PHILOS 2D03 Lecture 16: Nov.1
8 Jan 2019
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How do you deal with an ethical catch 22? (lose lose situation) Cancer, alzheimer"s, etc. will eventually render people irrational and medically incompetent. Irony: we need to study people who are afflicted with late-stage disease in order to cure this disease. Health-care proxy/surrogate decision maker: some who makes the health care choices for a patient who is no competent to make their own health choices. Therapeutic: being done explicitly for health and welfare of patient. Non-therapeutic: not obviously connected to health and welfare of patient. We don"t feel comfortable with letting a health-care proxy sign them up for a non-therapeutic treatment. We can assume someone would want therapeutic treatments if they"re severely ill. There are some diseases that make people incompetent to consent to research. But if we are ever going to fix these diseases then we need to do research upon those very people.
