Final Exam Review

Question 1

What should be the overall goal of pandemic response and preparedness according to LIVES?

Answer 1

other things being equal, it’s right to maximise the number of lives saved under given constraints.

Question 2

What should be the overall goal of pandemic response and preparedness according to YEARS?

Answer 2

other things being equal, it’s right to maximise the number of life years saved under given constraints.

Question 3

What should be the overall goal of pandemic response and preparedness according to FAIR?

Answer 3

other things being equal, it’s right to maximise the number of lives saved below a reasonable lifespan (R) or, given all lives below R being saved, it’s right to maximise the number of lives saved above R.

Question 4

Order priority

Answer 4

who gets the resources first, who gets it next, and who gets it last.

Question 5

Zero-sum priority

Answer 5

who gets the resources and who doesn’t get any resources.

Question 6

Proportional priority

Answer 6

who gets more resources and who gets less.

Question 7

Restrictive approach to LIVES

Answer 7

the closer and more relevant the health care resource under consideration is to the event of death, the tighter and more restrictive the definition of a priority group must be.

Question 8

LIVES priorities for critical care (ventilators, ICU beds, ECMO)

Answer 8

frontline health care professionals are first priority; patients with greater chance of survival are second priority; and then essential workers exposed to the disease are third priority.

Question 9

LIVES priorities for hospital beds

Answer 9

patients facing a high risk of death are first priority; and then very old patients are second priority.

Question 10

LIVES priorities for antiviral drugs

Answer 10

frontline healthcare professionals are first priority; and then symptomatic patients facing an increased risk of severe conditions and death are second priority.

Question 11

Two complications for antiviral drugs

Answer 11

priority between preventative care for higher-priority groups and treatment of symptomatic patients; and determining priority of pre-exposure and post exposure preventative care for essential workers.

Question 12

LIVES priorities for vaccines

Answer 12

uninfected frontline health care professionals are first priority; uninfected people at an increased risk of severe conditions and death are second priority; and essential workers exposed to the disease are third priority.

Question 13

Is it ever ethically defensible to ration healthcare resources based on vaccination status? (3 views)

Answer 13

• Desert-based view: yes, when unvaccinated people were reasonably expected to get vaccinated.
• Luck egalitarian view: yes, but not when ICU beds are unoccupied.
• Financial penalty view: not for critical care, but the unvaccinated must pay some financial price for not being vaccinated.

Question 14

3 steps for allocating heath care resources during pandemic outbreaks

Answer 14

1. “treat similar patients similarly, regardless of socioeconomic status.”
2. aim at correcting the disproportionate burden of risk all the way up to hospitalisation.
3. non-pharmaceutical interventions should also be targeted at the socioeconomically disadvantaged

Question 15

Vaccine nationalism

Answer 15

when a government of a country gives a greater priority to its own residents over non-residents in the provision of vaccines.

Question 16

Fair Priority Model vs COVAX

Answer 16

Fair Priority Model: (a) reducing premature deaths; (b) reducing economic and social deprivations; and then (c) reducing community transmission
COVAX: (a) proportional allocation for all countries, then (b) maximising the impact of a limited supply of vaccines.

Question 17

Total Good

Answer 17

restriction on a person’s freedom against their will is permissible if and only if the bad of the restriction is outweighed by a sufficiently large sum of good that the restriction does to them and others.

Question 18

Harm Principle

Answer 18

restriction on a person’s facts against their will is permissible only if it prevents harm to another (necessary condition).

Question 19

Paternalism

Answer 19

restriction on a person’s act against their will is permissible if it prevents harm to themselves (sufficient condition).

Question 20

“Thin” vs. “Thick” common ground

Answer 20

• “Thin” common ground: it is right to minimise the instances and extent of restrictions of freedom
• “Thick” common ground: it is permissible to restrict a person’s freedom just in case that they are likely to cause substantial harm to both themselves and others

Question 21

The problem with PCR tests

Answer 21

it’s ineffective and ethically wrong to “test all” people.

Question 22

The problem with human challenge trials (HCTs)

Answer 22

although few individual HCTs have serious incidents, there might be multiple serious incidents out of many HCTs over time.

Question 23

Excess mortality

Answer 23

difference between the total number of deaths from all causes during a certain period and an average of the number of deaths during the same period in the past several years.

Question 24

counterfactual scenarios

Answer 24

what ‘could have been’ under different circumstances

Question 25

3 methods of developing counterfactual scenarios

Answer 25

1. Assessment of the impact of the pandemic
2. Mathematical modelling of pandemic outcomes
3. Comparing light-handed and heavy-handed approaches to pandemic response and preparedness in different countries

Question 26

Cost benefit analysis (CBA)

Answer 26

CBA assesses the pros and cons of climate policies in purely monetary terms according to people’s willingness to pay for them; the course of action recommended by CBA is the one that is least costly.

Question 27

3 objections against cost benefit analysis (CBA)

Answer 27

1. it is monistic about value
2. it cannot support aggressive climate measures
3. it misunderstands our duties to future generations.

Question 28

Why are ethics necessary in discussing climate change?

