My Interest in Business Ethics

Region
Pacific

Sector
Academic - Faculty/Staff

Areas of Interest
Health ; Health - Biotech ; Health - Healthcare ; Human Rights ; Public Policy


Me in Brief

Michael McDonald was the founding Director of the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics (1990-2002). He received an Honours BA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. From 1969 to 1990, he was a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Waterloo.

Dr. McDonald’s work is located at the intersection of theory and practice in health care, business and professional life, politics, and other aspects of everyday life. He has written on such topics as the ethics of research involving human subjects, cross-cultural ethics, the rights of communities, professional and corporate responsibility, and the place of applied ethics in contemporary society. He has played an important leadership role in the development of a significant Canadian research capacity in applied ethics.

Dr. McDonald is the Principal Investigator on a CIHR-supported project, Towards the Ethical Governance of Canadian Research Involving Humans: Principles, Policies, Practices and Outcomes. This research is designed to provide an in depth ethical, historical and qualitative study of Canadian arrangements for the use of human subjects in health research.

Dr. McDonald is a co-investigator on the Genome Canada and Genome BC project, Democracy, Ethics and Genomics headed by Michael Burgess. McDonald is also a co-investigator on two projects in transplantation ethics -- one on Living Anonymous Donation headed by David Landsberg of the BC Transplant Society and the other on Ethnocultural beliefs regarding organ donation headed by Anita Molzahn at the University of Victoria.

Dr. McDonald's current research centres on the ethics of research involving humans. For the Law Commission of Canada, he and his research team just completed a report on the Governance of Health Research Involving Human Subjects. As well, he was recently involved in preparing reports on the integration of ethics into the new CIHR and is a member of CIHR’s Working Group on Ethics. McDonald serves on several ethics committees in British Columbia and is the Canadian Bioethics Society representative to the Canadian Council on Animal Care. As well, he was member the Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel on the future of Health Canada’s Non-Human Primate Centre.