Introduction to Bioethics

Question 1

What is ethics?

Answer 1

A theory of:

• How we ought / ought not to act
• Which values or principles should guide our actions

Question 2

What is bioethics?

Answer 2

Ethics for biological organisms

Question 3

What is meta-ethics?

Answer 3

A theory of the status / meaning of ethical theories

A theory of moral justification

Question 4

What are the 3 meta-ethical positions?

Answer 4

Moral absolutism

Moral relativism

Pyrrhonian moral scepticism

Question 5

What is moral absolutism?

Answer 5

I know that X is right (& anyone who disagrees is wrong)

Question 6

What is moral relativism?

Answer 6

X might seem right to me, but what is right and wrong is entirely subjective (nothing but a matter of taste)

Question 7

What is pyrrhonian moral scepticism?

Answer 7

I believe/think that X is right (but those who disagree may be right)

Question 8

Can I still act resolutely if I adopt Pyrrhonian moral scepticism?

Answer 8

A Pyrrhonian moral sceptic suspends judgement about the validity of moral values

Tolerance of ideas ≠ tolerance of practices

Question 9

Why is virtue of clarity important?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is an analogy?

Answer 10

A comparison of different things to show their similarity

Question 11

What is a thought experiment?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Thomson’s analogy: the violinist and the human foetus

Answer 12

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?

Question 13

What are some formal ethical theories?

Answer 13

Consequentialism 
Deontology
Virtue ethics 
The ethics of care 
Principlism

Question 14

What is consequentialism?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Problems with consequentialism

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What is deontology?

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Problems with deontology

Answer 17

Always following rules of conduct can lead to negative consequences

E.g. Allowing a bomb to explode by refusing to torture someone

Question 18

What are virtue ethics?

Answer 18

Focus on role models, on the agents character, rather than on the consequences or rules

Question 19

Problems with virtue ethics?

Answer 19

Might virtue actually be vice?

How to tell one from the other?

Question 20

What are care ethics?

Answer 20

Ethical theory and right conduct would emerge from caring relationships, the cultivation of which is focused upon

Careful attention to specific situations is required

Question 21

Problems with care ethics

Answer 21

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?

Question 22

What is principlism?

Answer 22

The ‘4 principles’ approach

1. Autonomy: the duty to allow for autonomous choices (‘informed consent’)
2. Beneficence: the obligation to promote well-being
3. Non-maleficence: the duty to avoid harm
4. Justice: the duty of fairness

A very popular approach in bioethics

Question 23

What are the 4 principles in principlism?

Answer 23

Autonomy
Beneficence
Non-maleficence
Justice

Question 24

What is autonomy?

Answer 24

The duty to allow for autonomous choices (‘informed consent’)

Question 25

What is beneficence?

Answer 25

The obligation to promote well-being

Question 26

What is non-maleficence?

Answer 26

The duty to avoid harm

Question 27

What is justice?

Answer 27

The duty of fairness

Question 28

What is mechanistic materialism?

Answer 28

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’)

Question 29

What is dualism?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

Problems associated with dualism?

Answer 30

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?

Question 31

What is panexperientialism?

Answer 31

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