Month: January 2023

Three Guys with Failing Organs vs One Guy with Good Organs

Michael Voytinsky finds another take on a classic utilitarian dilemma. A hypothetical example comes up in many discussions of utilitarianism and its implications: three people with three different failing organs lie dying in a hospital when a healthy person arrives with a minor injury. If utilitarians are serious about wanting the greatest happiness for the …

Three Guys with Failing Organs vs One Guy with Good Organs Read More »

Bioethics Now

Jeffrey Spike explains the place of medical ethics within bioethics and in relation to philosophy. What I want to do in this brief introduction is (1) help define what bioethics is, (2) identify its major aspects, and (3) clarify its relationship to philosophy. To this aim I will outline how bioethics has developed three distinct …

Bioethics Now Read More »

Lessons (Not) Learned

Robert Card on the ethics of medical care at the end of life. It is natural for humans to want control over their own lives. Since death is an inevitable part of being human, it is also understandable that people want control over the circumstances of their own death, if at all possible. As the …

Lessons (Not) Learned Read More »

Are People Rational?

John Ongley investigates what Bertrand Russell thought about human reason. The economist John Maynard Keynes once said of his Cambridge friends in the years before World War I – including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore – that while their conversations were all bright, amusing and clever, there was “no solid diagnosis of human …

Are People Rational? Read More »