Answer 28

(1) it’s difficult to say why climate change is a problem without making value judgments and because (2) we cannot make sense of climate change policy without invoking ethical considerations at the international and intergenerational levels.

Question 29

Why might ethics not be adequate in discussing climate change?

Answer 29

if climate change isn’t like other paradigmatic moral problems and if commonsense morality needs to be revised or revolutionised to grapple with climate change.

Question 30

The Precautionary Principle and its dilemma

Answer 30

The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimise the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Dilemma: either too weak or too banal advice.

Question 31

Adaptation and mitigation

Answer 31

Adaptation: not just technological enhancements but also adapting laws (e.g., introducing and recognizing the category of “climate change” or “climate refugees” in international law).
Mitigation: any human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.

Question 32

We shouldn’t try to reduce the complex problem of climate change to the three drivers of ____, ____, and _____.

Answer 32

population, economic growth, and efficiency

Question 33

What should we do to achieve international climate justice? (3 views)

Answer 33

• Procedural justice: establishing fair procedures in relevant institutions.
• Distributive justice: allocating essential and scarce resources fairly.
• Corrective justice: compensating those who have been unfairly harmed through poor distribution.

Question 34

Polluter Pays Principle

Answer 34

you broke it, you fix it.

Question 35

Beneficiary Pays Principle

Answer 35

even if a party is not to blame for an historically produced injustice, it can be liable for payment if it benefited from the economic structures the injustice has produced.

Question 36

Ability to Pay Principle

Answer 36

if a party is able to reduce or prevent harm then, other things equal, it may be required to pay to do so.

Question 37

If poorer nations must burn fossil fuels to develop, then…

Answer 37

either (a) they cannot develop; or (b) their increases in emissions must be accompanied by more dramatic cuts in the developed world (the international arms race).

Question 38

Intergenerational arms race

Answer 38

each generation is forced to burn fossil fuels to cope with climate change, making the climate crisis worse for each succeeding generation.

Question 39

The Non-identity Problem (5 points)

Answer 39

(1) We have a decision between a risky policy or a safe policy, and we choose the risky policy.
(2) Due to its scale, choosing the risky policy will ramify pervasively into the social world.
(3) (2) will cause different people to have been born than would have been born under the safe policy.
(4) The lives of the people born under the risky policy will be worth living.
(5) Therefore, they cannot blame us for the quality of the world they are bequeathed since the only other option for them (for example, the world under the safe policy) is non-existence.

Question 40

Person-affecting view of morality

Answer 40

attitudes of blame are directed at the victim of harm.

Question 41

Comparative notion of harm

Answer 41

some victims are harmed only if they are worse off than they would have been under some alternative scenario.

Question 42

3 options to solve the Non-Identity Problem

Answer 42

• Option 1: replace the person-affecting conception of morality with an impersonal principle of beneficence.
• Option 2: deny the comparative notion of harm by inserting a wedge between harm and being made worse off.
• Option 3: deny premise 4 and say the lives of most future people won’t be worth living if we adopt the RP.

Question 43

Just Savings Principle

Answer 43

we are required to maintain for future generations the institutions of justice as well as the material conditions supporting those institutions. The Just Savings Principle looks too demanding but also not demanding enough. But one solution might be to abandon contractarianism for another moral theory.

Question 44

Contractarianism

Answer 44

an action is morally permissible only if it is the product of agreeement among well-informed moral agents

Question 45

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Answer 45

a game-theoretical thought experiment in which two prisoners, separately interrogated by the police, produce a sub-optimal outcome for themselves by reneging on their prior agreement to stay silent

Question 46

Negligibility thesis

Answer 46

the notion that since individual contributions to some process or outcome are irrelevant to that process or outcome, making those individual contributions is irrational.

Question 47

Parfit’s view of the negligibility thesis

Answer 47

it would be a mistake in moral mathematics to apply the negligibility thesis to climate change.

Question 48

Barry and Øverland’s view of the negligibility thesis

Answer 48

emitting carbon is not morally innocent when you are (a) emitting in a world of 8 billion or more other emitters, in a situation which (b) your actions may trigger dangerous positive feedback loops, and (c) the limited space remaining in the carbon budget needs to be allocated to the developing world.

Question 49

Human-human virtues

Answer 49

courage; benevolence; and hope.

Question 50

Human-nature virtues

Answer 50

frugality; humility; and respect.

Question 51

Institutional Theory of Justice

Answer 51

all individual duties of justice are defined by and limited to the principles and regulatory arrangements of just institutions.

Question 52

Following the Institutional Theory of Justice, what responsibilities of climate justice do individuals have in the non-ideal circumstances currently prevailing? (3 options)

Answer 52

• Option 1: deny that we have any duties of justice
• Option 2: individuals must pick up the slack for the missing institutions
• Option 3: work collectively to build just institutions

Question 53

Carbon offsetting

Answer 53

seeing to it that, for every unit of carbon you emit, an equivalent amount is prevented from being emitted.

