Imagine a scenario where a child is born with a rare and severe medical condition that leads to significant suffering over time. While the child initially appears healthy, the condition causes progressive physical changes and developmental challenges. Despite these challenges, the child remains mentally sharp and emotionally aware.
This condition is life-threatening, with a drastically reduced life expectancy, often cutting short the possibility of reaching adulthood. Treatments exist that might alleviate some symptoms and potentially extend life, but they don’t offer a cure and could involve extensive, long-term care.
Parents are faced with a tough choice:
- Should they approve a medical procedure that might extend their child’s life, knowing it could lead to ongoing and expensive care?
- Or should they decide against it, which could result in their child’s death?
For this discussion, let’s focus on the ethics of the decision rather than on who has the authority to make it.
Respond to one of the following:
- Contrast what a virtue ethicist would say according to its core principles of telos, virtue, eudaimonia, and practical wisdom with what a utilitarian would say using its core principles of welfare, impartiality, sum-ranking, and consequences. Do your best to answer whether it is immoral for the parents to withhold surgery. Use appropriate textual evidence to back up your claim. Which of the ethical theories you discussed do you believe provides the best account of what the morally correct action to take is and why? (USLOs 9.1, 9.2, 9.3)
- Contrast what a Kantian would say according to its core principles of universalizability, duty, impartiality, and reciprocity with what a utilitarian would say using its core principles of welfare, impartiality, sum ranking, and consequences. Do your best to answer whether it is immoral for the parents to withhold surgery. Use appropriate textual evidence to back up your claim. Which of the ethical theories you discussed do you believe provides the best account of what the morally correct action to take is and why? (USLOs 9.1, 9.2, 9.3)
