Bioethics Midterm

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meta-ethics

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This branch tries to answer the nature of ethics. Such questions raised are, why be moral? Are there any moral facts or is ethics just a matter of opinion? What does it mean for something to be ‘good’ or ‘right’?

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Normative Ethics

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This branch tries to give us theories as to what constitutes right action.

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Examples of Normative Ethics

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1. John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (the right action is the one that maximizes happiness in the world);
2. Immanuel Kant’s Deontology (act only according to rules that you could will to be universal law); and
3. Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics (act in ways that display the virtues: courage, generosity, moderation, wisdom, etc.).

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Applied Ethics

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This branch is, in some sense, the newest of the three and addresses specific fields within ethics rather than the broad moral principles that concern normative ethics.

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Fields of Applied Ethics

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Biomedical Ethics;
Business and Professional Ethics;
Environmental Ethics; and
Other important topics, such as: animal rights, duties to those in need, just war theory, etc.

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Biomedical Ethics

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Biomedical Ethics as the union of two related fields: Bioethics and Medical Ethics.

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Bioethics

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The study of the ethics of life and death, and encompasses such topics as abortion, cloning, euthanasia, etc. Medical Ethics is the study of the ethics of the medical profession and encompasses such topics as the role of the physician, whether doctors are morally permitted to lie to patients, whether there exists a right to health care, etc.

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ethical relativism

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First, some people are skeptical about whether there are answers to questions in ethics (such as “is abortion morally permissible?”). These people might argue that there is no right and wrong, there are just matters of opinion. Or else they question whether or not any one person is qualified to give authoritative answers to such questions

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problems with ethical relativism

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There are numerous problems with ethical relativism. If it were true, then there could not be arguments about what is right and wrong, nor could there be moral progress. For the purposes of this course, we will assume that ethical relativism is false, that there do exist answers to moral questions and that we, as moral philosophers, can try to learn what they are.

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fact-value gap

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Second, we must recognize that there is an important difference between what currently is allowed/disallowed and what ought to be allowed/disallowed.

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What is wrong with this statement:

“abortion is legal in my state, of course I can have an abortion”.

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The question that moral philosophers want to know is a deeper one, it is whether or not abortion should be legal. There are plenty of examples of immoral practices that were, at some time, legal (such as slavery) and there continue to be practices that many people would think to be morally permissible behavior that are illegal (e.g., responsible drug use, gay marriage, etc.).

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What are we concerned with?

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So the point is that, as moral philosophers, we should not be interested in what is legal or illegal, but rather what is moral or immoral. This point will be repeated throughout the course in response to various arguments.

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arguement

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Philosophically speaking, an argument is not something that you have with another person; rather an argument is a set of statements with an inferential structure. In particular, arguments will always have at least one premise which purports to support exactly one conclusion.

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what does an arguement look like

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Both the premises and the conclusion must be propositions, which is to say that they are sentences which are capable of being true or false; other kinds of sentences, such as questions (e.g., “What time is it?”), imperatives (e.g., “Close the door.”), and exclamations (e.g., “Go Pistons!”), cannot serve as premises or conclusions since they cannot be true or false.

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Two Questions to Ask if assessing an arguement

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Does the conclusion logically follow from the premises? Or, alternatively, does the truth of the premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion? Or, alternatively, is it impossible for the premises for be true and, at the same time, for the conclusion to be false?

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If an arguement is valid
(modus ponens - logical form)

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It is impossible for the premises to be true and for the conclusion to be false.

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Invalid Arguement

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This argument is invalid since it is possible for the premises to both be true and for the conclusion to be false:

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When do we use Valid

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We will not use 'valid' to modify 'point' or 'conclusion', validity is something that only arguments can possess

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Sound Arguement

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If an argument is valid and if all of its premises are true

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unsound argument

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one that is invalid, has at least one false premise, or suffers from both these afflictions. Since 'unsound' is therefore ambiguous, it would be helpful for you to specify in what way an argument is unsound: explicitly identify the argument as being invalid, having a false premise, or both.