirate unless O1 or O2...or he.” In practice, concrete ethics push many Internet users to treat Internet resources as a common good, from which everyone can draw according to their own needs. Digital communism can be treated, on the one hand, as a partially implemented idea and, on the other, as a postulate. From an axiological point of view, this postulate would be connected with the Internet implementation of equality (access to resources for everyone) and freedom (access to all information).

The subject of the considerations put forward in this article is an evaluation of the quality, in substantive and ethical terms, of the specialist translation into Polish of Henryk Hiż’s article ‘Peirce’s Influence on Logic in Poland’. The translation subjected to evaluation here was published in 2015 in the specialist philosophical journal Studia z Filozofii Polskiej [Studies of Polish Philosophy] (October 2015, pp. 21–33). In the presented evaluation, I point out substantive and ethical violations committed by interpreter, calling attention to (a) the flouting of the principle cuilibet in arte sua ; (b) manipulation of source material; (c) dishonesty in philological-textological development; (d) improper editorial preparation; (e) disregard of the subsequent literature on the subject; (f) deliberate and unjustified abridgement of the original text. The deficiencies enumerated in points (a)–(f) are the result of interpreter’s adoption of the ‘publish or perish’ strategy, the overriding goal of which is to publish an article in a high-impact journal with the aim of achieving the most favourable bibliometric result in the shortest possible time, at a cost to the integrity and ethical responsibility of the translator-researcher.

The current model of hunting economy, focused mainly on killing innumerable number of game species and finding joy and benefit in it, does not totally fulfil criteria of sustainable, ethical and rational management. This work provides an overview of evidences that the moral evil of hunting, together with the whole hunting culture, are not rationally justifiable. I am going to validate there is no reasonable argument for maintaining hunting economy and culture in the on-going, archaic condition. I maintain that therefore an immediate system reform of our hunting economy is necessary. There is a broad list of objection to the different aspects of hunting practices, which are presented and discussed in short in the paper. A reformed hunting institution, endowed with veterinary service, should guard some animals’ interests by different strategies of assuaging some conflicts among people and animals, as catching alive, flushing, separating or biosafety and professional reprocessing of infected corpses. The main recommendation for the ossified hunting tradition is the appeal for listening to the opinion of experts in natural sciences.