Class Dropped

I wanted to let everyone know that I have dropped this ethics class and as a result will no longer be posting on this blog. You may all remove this blog from you RSS reader. I was in both three week classes and, I decided that I wanted to spend more time doing winter break activities and less time on school work. I think having just one class will help me do that. Thank you and from what I saw this class was very interesting.

Genetic Testing

I recently listened to two reports by National Public Radio about genetic testing and the consequences of having the tests performed. Genetic testing is when the genes of an individual are examined for specific mutations which have been shown to be related to an increased risk of diseases such as cancer. Genetic testing is a relatively new form of testing and as such it is being debated when genetic testing should be used and who should get tested.

In the report they looked at a family in which several members recently underwent genetic testing for a gene which is connected to ovarian and breast cancer. They chose to do these tests because of their family history and their perceived need to know whether or not they were at an increased risk. As this family learned, it is not as simple as knowing if they will get the diseases. This family found out that they did have a potentially harmful genetic mutation and were unsure of how to handle this new knowledge. This is not an uncommon result of positive genetic test; many people who get back positive results are unsure of what to do next.

Another effect of genetic testing being a relatively new area of science is that it is unknown what some mutations do or if they will have any effect on the health of the individual at all. Mutations happen all of the time and most of them have no effect on the person at all but it is difficult to explain this to a person who has just been told that they have an unknown mutation in a gene that is linked to ovarian cancer or breast cancer.

Another ethical dilemma is raised when considering who should be tested. For many people testing could cause unnecessary worry if the test is inconclusive because most inconclusive tests have no effect on health. Even positive tests do not guarantee that they will get the disease; it just means they are at an increased risk compared to the rest of the population. For others the knowledge may cause them to change their lives and do things that they have always wanted to do because they may not have many more opportunities.

Genetic testing can raise more questions than it can answer and it may be an example of technology advancing beyond knowledge. It can be an important tool which doctors can use but they need to be careful who they test. They need to ensure that the person is emotionally ready to be tested and that they do have a strong enough family history to suggest a need for the test. This is not a test that everyone should have done; it should be treated like many other medical procedures and tests and only be performed when absolutely necessary.

My Ethical Dilemma

Everyone is faced with ethical dilemmas every day; some of them are small and seemingly insignificant while others have serious ramifications for us depending on what we decide to do. For me I was recently faced with the ethical dilemma of deciding whether to make up an ethical dilemma to blog about or if, through concerted effort, I would search the recesses of my brain to find a real time I was faced with an ethical dilemma worthy of being written about.

If I was to just make up an event, no one else would be the wiser. There is no way that anyone in my class or anyone reading my blog would be able to know if the event really did or did not happen. Even if they did have an inkling that the story was too elaborate or too perfect they would have no reason to question it. They would gain nothing by questioning it and everyone else in the class would see their claim about my dilemma as preposterous and pompous. I would get away with lying.

I however would know the truth; I would know that what I had told was a lie and if I was complimented on how I handled the situation it would be a shallow and hollow victory. Instead I decided to do the right thing and relay a real life ethical dilemma; deciding on an ethical dilemma to share with the class through my blog. It may not be a serious event and it may seem insignificant but it is the kind of ethical dilemmas that we all deal with everyday.

Brain Boosters

The article that I read was entitled “Why boost brains?”. It looked at the emerging possibility for drugs which improve brain function. Specifically it discussed the issue of what restrictions should be placed on these brain boosters or should they be legal at all.

I think that these cognitive enhancers should be legal but that their use must be carefully monitored and that they need to stay out of mentally competitive areas such as the school setting. If they were allowed in schools, it would no longer be the students who worked the hardest who would succeed. Instead it would be those who could afford the medication needed to make their brains work better. On the opposite side of the spectrum, if I am in an airplane, I want that pilot to be functioning the best that he can because my life as well as the lives of everyone else on that plane is in his or her hands. If studies prove that pilots can function better by using brain boosters then I want them to use the drugs.

At this point there are no studies that definitively prove that the drugs work and more studies need to be conducted to ensure that the changes that are seen in the people who have tested the drugs are not just the result of the placebo effect. If the drugs are proven to work they could have very important ramifications for many people but we need to ensure that they do not give the people who can afford them an advantage over those who cannot; there is already enough of an achievement gap between the economic classes.

Consequentialism vs. Non-consequentialism

I believe that having clearly defined and established rules is not necessary to having a moral and good society. Rules always exist in societies but for thousands of years those rules were not written down, instead they were passed from generation to generation by tradition and custom. Even today outside of the world of academia there are very few people who define their own rules guiding their morals. Laws may exist but just as the book said: if laws did not exist people would not immediately go around killing people and stealing from one another. We are guided by some strong ideas that do not need to be written down to know what is right and what is wrong; those ideas have been established over the thousands of years where the human race has lived together in a social setting.

I think that the morality or immorality of an action does depend on the situation that we find ourselves in. For example, there are some situations where I believe that lying to someone may be appropriate. I know that it is an extremely dangerous precedent to set but if the person being lied will only make the situation worse if they are told the truth or if they are unable to handle the truth at that time it may be not be immoral to lie to the person or at least delay revealing the truth. What about killing another person, it may be wrong in almost all situations but what if someone is trying to kill you. In that situation I would argue that if you must kill the attacker in order to protect yourself it is not an immoral act.

A non-consequentialist would argue with this idea. For them there would be no exceptions to their own established rules. They would expect people to follow the rules them regardless of the situation and regardless of the outcome. There are very few true non-consequentialists in practice although it is a very interesting idea. Most people have at least some consequentialist thought and the impracticality of non-consequentialism was evident even in the non-consequentialist theories which usually made some sort of concession such as the reversibility criterion in Kant’s duty ethics.

What is Morality?

I think morality is the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. It is the most important set of guiding principles that we have in society. It is the set of ideas that allow us to interact with one another and make our lives easier. Without morality we would always have to be in fear for our lives and our property. There would be no trust between people and without trust we would all have to be completely independent of one another. There is no way that we could have progressed as a species like we did without the underlying rules of morality in our societies. We would never have been able to become as social and we never would have developed the language and technology that we have today.

The idea of cause and effect plays a very big role in our ideas about morality and what is right or wrong. Cause and effect guides morality in that if something results in a good outcome; the action is generally seen as moral and a good action. The opposite is also true, if the effect of an action is negative, the action is generally seen as bad and immoral. The difficulty that arises in this type of thinking is that it is sometimes very hard to determine what cause is related to what effect and therefore what actions are good and what actions are bad. This is not always the case, but on occasion this can cause problems.

In the lecture there seemed to be a lot of different methods of determining the same thing, namely what is moral and what is immoral. I did not expect this; I was under the impression that there was one generally accepted way to view ethical dilemmas but obviously that is not the case. If the book and the lecture are any indication there is much debate over how to handle ethical dilemmas and there is no one universally accepted way or if there is we have not touched on it yet. It seemed that all of the main theories had their own drawbacks.

The one question that I had about the lecture was on the topic of unjust and immoral laws. Many people have said that people must oppose unjust laws but how are we to determine if a law is just or unjust? To some people a law might seem unjust while to others it will seem fair. On almost any law it is possible to find people for it and against it but that does not mean that every law is unjust. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught that laws were unjust when those that the law restricted had no say in the law but is that the only situation where the law is unjust? Is that even a situation where a law can be called unjust?

Animation

I thought would include the link to my introduction animation here in my blog as well. It is at http://goanimate.com/.