Trolleyology in Medicine

Trolleyology in Medicine
Author: Gabriel. Andrade
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-11-08
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9783031728051

This book provides an overview of how the intricacies of the Trolley Problem shed light on various aspects of medical ethics. It shows how trolley dilemmas have become useful to ethicists to the extent that they activate intuitions and provide guidance about what the relevant moral principle ought to be in judging specific actions. Issues are covered at length such as euthanasia, where it is important to determine a relevant difference between killing and letting die; and abortion, where it is necessary to establish if harms can be used as a means to an end. While specialists in medical ethics have argued about these topics at length, few have established connections with the complexities of trolley cases. The Trolley Problem has now become a staple of pop culture and yet, outside philosophy, few people understand its implications. Consequently, this book is of interest to those with a general interest in philosophy, students, researchers as well as those in the healthcare industry where many of the difficult moral decisions encountered are better informed by framing them around the intricacies of the Trolley Problem.

Would You Kill the Fat Man?

Would You Kill the Fat Man?
Author: David Edmonds
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2013-10-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400848385

From the bestselling coauthor of Wittgenstein's Poker, a fascinating tour through the history of moral philosophy A runaway train is racing toward five men who are tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. You are standing on a footbridge looking down on the unfolding disaster. However, a fat man, a stranger, is standing next to you: if you push him off the bridge, he will topple onto the line and, although he will die, his chunky body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? The question may seem bizarre. But it's one variation of a puzzle that has baffled moral philosophers for almost half a century and that more recently has come to preoccupy neuroscientists, psychologists, and other thinkers as well. In this book, David Edmonds, coauthor of the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker, tells the riveting story of why and how philosophers have struggled with this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the trolley problem. In the process, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the history of moral philosophy. Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man. But why? After all, in taking one life you could save five. As Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex—and important—than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.

Medical Ethics and Law

Medical Ethics and Law
Author: Dominic Wilkinson
Publisher: Elsevier Health Sciences
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2019-07-05
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0702075973

This short textbook of ethics and law is aimed at doctors in training and in practice. Medical ethics and law are now firmly embedded in the curricula of medical schools. The ability to make clinical decisions on the basis of critical reasoning is a skill that is rightly presumed as necessary in today's doctors. Medical decisions involve not only scientific understanding but also ethical values and legal analysis. The belief that it is ethically right to act in one way rather than another should be based on good reasons: it is not enough to follow what doctors have always done, nor what experienced doctors now do. The third edition has been revised and updated to reflect changes in the core curriculum for students, developments in the law as well as advances in medicine and technology. - The first part of the book covers the foundations of ethics and law in the context of medicine. - The second part covers specific core topics that are essential for health professionals to understand. - The third section of the book includes new chapters on cutting edge topics that will be crucial for the doctors and health professionals of tomorrow. - This new edition includes a new third section that provides an extension to the core curriculum focused on four key emerging topics in medical ethics – neuroethics, genethics, information ethics and public health ethics. - The chapters on Consent, Capacity and Mental Health Law have been extensively revised to reflect changes in legislation. Chapters on confidentiality and information ethics contain new sections relating to information technology, sharing information and breaching confidentiality. - Each chapter contains case examples drawn from personal experience or from the media. - This edition also includes cartoons to highlight cutting edge and topical issues. - Most chapters include revision questions and an extension case to encourage readers who are interested in a topic to explore further.

The Trolley Problem

The Trolley Problem
Author: Hallvard Lillehammer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1009255649

The Trolley Problem is one of the most intensively discussed and controversial puzzles in contemporary moral philosophy. Over the last half-century, it has also become something of a cultural phenomenon, having been the subject of scientific experiments, online polls, television programs, computer games, and several popular books. This volume offers newly written chapters on a range of topics including the formulation of the Trolley Problem and its standard variations; the evaluation of different forms of moral theory; the neuroscience and social psychology of moral behavior; and the application of thought experiments to moral dilemmas in real life. The chapters are written by leading experts on moral theory, applied philosophy, neuroscience, and social psychology, and include several authors who have set the terms of the ongoing debates. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars working on any aspect of the Trolley Problem and its intellectual significance.

Moral Tribes

Moral Tribes
Author: Joshua Greene
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2014-12-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0143126059

“Surprising and remarkable…Toggling between big ideas, technical details, and his personal intellectual journey, Greene writes a thesis suitable to both airplane reading and PhD seminars.”—The Boston Globe Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world’s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (“portrait,” “landscape”) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions—efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain’s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight—sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words—often with life-and-death stakes. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.

