Introduction to Bioethics Flashcards
What is ethics?
A theory of:
- How we ought / ought not to act
- Which values or principles should guide our actions
What is bioethics?
Ethics for biological organisms
What is meta-ethics?
A theory of the status / meaning of ethical theories
A theory of moral justification
What are the 3 meta-ethical positions?
Moral absolutism
Moral relativism
Pyrrhonian moral scepticism
What is moral absolutism?
I know that X is right (& anyone who disagrees is wrong)
What is moral relativism?
X might seem right to me, but what is right and wrong is entirely subjective (nothing but a matter of taste)
What is pyrrhonian moral scepticism?
I believe/think that X is right (but those who disagree may be right)
Can I still act resolutely if I adopt Pyrrhonian moral scepticism?
A Pyrrhonian moral sceptic suspends judgement about the validity of moral values
Tolerance of ideas ≠ tolerance of practices
Why is virtue of clarity important?
Things that look like moral (dis)agreements may not be moral (dis)agreements
Scrutinise what you think before you say something
Scrutinise what others say before you decide to (dis)agree
What is an analogy?
A comparison of different things to show their similarity
What is a thought experiment?
An analogy between a real case and an imaginary case whereby the latter is used with the aim to shed light on how to handle the former
Thomson’s analogy: the violinist and the human foetus
Thomson argues that you should be free to walk out of the hospital even if it means death for the violinist
Could this analogy be used to justify why it might be morally appropriate for women to have an abortion in some situations?
What are some formal ethical theories?
Consequentialism Deontology Virtue ethics The ethics of care Principlism
What is consequentialism?
Focus on consequences
Example:
Utilitarianism: consequences are measured in terms of whether or not they produce happiness, where we should try to create the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number
Problems with consequentialism
Utilitarianism is an impartial moral theory - might we have a duty to be partial
What if trying to bring about positive consequences ignores certain rules?
Should happiness be all that matters?
It is hard to see how an act that produces good consequences could be good if it was motivated by bad intentions
What is deontology?
From the greek word for ‘duty’
Intentions matter
Ethical decisions are good if they are made on the basis of some rules, which are based on the recognition of particular duties (where many would argue that to say that X has a duty implies that Y has a legal or moral right)
E.g. killing someone to give their organs to someone else may ignore our duty to respect that person’s right to life.
Problems with deontology
Always following rules of conduct can lead to negative consequences
E.g. Allowing a bomb to explode by refusing to torture someone
What are virtue ethics?
Focus on role models, on the agents character, rather than on the consequences or rules
Problems with virtue ethics?
Might virtue actually be vice?
How to tell one from the other?
What are care ethics?
Ethical theory and right conduct would emerge from caring relationships, the cultivation of which is focused upon
Careful attention to specific situations is required
Problems with care ethics
How do we know what counts as ‘caring’?
Why value ‘caring’?
Should we not focus also on general principles that can be applied to different situations?
What is principlism?
The ‘4 principles’ approach
- Autonomy: the duty to allow for autonomous choices (‘informed consent’)
- Beneficence: the obligation to promote well-being
- Non-maleficence: the duty to avoid harm
- Justice: the duty of fairness
A very popular approach in bioethics
What are the 4 principles in principlism?
Autonomy
Beneficence
Non-maleficence
Justice
What is autonomy?
The duty to allow for autonomous choices (‘informed consent’)
What is beneficence?
The obligation to promote well-being
What is non-maleficence?
The duty to avoid harm
What is justice?
The duty of fairness
What is mechanistic materialism?
The ontology that reality is composed if bits of stuff that act in a machine-like fashion
Mental phenomena (e.g. minds) are caused entirely by the material components that constitute them and these material components would not possess any mental properties
So:
- no place for consciousness as something with its own causal power
- no place for free will
It accepts ‘determinism’: the view that all events are determined by causes that lack free will (no place for ‘self-determination’)
What is dualism?
The view that reality is composed of 2 fundamentally distinct things: things with minds & things that lack minds
Things with minds (mental phenomena) cannot be explained by reference to the laws of matter
Things without minds (supposedly ‘material’ phenomena) cannot be explained by reference to mental phenomena
Problems associated with dualism?
How can ‘mental things’ not be ‘material things’? Is matter not all-encompassing?
How can mental and material things co-exist if they are caused by different processes?
How can mental things emerge in a world that would once have been totally devoid of mental processes?
What is panexperientialism?
The view that if evolution of humans goes all the way down to subatomic particles, then human ‘experience’ by deduction must have originated at the subatomic level
Does adopting panexperientialism imply that we ought to think of atoms as having minds?
The behaviour of complex organisms cannot be reduced to the behaviour of the sum of their parts
