Philo Flashcards
Common ground restriction
Ethical recommendations for pandemic response should be acceptable by at least two major ethical theories.
2 reasons for accepting the CGR:
1) We’re interested in the general ethical problems that arise in pandemics
2) Gives us more room to evaluate the policies recommended by public health authorities.
Hirose on pandemics
The justifiability of a policy partly depends on its effectiveness
No golden rule to public health interventions
5 challenges of pandemics?
1) Scarcities in health care resources, need to ration
2) Extraordinary measures become necessary, causing restric. on people’s freedoms
3) Uncertainty
4) Balance long and short term perspectives
5) Problems occur at a global level
SEUPP (soup) means we need to consider ethics.
Lives: who should be saved first?
Healthcare workers on the frontline are first priority
Second priority group should be patients with a greater chance of survival as this allows for redistribution of resources and maximization of lives saved
Doctrine of Doing and Allowing
Big distinction between doing harm and allowing harm to occur.
Non-consequentialists agree with this: there are cases where the rightness or wrongness of an action also depends on whether the agent does harm or just allows it to happen..
Consequentialists don’t think it is worse to do harm than to allow it to occur; no difference between killing someone and letting someone die.
Who is priority for getting hospital beds? (LIVES)
Higher priority given to those with high risk of death.
1) Old patients
2) Patients w/ health conditions (asthma, pregnant, heart diseases)
LIVES vs YEARS vs FAIR on hospital beds
LIVES: give very old patients second priority because they face higher risk of death
YEARS; not right to give old patients second priority because even if they survive the pandemic, they’ll still soon die due to other causes
FAIR: give second priority to younger patients over very old ones
What distinguished vaccines from other types of health care resources being rationed?
1) Vaccines are preventative, not a cure
2) Unlike therapeutic care, vaccine supply will increase over time, making rationing vaccines a matter of order priority
3) The scale of vaccination efforts is enormous
LIVES: who gets vaccines
1) Health care prof.
2) People at higher risk of severe conditions and death
3) Essential workers exposed to the disease
4) People 70 - 79
5) 60- 69
Social Gradient in Health
People in the best-off group tend to have better health outcomes than people in the second best-off group and so one.
Gives rise to concerns on injustice.
Vaccine nationalism
When a country focuses on getting vaccines for its own people first, rather than working with other countries to ensure everyone gets vaccinated.
Compatible w the duties toward people in other countries
Encompasses any national gov, rich or poor
Is vaccine nationalism wrong?
1) No country can avoid the charge of VN
a) a gov is meant to protect the lives of its citizens
2) Not wrong as a country keeps a sufficient number of vaccines for its population
Siracusa Principles
Specify conditions under which we can restrict rights and freedoms.
Must be
a) in accordance w law
b) based on an objective
c) necessary in a democratic society
d) the least restrictive/intrusive means avail.
e) not unreasonable or discriminatory
LONRU
Harm principle
You can restrict people’s freedom ONLY if it prevents harm to another
Paternalism
You can restrict people’s freedom ONLY if it prevents harm to themselves (self-harm)
Total Good
You can restrict people’s freedom ONLY if the bad of the restriction is outweighed by a large sum of good that the restriction does to them and others.
Total Good, harm principle, and paternalism can all accept the _________________
Thin Common Ground: it is right to minimize the instances and extent of restrictions of freedom
Thick Common Ground: permissible to restrict a person’s freedom in case they are likely to harm both themselves and others
John Rawls: strict compliance and favorable circumstances
Strict compliance: Everyone is doing their part to uphold the moral theory.
Favourable circumstances: Individuals in more privileged positions should use their advantages to contribute to the overall well-being of society.
Cost-benefit analysis and CC
Assesses the pros and cons of climate policies in purely monetary terms according to people’s willingness to pay for them.
Issues with CBA
Value monism leaves no room for other types of values, i.e., aesthetic, religious, or political.
Preserving the enviro. becomes no different than preferring choc. ice cream over vanilla
David Weisback’s argument against CBA
- Ethics demands that we sometimes look beyond self-interest for solutions to problems.
- Climate change is happening because we’ve misunderstood our self-interests.
- Determining our self-interests is the goal of CBA.
- So, climate change is an economic problem, not an ethical one.
Why is ethics necessary to solve CC?
We have to make evaluative judgements
Use of moral language when discussing GHG reduction targets: responsibility, appropriate, importance, needs…
International: which countries are most to blame for climate change? Which countries should make the biggest cuts in GHG emissions?
Intergenerational: how much do we value the lives of future people?
Precautionary principle
Parties should take measures to anticipate, prevent, or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its effects.
Dilemmas with precautionary principle
1) Gives banal advice: tells us to be careful when dealing with risk/uncertainty; effects of GMO food may be uncertain and policy makers may decide to make GMOs illegal.
2) Self-defeating: condemns the actions it recommends. GMOs strengthen crops against pests, so making GMOs illegal is a risky policy.
What are Henry Shue’s 3 conditions for strong policy action?
- There are massive losses from climate change
- We understand what cause these losses and can see their conditions happening.
- The costs of action are not prohibitively high
How does the precautionary principle resemble the harm principle?
Both focus on protection, both focus on proactivity
Dale Jameson on CC
We should focus instead on non-calculative generators of behavior: character traits, dispositions, emotions.
Virtue ethics
Virtues are certain character traits which help our actions achieve a mean between two extremes: excess and deficiencies in character.
You must (1) know that the act is virtuous; (2) do it because it is virtuous; and then (3)
develop, through habit, a firm and stable disposition to act in such a way.
Virtues for the climate crisis
Courage: speaking out against fossil fuel industry takes courage
Benevolence: act benevolently towards vulnerable countries + future gens
Hope: hope is a response to CC fear-mongering
Kosgaard on human attitudes towards animals
We are obligated to treat all sentient beings as “ends-in-themselves
Cartesian view on human and nonhuman good
Since nonhuman animals have no unconscious experiences (anticipation, memory) nothing can be really good or bad for them
Peter Singer in Animal Liberation
His daughter has “more to lose” than their dog who could be replaced by another dog having the same pleasant experiences
But: giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color.
