PHILOS 2D03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Brain Death, Gene Therapy
15 Mar 2018
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Consider two patients who are dying of some organ failure. There are no suitable donors who have recently died / are brain dead to procure organs to fulfil the dead donor rule. Wouldn"t this increase terror and decerase security: mill says security is the greatest utility you can have in society, this seems to undermine this utility. Equipoise = the balancing of considerations: we want to balance interests / information when deciding a course of action. Resnik: therapy vs. enhancement distinction with genetic interventions. Says this distinction is morally irrelevant: there is no reason to base our considerations on this distinction. Argues against this, saying this is not going to be significance to our decisions. Why do we do this in the first place: we have a tendency to do this because we think that there is a legitimate medical distinction. The species functional definition: is going to be silent on what we ought to do about something.
