Introduction to Medical Ethics Should The Baby Live

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Introduction to Medical EthicsShould The Baby
Live?
Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life.
This is what gives me the fundamental principle
of morality, namely, that good consists in
maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and
that destroying, injuring, and limiting life is
evil. Albert Schweitzer

• 2008
• Marek Vácha

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Science x Ethics

• science investigates what is
• ethics investigates what ought to be

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Science x Ethics

• Methodological Naturalism
• what natural world contains
• how it arrived at its current state
• laws that regulate its behavior
• Ontological Naturalism
• nothing else exists

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Postavení prírodních ved
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Descriptive Ethics and Normative Ethics

• Descriptive Ethics
• What do people think is right?
• philosophical schools, religions etc.
• Normative Ethics
• identification of values
• what behavior is good and why
• supported by arguments
• what should I do and why?

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Normative Ethics

• Normative ethics is the attempt to determine what
  moral standards should be followed so that human
  behaviour and conduct may be morally right.
• Normative ethics is concerned with establishing
  standards for conduct and is commonly associated
  with theories about how one ought to live.

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Ethical relativism
Well..... well.... we will think about it.
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Ethical relativism

• there is no goodness or badness
• there is no rightness or wrongness
• ....there are only opinions

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HedonismWhat should I do to live a succesful
life?(hedoné pleasure, bliss)

• ultimate goal of all our actions is pleasure
• among human values pleasure is the highest and
  pain the lowest
• actions which increase the sum of pleasure are
  right, and what increases pain is wrong.
• optimization of calculus of pleasure and
  displeasure

Aristippus of Cyrene (435 355?)
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• An action is good when it maximises the amount of
  pleasure, leading to the minimum amount of pain.

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Utilitarianism

• Jeremy Bentham (1748 1832)
• John Stuart Mill (1806 1873)

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Utilitarianism

• Combination of four principles
• principle of consequences
• principle of hedonism
• principle of tolerance
• social principle

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Utilitarianism

• Nature has placed mankind under the
  governance of two sovereign masters, pain and
  pleasure.
• (Jeremy
  Bentham)

(1748 1832)
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Utilitarianism

• it is the consequences of human actions that
  count
• The principle of utility defines the meaning of
  moral obligation by reference to the greatest
  happiness of the greatest number of people
• Utilitarianism is a Consequentialist theory of
  ethics. Consequentialist theories judge the
  rightness (or wrongness) of an action, by what
  occurs as a result of doing something.

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Utilitarianism

• " . . . actions are right in proportion as they
  tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to
  produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is
  intended pleasure, and the absence of pain by
  unhappiness, pain, and the privation of
  pleasure.
• (John Stuart Mill)

(1806-1873)
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Utilitarianism

• principle of consequences
• The end justifies the means
• principle of hedonism
• greatest happiness of the greatest number of
  people

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Critique of Utilitarianism
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Critique of Utilitarianism

• the question is, whether human actions are to be
  judged right or wrong solely according to their
  consequences.

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Immanuel Kant(1724 1804)"Act only according
to that maxim whereby you can at the same time
will that it should become a universal law."

• Deontological ethics
• Categorical Imperative
• maxim
• Critique of Pure Reason

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Immanuel Kant(1724 1804)

• Kant's moral theory is deontological actions are
  morally right in virtue of their motives, which
  must derive more from duty than from inclination.
  
• The clearest examples of morally right action are
  precisely those in which an individual agent's
  determination to act in accordance with duty
  overcomes her evident self-interest and obvious
  desire to do otherwise.

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Immanuel Kant(1724 1804)

• Of course, human agents also have subjective
  impulsesdesires and inclinations that may
  contradict the dictates of reason.
• So we experience the claim of reason as an
  obligation, a command that we act in a particular
  way, or an imperative.

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Immanuel Kant(1724 1804)

• Categorical Imperative
• Act only according to that maxim whereby you can
  at the same time will that it should become a
  universal law.
• we must be willing for the rules we set for
  ourseleves to become a law of nature
• we must be willing to have such rules apply
  universally

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Immanuel Kant(1724 1804)

• The essence of immorality, is to make an
  exception of myself by acting on maxims that I
  cannot willfully universalize.
• It is always wrong to act in one way while
  wishing that everyone else would act otherwise.
  (The perfect world for a thief would be one in
  which everyone else always respected private
  property.)

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Immanuel Kant(1724 1804)

• "formula of the end in itself" as "Act in such a
  way that you treat humanity, whether in your own
  person or in the person of another, always at the
  same time as an end and never simply as a means."

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animals? gender nationality colour of
skin (indians) people in one geographical
locality tribe family
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rocks minerals rivers plants etc. higher
animals people
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Peter Singer

• human being and human person
• person being able to feel pleasentness and
  unpleasentness
• patient in PVS or human embryo is not a person, a
  dog is.

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Peter Singer
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Peter Singer

• if we set a moral frame to incorporate all the
  people, a lot of animals are inside as well
• if we set a moral frame to incorporate no
  animals, a lot of people are left out as well.

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Empirical Functionalism
person
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Peter Singer
person
person being able to feel pain and pleasure
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Peter Singer

• "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to
  the birth of another infant with better prospects
  of a happy life, the total amount of happiness
  will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.
  The loss of the happy life for the first infant
  is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for
  the second. Therefore, if the killing of the
  hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on
  others it would be right to kill him." (Practical
  Ethics)

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Critique of Singera Stephen Hawking

• Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees,
  was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a
  Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient
  of many awards, medals and prizes and is a Fellow
  of The Royal Society and a Member of the US
  National Academy of Sciences.
• Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life
  (he has three children and one grandchild), and
  his research into theoretical physics together
  with an extensive programme of travel and public
  lectures.

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Stephen Hawking
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Stephen Hawking
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Peter Singer

• "If we compare a severely defective human
  infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig,
  for example, we will often find the nonhuman to
  have superior capacities, both actual and
  potential, for rationality, self-consciousness,
  communication, and anything else that can
  plausibly be considered morally significant. The
  fact that a being is a human being, in the sense
  of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not
  relevant to the wrongness of killing it."
• (1)
• (1) Singer, P., (1983) Sanctity of life or
  quality of life. Pediatrics,72128-129

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person
Ontological Personalism
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person
Ontological Personalism
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Nazism
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Kritika empirického funkcionalismu

• dividing Homo sapiens sapiens to two groups
• black x white
• germans x non-germans
• communists x noncommunists
• in-group x out-group
• beings x persons
• ...was not good in any case
• The attempt to produce Heaven on Earth often
  produces Hell. (Karl Popper)

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New York 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights

• Everyone is entitled to all the rights and
  freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without
  distinction of any kind, such as race, colour,
  sex, language, religion, political or other
  opinion, national or social origin, property,
  birth or other status. (Article 2)

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Virtue Ethics

• Aristotle
• not What ought I do?
• but What should I be?

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Many Thanks Marek Vácha