What is the relationship between biotechnology employees’ beliefs about the moral outcomes of a controversial transgenic research project and their attitudes of acceptance towards the project? To answer this question, employees (n=466) of a New Zealand company, AgResearch Ltd., were surveyed regarding a project to create transgenic cattle containing a synthetic copy of the human myelin basic protein gene (hMBP). Although diversity existed amongst employees’ attitudes of acceptance, they were generally: in favor of the project, believed that it should be allowed to proceed to completion, and that it is acceptable to use transgenic cattle to produce medicines for humans. These three items were aggregated to form a project acceptance score. Scales were developed to measure respondents’ beliefs about the moral outcomes of the project for identified stakeholders in terms of the four principles of common morality (benefit, non-harm, justice, and autonomy). These data were statistically aggregated into an Ethical Valence Matrix for the project. The respondents’ project Ethical Valence Scores correlated significantly with their project acceptance scores (r=0.64, p<0.001), accounting for 41% of the variance in respondents’ acceptance attitudes. Of the four principles, non-harm had the strongest correlation with attitude to the project (r=0.59), followed by benefit and justice (both r=0.54), then autonomy (r=0.44). These results indicate that beliefs about the moral outcomes of a research project, in terms of the four principles approach, are strongly related to, and may be significant determinants of, attitudes to the research project. This suggests that, for employees of a biotechnology organization, ethical reasoning could be a central mechanism for the evaluation of the acceptability of a project. We propose that the Ethical Valence Matrix may be used as a tool to measure ethical attitudes towards controversial issues, providing a metric for comparison of perceived ethical consequences for multiple stakeholder groups and for the evaluation and comparison of the ethical consequences of competing alternative issues or projects. The tool could be used to measure both public and special interest groups’ ethical attitudes and results used for the development of socially responsible policy or by science organizations as a democratizing decision aid to selection amongst projects competing for scarce research funds.

中文翻译：

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衡量生物技术员工对有争议的转基因牛项目的伦理态度：伦理价值矩阵

生物技术员工对有争议的转基因研究项目的道德结果的信念与他们对该项目的接受态度之间有什么关系？为了回答这个问题，新西兰公司 AgResearch Ltd. 的员工 (n=466) 接受了一项关于创建转基因牛项目的调查，该项目包含人类髓鞘碱性蛋白基因 (hMBP) 的合成副本。尽管员工的接受态度存在差异，但总体上是：支持该项目，认为应该允许项目完成，使用转基因牛为人类生产药物是可以接受的。将这三个项目汇总形成项目验收分数。根据共同道德的四项原则（利益、非伤害、正义和自主），制定了量表来衡量受访者对确定的利益相关者项目道德结果的信念。这些数据被统计汇总到该项目的道德效价矩阵中。受访者的项目道德价值得分与其项目接受度得分显着相关（r=0.64，p<0.001），占受访者接受态度方差的 41%。在四个原则中，非伤害与项目态度的相关性最强（r=0.59），其次是利益和正义（均 r=0.54），其次是自主性（r=0.44）。这些结果表明，就四项原则方法而言，对研究项目道德结果的信念与以下因素密切相关：并且可能是对研究项目的态度的重要决定因素。这表明，对于生物技术组织的员工，道德推理可能是评估项目可接受性的核心机制。我们建议道德效价矩阵可用作衡量对有争议问题的道德态度的工具，为比较多个利益相关者群体的感知道德后果以及评估和比较竞争性替代问题或项目的道德后果提供度量.