Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Utility -
1. Condition of being useful.
2. Useful outcome.
3. Level of enjoyment an individual attains from choosing a certain combination of goods.
Valuation - Quantifying or otherwise placing value on goods and services. Monetized valuation uses
monetary currency (e.g., gross domestic product), whereas many environmental and quality of life
resources are not readily conducive to monetized valuation, e.g., old growth forests have nonmonetized
value (e.g., habitat, ecological diversity) but little monetized value since they are not used for timber.
Value -
1. Principle, standard, or quality that are good for a person to hold.
2. Worth.
Value engineering (VE) - Systematic application of recognized techniques by a multidisciplined team to
identify the function of a product or service, establish a worth for that function, generate alternatives
through the use of creative thinking, and provide the needed functions to accomplish the original
purpose of the project, reliably, and at the lowest life-cycle cost without sacrificing safety, necessary
quality, and environmental attributes of the project (US Department of Transportation).
Value of life -
1. Economic or moral worth of a human being.
2. Marginal cost of preventing death (social sciences).
Variability - True heterogeneity or diversity (e.g., among a population that is exposed to airborne
pollution from the same source and with the same contaminant concentration, the risks to each person
as a result of breathing the polluted air will vary).
Veil of ignorance - Notion introduced by John Rawls (
A
Theory
of
Justice
, 1971) to determine morality
of an action supposing that societal roles can be completely reshaped and redistributed, and that
the ethical decision maker does not know his or her reassigned role. This is an attempt to reach
distributive justice (see Distributive Justice).
Very low birth weight - Weight of human baby at birth less than 3 pounds and 5 ounces (1500 grams).
Compare to low birth weight.
Vice - Immorality; negative moral trait. Opposite of virtue.
Virtue - Moral excellence or goodness. Opposite of vice.
Virtue ethics - Ethical theory that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in ethical decision making.
Focuses on what makes a good person, rather than what makes a good action. One of three major
theories of normative ethics (see Normative Ethics), along with consequentialism and deontology
(see Consequentialism and Deontology or Deontological Ethics).
Vulnerability - Condition of an individual or population determined by physical, social, economic,
and environmental variables, wherein susceptibility to a hazard increases (e.g., asthmatics are more
vulnerable to the effects of some air pollutants than is the average person).
Way of knowing - Method of learning. Discovery and reason hold primacy as scientific ways of
knowing. Intuition (see Intuition), to scientists, is an advanced, integrated means of knowing. All
are considered
a
posteriori
knowledge (see
A
posteriori
knowledge). However, theological ways