An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse

An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse
Author: Bryan Hall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 135008364X

When your base camp is overrun by zombies, whom do you save if you cannot save everyone? Is it permissible to sacrifice one survivor to an undead horde in order to save a greater number of the living? Do you have obligations to loved ones who have turned? These are some of the troubling ethical questions you might face in a zombie apocalypse. Bryan Hall uses situations like these to creatively introduce the foundational theories of moral philosophy. Covering major thinkers such as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, this is an introduction to Ethics like no other: a practical guidebook for surviving a zombie outbreak with your humanity intact. It shows you why moral reasoning matters as long as you still walk among the living. The book is written entirely from the perspective of someone struggling to survive in a world overrun by the undead. Each chapter begins with graphic art and a “field exercise” that uses a story from this world to illustrate an ethical problem. By considering moral controversies through the unfamiliar context of a zombie apocalypse, the morally irrelevant factors that get in the way of resolving these controversies are removed and you can better answer questions such as: · Do we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves? · Is it ever morally permissible to intentionally kill an innocent person? · Are non-rational but sentient beings morally considerable? Equipped with further reading sections and overviews of the theories that you would usually cover in an introductory Ethics course, this one-of-a-kind primer critically evaluates different procedures for moral action that you can use not only to survive but flourish in an undead world.

The Principle of Double Effect

The Principle of Double Effect
Author: David Černý
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2020-03-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000061922

This book offers a comprehensive history of the principle of double effect and its applications in ethics. Written from a non-theological perspective, it makes the case for the centrality of the double effect reasoning in philosophical ethics. The book is divided into two parts. The first part thoroughly examines the history of double effect reasoning. The author’s history spans from Thomas Aquinas’s opera omnia to the modern and influential understanding of the principle known as proportionalism. The second part of the book elucidates the principle and addresses various objections that have been raised against it, including those that arise from an in-depth discussion of the trolley problem. Finally, the author examines the role of intentions in ethical thinking and constructs a novel defense of the principle based on fine distinctions between intentions. The Principle of Double Effect: A History and Philosophical Defense will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in moral philosophy, the history of ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, and the Catholic moral tradition.

Killing and Letting Die

Killing and Letting Die
Author: Bonnie Steinbock
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 1994
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780823215621

This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller charts in the United States, and the many headlines devoted to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has assisted dozens of patients to die. The essays address the range of questions involved in this issue pertaining especially to the fields of medical ethics, public policymaking, and social philosophy. The discussions consider the decisions facing medical and public policymakers, how those decisions will affect the elderly and terminally ill, and the medical and legal ramifications for patients in a permanently vegetative state, as well as issues of parent/infant rights. The book is divided into two sections. The first, "Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment" includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, "Philosophical Considerations," probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg.

The Trolley Problem Mysteries

The Trolley Problem Mysteries
Author: Frances Myrna Kamm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190247150

A rigorous treatment of a thought experiment that has become notorious within and outside of philosophy - The Trolley Problem - by one of the most influential moral philosophers alive today Suppose you can stop a trolley from killing five people, but only by turning it onto a side track where it will kill one. May you turn the trolley? What if the only way to rescue the five is to topple a bystander in front of the trolley so that his body stops it but he dies? May you use a device to stop the trolley that will kill a bystander as a side effect? The "Trolley Problem" challenges us to explain and justify our different intuitive judgments about these and related cases and has spawned a huge literature. F.M. Kamm's 2013 Tanner Lectures present some of her views on this notorious moral conundrum. After providing a brief history of changing views of what the problem is about and attempts to solve it, she focuses on two prominent issues: Does who turns the trolley and how the harm is shifted affect the moral permissibility of acting? The answers to these questions lead to general proposals about when we may and may not harm some to help others. Three distinguished philosophers - Judith Jarvis Thomson (one of the originators of the trolley problem), Thomas Hurka, and Shelly Kagan - then comment on Kamm's proposals. She responds to each comment at length, providing an exceptionally rich elaboration and defense of her views. The Trolley Problem Mysteries is an invaluable resource not only to philosophers concerned about the Trolley Problem, but to anyone worried about how we ought to act when we can lessen harm to some by harming others and how we can reach a decision about the question.