About the Book

This book investigates how ethics generally precedes legal regulation, and looks at how changes in codes of ethics represent an unparalleled window into the research, innovation, and emerging technologies they seek to regulate. It provides case studies from the fields of engineering, science, medicine and social science showing how professional codes of ethics often predate regulation and help shape the ethical use of emerging technologies and professional practice. Changes in professional ethics are the crystallization of ongoing conversation in scientific and professional fields about how justice, privacy, safety and human rights should be realized in practice where the law is currently silent. This book is a significant addition to this area of practical and professional ethics and is of particular interest to practitioners, scholars, and students interested in the areas of practical and applied ethics.

About the Author: Kelly Laas is the Librarian/Information Researcher at the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (CSEP) at the Illinois Institute of Technology. During her eleven years at the Center, she has supervised a number of projects relating to the development of online ethics resources and collections, including the management of CSEP's large Ethics Codes Collection. She is currently collaborating with the National Academy of Engineering's Center for Engineering, Ethics and Society in a five-year National Science Foundation-funded project in developing bibliographies and other materials for the Online Ethics Center, as well as developing the Ethics Education Library, an online database of articles, syllabi, ethics case studies, and best practices of how to integrate ethics into existing technical courses and workshops. Along with coordinating the Center's funded projects, Ms. Laas also collaborates with Illinois Tech faculty in engineering, science, the social sciences and business schools to help integrate ethics into existing courses. She received her MLS in 2005 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is a member of the College and Research Libraries division of the American Library Association.
​Elisabeth Hildt is the director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and Professor of Philosophy at Illinois Institute of Technology. After having completed her studies in biochemistry, Elisabeth Hildt became a fellow of the post-graduate program Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen, where she did her doctorate writing a thesis on personal identity issues in neural grafting. Afterwards, she was the scientific coordinator of the interdisciplinary project European Network for Biomedical Ethics. After several years of post-doctoral experience at the University of Munich she was an assistant professor at the Chair for Ethics in the Life Sciences at the University of Tübingen. From 2008 to summer 2014, Elisabeth Hildt was the head of the Research Group on Neuroethics/Neurophilosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Mainz.Michael Davis is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions and Professor of Philosophy, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Before coming to IIT in 1986, he taught at Case-Western Reserve, Illinois State, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. For 1985-86, he held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Davis has published more than 190 articles (and chapters) and authored seven books: To Make the Punishment Fit the Crime (Westview, 1992); Justice in the Shadow of Death (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Thinking Like an Engineer (Oxford, 1998); Ethics and the University (Routledge, 1999); Profession, Code, and Ethics (Ashgate, 2002); Actual Social Contract and Political Obligation (Mellen, 2002); and Code Writing: How Software Engineering Became a Profession (Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, 2007). He has also edited or co-edited five other books: Ethics and the Legal Professions (Prometheus, 1986) and a second edition (Prometheus, 2009); AIDS: Crisis in Professional Ethics (Temple, 1994); and Conflict of Interest in the Professions (Oxford, 2001) and Engineering Ethics (Ashgate, 2005).