Should a medical team try CPR to resuscitate an Ebola patient whose heart stops beating? Medical ethicist Dr. Joseph J. Fins says no because the risks are too great for health care workers and even for some Ebola patients whose heartbeat is restored.
E2: What makes right acts right?
Drunks and the trolley case
Emma Green’s “The Cold Logic of Drunk People.” What happens when you ask inebriated persons about the runaway trolley?
Existentialism and the Nobel Prize
Fifty years ago … on October 22, 2964 … Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had been selected “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.” But seven years earlier his fellow existentialist Albert Camus accepted the prize. He had been selected “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” Which of them violated existentialism? Neither did, according to Stefany Anne Goldberg: “What matters most about Existentialism is not the validity of a decision, but following out the responsibilities and implications of that decision. Both Sartre and Camus did that. They lived out the responsibilities of being the rejector and the acceptor, respectively. In making opposite decisions, both writers affirmed the underlying creed, which is that the choice itself is far less important than the life lived according to that choice.”
Socrates considers snack mix
Dan Pashman humorously asks whether it is ethical to cherry-pick your favorite ingredient from a snack mix. Socrates, Hobbes, Kant, and Nietzsche weigh in.
What do we owe the hungry?
The United States is the wealthiest nation, has an obesity epidemic, and yet also has a very serious problem with hunger. Mike LaBossiere considers whether we have moral obligations to the hungry.
Thomas Aquinas
What can we learn from a medieval philosopher who had visions of the Virgin Mary and explained how angels speak and move. Quite a bit, it turns out. Thomas Aquinas developed “a philosophical framework for the process of doubt and open scientific inquiry.”
Hostages, ransom, and runaway trolleys
According to Nigel Warburton, although it won’t deter kidnappers to pay a ransom, rational calculations fall by the wayside when people you love are involved.
Not so foolish
“Humanity’s achievements and its self-perception are today at curious odds. We can put autonomous robots on Mars and genetically engineer malarial mosquitoes to be sterile, yet the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a dismaying variety of hard-wired errors.” And so we exploit these hard-wired errors to nudge people into making the right choices. But Steven Poole claims there are ethical questions about nudging if only because “there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable.”
The drowning child
Test your thoughts about what we owe others with this philosophy experiment based on articles by Peter Singer.
Socratically Speaking 