PHILOS 2D03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Antigen, Colonoscopy, Prostate Cancer
27 Feb 2017
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There are diseases that make people incompetent to consent to research. However, in order to cure these diseases we need to do research on these people. This research will not provide a cure in time to help the people the research is on, therefore the research would count as non-therapeutic. Utilitarian: allow health care proxy to sign incompetent patient up for research because the action augments the greater good. Kantian: never allow them to be signed up for research, because it infringes the incompetent patients" autonomy and treats them as a means [not an end in themselves] brown: neither answer is acceptable. Utilitarian answer justifies too much compromise bodily integrity in order to realize a social good. This line of reasoning allows us to justify all sorts of bodily infringement. Since we cannot rely on either theory to provide a solution to this puzzle, brown thinks we ought to think of patients as being a member of a community.
