Students

Please note: This title has recently been acquired by Taylor & Francis. Due to rights reasons, any multimedia resources will no longer be available.

Learning Objectives

After reading these chapters, you should be able to:

  1. Analyze the choices involved in the Yusef Camp case.
  2. Define casuistry.
  3. Compare situationalism to the rules of practice view.
  4. List the three separate issues involved in normative ethics.
  5. Illustrate the kinds of questions that arise in metaethics.
  6. Explain how action theory is relevant to ethics.
  7. Name some moral principles.
  8. Evaluate the claim that morally good character is intrinsically valuable.
  9. Recognize what traditional secular ethics shares with monotheistic religions.
  10. Describe the state of reflective equilibrium.
  1. Sketch the history of the Hippocratic Oath.
  2. Compare Pythagorean philosophy to liberal political philosophy.
  3. Discuss why the Hippocratic Oath forbids physicians to practice surgery.
  4. List some modern codes in the Hippocratic tradition.
  5. Explain three challenges to the Hippocratic Oath.
  6. Distinguish the Nuremberg Code from the codes in the Hippocratic form.
  7. Recognize why the Hippocratic Oath never mentions any rights
  8. Describe some of the medical ethical positions in ancient religious traditions outside the West.
  9. Analyze the potential improvements of UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.
  1. Discuss some problems with medical ethical codes in general.
  2. Define moral standing.
  3. Compare moral uses to descriptive uses of the term person.
  4. List some different definitions of person.
  5. Explain why excluding the use of personhood language eliminates confusion in medical ethics debates.
  6. Define human in the moral and the nonmoral sense.
  7. Illustrate the problem of irreversibility.
  8. Evaluate the somatic definition of death.
  9. Distinguish between the whole-brain and the higher-brain definition of death.
  10. Explain the concept of speciesism.
  1. Analyze the problem of determining benefits for patients.
  2. Compare objective to subjective estimates of benefits and harms.
  3. Distinguish consequentialist ethics from duty-based ethics.
  4. Discuss how different types of well being present problems for the physician.
  5. Explain why there is no consensus about what counts as a medical benefit.
  6. Evaluate Bentham’s "arithmetic summing" method of combining benefit and harm estimates.
  7. Demonstrate how to calculate the ratio of benefits to harms in a medical case.
  8. Analyze the meaning of the "first do no harm" slogan.
  9. Define medical paternalism.
  1. List the four principles that are sometimes included under the rubric of respect for persons.
  2. Illustrate the principle of fidelity.
  3. Compare the Hippocratic approach to confidentiality to non-Hippocratic approaches.
  4. Distinguish positive from negative rights.
  5. Define autonomy.
  6. Discuss the controversy concerning the therapeutic privilege.
  7. Describe the three standards of disclosure for consent to be adequately informed.
  8. Analyze why physicians today are inclined to tell patients the truth.
  9. Evaluate Kant's claim that lying is always morally wrong.
  1. Discuss how consequentialism can be used to make a case either for or against the distinction between active killing and allowing to die.
  2. Explain how considerations about incompetent patients create an argument for the distinction between active killing and allowing to die.
  3. Evaluate the claim that there is something inherently wrong about killing a human.
  4. Compare homicide on request to assistance in suicide.
  5. Define "initiative petition".
  6. Illustrate the doctrine of double effect.
  7. List the criteria for classifying treatments as "morally expendable".
  1. Define advance directive.
  2. Illustrate the notion of substituted judgment.
  3. Analyze why most advance directives today specify what the patient wants, giving instructions rather than mere permission.
  4. List some problems with advance directives.
  5. Explain why an advance directive that simply refuses "extraordinary means" is begging for trouble.
  6. Evaluate the claim that we should do what is best for never-competent patients
  7. Apply the notion of limited familial discretion to a controversial medical case.
  1. Evaluate the social utility principle.
  2. Analyze the role of justice in determining how to allocate medical resources.
  3. Explain the debate over rationing with regard to health care.
  4. Compare the subjective and objective forms of Hippocratic (patient-benefitting) utility.
  5. Demonstrate the need for social ethical principles.
  6. Illustrate problems with making the clinician society’s cost-containment agent.
  7. Recognize the purpose of the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
  8. Discuss the question of whether all humans have a right to health care.
  9. Evaluate the claim that organ transplantation is "playing God."
  10. Distinguish human medical research from innovative therapy.
  1. Recognize opposing Biblical views of genetic engineering.
  2. Evaluate the claim that healthy people should not know in advance how they will die.
  3. List some of the conditions that can be detected through genetic counseling.
  4. Analyze the problem of neutrality in genetic counseling.
  5. Discuss the risks of discrimination in light of advances in genetic screening.
  6. Define Human Genome Project.
  7. Compare genetic therapy to genetic enhancement.
  8. Distinguish somatic from reproductive cell changes.
  9. Describe some new reproductive technologies.
  10. Explain the moral aspect of the cloning controversy.
  1. Compare some different concepts of duty.
  2. Describe how single-principle theories resolve the conflict among ethical principles.
  3. Explain how the ranking and balancing strategies can be combined.
  4. Demonstrate the Rawlsian maximin reconciliation of justice and utility.
  5. Analyze why it is problematic to permit social utility to be balanced against autonomy.
  6. Evaluate the strategy of giving worse-off patients a proportionally greater percentage of their possible benefits.
  7. Discuss some reasons why someone might support the rules of practice position.
  1. Define virtue.
  2. Compare secular to religious virtues.
  3. Name the five virtues you regard as the most important for medical ethics.
  4. Explain the wrong virtue problem.
  5. Analyze the naked virtue problem.
  6. Evaluate the claim that an ethic of principles is incompatible with an ethic of virtues.

Weblinks

All links provided below were active on website launch. However, due to the dynamic nature of the Internet, links do occasionally become inactive. If you find a link that has become inactive, please try using a search engine to locate the website in question.

  • Language Tip of the Week
    June Casagrande, author of Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies. This site offers a useful language, usage and style tips on a weekly basis.
  • Dave's ESL Café
    Professor Dave Sperling This site offers a wide range of resources for students and teachers of English as a second language, including language learning resources, job postings, and discussion forums.
  • MLA Style
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  • CMS Style
    This site includes a description of Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) guidelines for documenting with a comprehensive Q&A section.
  • Research and Documenting Sources
    Purdue University Online Writing Lab This section of the Purdue University OWL offers guidelines for finding, evaluating, and documenting sources, as well as advice on writing research papers.
  • Internet Public Library
    University of Michigan School of Information This site offers an interactive tutorial on identifying the argument of an essay.
  • Librarians' Index to the Internet
    The Library of California Created and maintained by librarians, this site offers a searchable annotated subject directory of Web resources that have been selected and evaluated.
  • American Memory
    Library of Congress This site offers links to the digital versions of selected holdings relevant to American history and culture, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, and recorded sound and moving pictures.
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    New York Public Library This site offers access to more than 275,000 digitized images from the collections of the New York Public Library. You can search collections or browse by topic to find illustrations, photographs, posters, maps, and manuscripts.
  • The New York Times
    This online version of the The New York Times includes searchable archives.
  • Online Writing Lab
    Purdue University A well-respected online resource, this site features handouts with examples of the writing process, from planning and drafting to proofreading.
  • Writing CSU Writing Guides
    The Writing Center at Colorado State University This site offers a wide range of resources for students and teachers of English as a second language, including language learning resources, job postings, and discussion forums.
  • Identifying the Argument of an Essay: A Tutorial in Critical Reasoning
    Dr. Frank Edler, Metropolitan Community College This site offers an interactive tutorial on identifying the argument of an essay.