Bioethics
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This paper examines how decisions to limit treatment to critically ill patients under uncertainty can be made rationally. Expected utility theory offers one way of making rational decisions under uncertainty. One problem with using this approach is that we may not know the value of each option. ⋯ Critically ill patients are allowed to die because it is believed that their lives will be not worth living. It is likely that some patients are allowed to die when there is some objective chance of worthwhile future life. This paper argues that a policy of treating critically ill patients until the nature of future options can be better evaluated, in company with an offer of subsequent euthanasia where appropriate, allows a more rational and humane approach to treatment limitation decisions under uncertainty.
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I consider objections to the use of living wills based upon the discontinuity of personal identity between the time of the execution of the directive and the time the person becomes incompetent. Recent authors, following Derek Parfit's "Complex View" of personal identity, have argued that there is often not sufficient identity of interests between the competent person who executes the living will and the incompetent patient to warrant the use of the advance directive. ⋯ By exploring Buchanan and Brock's concept of "surviving interests", an argument is developed that certain future-oriented acts have a normative force that contributes to the narrative unity which is constitutive of personal identity. This narrative concept of the self is entailed by many of our ordinary practices and challenges the philosophical consensus to view the self in a more dynamic and communitarian manner.
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In The Clouds by Aristophanes, Strepsiades brings his son before Socrates so that he could learn Philosophy for he has heard that this science teaches how to overcome the most difficult causes with reasons. And Strepsiades wants his son to learn the art of failing to pay debts. Regarding medical education in our time, Edmund Pellegrino has noted that the educational philosophy of medical schools determines what a "good" physician is. Thus, teaching bioethics to future health professionals makes us face old problems now: What teaching method to choose among all the possible various ones? What should teaching aim at? Which will be our educational philosophy? Therefore I shall introduce here the epistemological basis of our Bioethics teaching program in Argentina and its implementing strategies in the undergraduate curriculum and the post-graduate level.
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[E]conomists have to assess the value of human lives in order to decide how much ought to be spent on matters like road improvements, safety measures, health costs and pollution controls. These economic measures of the value of a life are the subject of this paper. When I first heard of the attempts of economists to put a monetary price on the value of a life I was sure that such measures would have to be at best hopelessly partial and at worst morally objectionable. I now think I was wrong on both counts and in this paper I shall argue that: (i) it is morally permissible to put a price on a person's life; and (ii) there is a theoretically adequate way of determining such a price.