Question 54

Christine Korsgaard’s view on treatment of other non-human animals

Answer 54

Kant was right to think that our duties to other animals arise from our duties to ourselves, but he was wrong to think that duties are not owed to the other animals. Since animals don’t make claims on us based on common moral laws we come up with together, we make claims on ourselves on their behalf insofar as we see them as falling outside the protection of our moral laws.

Question 55

Rosalind Hursthouse’s view on treatment of other non-human animals

Answer 55

the concept of moral status is superfluous to answer that question. Our treatment of animals is highly context-dependent. (eg. vegetarianism, pets)

Question 56

Ethical veganism

Answer 56

all current animal farming practices and individual consumption of these products is morally wrong.

Question 57

Modest Ethical Veganism

Answer 57

it is typically morally wrong to use animal products (Tristram McPherson).

Question 58

Conscientious Omnivorism

Answer 58

at least humanely farming animals for meat and their byproducts and consuming those products is morally permissible (Terence Cuneo).

Question 59

New (“virtuous”) Omnivorism

Answer 59

minimising animal harm, in our non-ideal circumstances, sometimes requires eating some animals out of compassion for them (Christopher Bobier).

Question 60

McPherson’s Anti-Complicity Principle

Answer 60

it is typically morally wrong to aim to benefit by cooperating with the wrongful element of others’ plans.

Question 61

Cuneo’s Support Principle

Answer 61

one morally ought not symbolically support an essentially wrong practice, which provides some good G, if there are readily available and comparable alternatives to G.

Question 62

4 premises in Bobier’s argument for new omnivorism

Answer 62

1. Non-Ideal World Thesis
2. Animal Care Thesis
3. Free Meat Thesis
4. Pain Free Animal Thesis

Question 63

Non-Ideal World Thesis

Answer 63

A strict plant-based diet involves animal harm

Question 64

Animal Care Thesis

Answer 64

the virtuous person cares about animals and seeks to minimise animal harm

Question 65

Free Meat Thesis

Answer 65

incorporating free animal products in one’s diet will minimise the number of animals harmed in food production

Question 66

Pain Free Animal Thesis

Answer 66

incorporating animals that don’t experience pain—and hence can’t be harmed— in one’s diet will minimise the number of animals harmed in food production

Question 67

Longtermism

Answer 67

(1) our actions today will affect how much longer humanity survives and (2), we can affect how well or badly the lives of future people are, for as long as humanity survives. What determines all this is the significance, persistence, and contingency of our actions.

Question 68

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Answer 68

aims to design machines that mimic (or otherwise replicate) human intelligence; could “lock-in” whatever values may be dominant at the time.

Question 69

Setiya’s view on longtermism

Answer 69

longtermist thinking will dominate expected value calculations in practice by ruling out any moral views that say saving people alive today is more important than saving future lives. Theoretical issues arise because we should be uncertain about longtermism’s handling of uncertainty too, especially regarding climate change and space colonisation.

Question 70

Can life be meaningful in virtual reality? (Robert Nozick and David Chalmers’ views)

Answer 70

Robert Nozick: no, we want to do certain things; be certain people; and have contact with physical reality.
David Chalmers: yes, VR isn’t illusory; it isn’t always preprogrammed; and many non-virtual environments are artificial.

Question 71

4 theories on what’s missing in VR

Answer 71

1. Hedonism and experientialism: what’s missing in VR is positive (conscious) experiences.
2. Desire-satisfactionism: what’s missing in VR is things we desire.
3. Objective list view: what’s missing in VR is (one or more) objectively valuable things.
4. Ubuntu: what’s missing in VR are social relationships.

Question 72

Do simulated lives matter? When can we create them? (2 views)

Answer 72

Chalmers: yes, as much as lives in physical reality. So, it’s not acceptable to kill five simulated humans to save one ordinary human because the former aren’t in physical reality. But if the simulated humans aren’t conscious, then it would be morally acceptable. we should try to produce the best of all possible simulations, then the second best, then the third, and maybe stop somewhere when it’s reasonable to think that the simulated beings would experience more pain than pleasure in the VR world. But we shouldn’t assume that all creators of simulations will follow any ethical principles whatsoever.
Utilitarians: we should try to produce the best of all possible simulations, then create duplicate copies of that simulation to maximise happiness for everyone in those simulated worlds.

Question 73

What is justice in VR worlds? (2 views)

Answer 73

1. Virtual Fictionalism: the ethics of VR worlds is equivalent to the ethics of fictional worlds.
2. Virtual Realism: the ethics of VR worlds is equivalent to real-world ethics.

Question 74

The puzzle of virtual theft (and 2 views)

Answer 74

how can virtual fictionalism say you can steal something that doesn’t exist?
- Wildman and McDonnell: you can steal digital objects but not virtual objects.
- Chalmers: you can steal virtual objects because they’re real, valuable objects.

Question 75

Equivalence principle

Answer 75

If it would be wrong to allow subjects to have a certain experience in reality, then it would be wrong to allow subjects to have that experience in a virtual reality setting.

Question 76

Relational view of equality

Answer 76

even if goods and services are distributed as fairly as possible in VR worlds, society cannot be egalitarian if there are unequal relations of domination, oppression, and power that still exist.