Ursinus Intro Ethics Blog - Section A

Imagine business driven by "matters of the heart" as Xiusheng Liu puts it. Not egocentric values, work for work's sake, or action motivated by pure profit. Rather business for the purpose of providing a comfortable living, advancing a passion, or bettering people's lives. It sounds pretty idealistic, but why not?

Ok, so there are many reasons why in practice this would not be feasible – namely the natural greed that some believe is part of human nature – but we're talking about the Hindu viewpoint. "The quality of the subject is of primary importance," Liu says. If this is so, the entailment (as it appears to me) would be that human beings would cease being viewed as commodities. That is, instead of people being a means to an end (profit), they would be the end. One would be free to "cultivate the spirit of offering both the work and its fruits to the Master Worker." Now, I'm not calling upon one to accept Vedantic doctrine, but replace Master Worker with "higher good" or "spiritual fulfillment," and it approves likewise. Why should we desire to be more than what we need to live comfortably? Why should we pursue business ends for egocentric goals rather than idealistic ones? We could all use a little more idealism.

I would like this to be a discussion starter for people to think about some more real-world problems of Spirinomics versus Western business practices. What are the biggest obstacles?

Instead of dissecting the situation where a pharmaceutical company wants to get their drug out on the market in the quickest way possible, so they test on people in Ethiopia, I am going to concentrate on the morality of the action. I do not think it is immoral for companies to test their drugs on subjects. It leads me to think of those cancer patients and in my case a family member, with no hope left, who agrees to test an experimental drug for a company knowing full well that it may not help. However, there are many drugs out there who are in the last phases of testing and are awaiting approval from the FDA that could very well prolong life or contain cancerous cells. These drugs need to start somewhere and if they did not we wouldn't have any of the current medications that we rely on. If the people in Ethiopia are aware that it is an experimental drug, and if they are balding, I do not see how this is immoral. Of course they are not going to test this type of drug on an unhealthy person, but they are going to test it on a person that is losing their hair. The health of the person has nothing to do with this situation and is irrelevant. It is not an experimental cancer drug where they would test the drug on someone who has cancer and is nearing the end of their life. It is simply a drug to help men who are balding. We have no way of telling the side effects of the medication, but I can not imagine anyone signing up for an experimental drug test where a side effect could be death. Therefore I see nothing immoral about a Pharmaceutical company testing their drug on people from Ethiopia who are aware of the situation and agree to become a test subject.

Blog week #13 begins here -- this is a separator post to help you see which posts to focus on.

Blog week #12 begins here -- this is a separator post to help you see which posts to focus on.

All right, I accept Anthony's application that mechanics and electricians are skilled labor and not what he would deem "dummy jobs," – but is there really such a thing as a dummy job? And why why why, given that everyone has been raised to some super-standard of presumably not only high IQ, but high performance in every way, would we not have figured out workaround solutions to what to do with the trash, our septic systems, and bagging our groceries. Can we not have a little more faith in the human race?

Furthermore, let's not simplify the situation. Certainly it's fair to reason that we don't know the whole picture of what we're doing with regards to genetic manipulation. But suppose, for the sake of a thought-experiment, that we could? Where would the problem lie? Given our genes, I would be willing to wager than some people have less maximum potential in certain areas than other people. This would allow for diversity. So why not get everyone to their maximum potential? Does this really threaten homogeneity, or merely a more evolved for of heterogeneity, aided by the best advancements in technology? I don't buy the "we'll all be the same and lose our individuality" scenario. There's more to nurture than nature, so why not give our children our best?

Although I was not in class today, I find the issue of parents being allowed to choose certain characteristics that they want their children to have immoral. Having a baby is not the same as picking out what outfit you want to wear or designing a room in a house. The miracle of life lies in the creation of the baby and if parents are given the power to choose what they want their children to turn out as the miracle is no longer there. It is also unnatural to “play God” in wanting to alter your child’s potential natural appearance. I don’t understand why parents would ever feel the need to pick and choose what type of characteristics they would want their children to have and it seems very selfish to me for them to want to manipulate a baby in this way. I am not against doctors being able to use this technology to cure diseases because it would be helping the baby in the long run. Whereas being able to design the baby is not helping the child it is only playing off of the parents vain intentions.

Humans have started to develop the technology and intelligence to genetically engineer specific traits into new human beings. This ability has created the discussion as to whether the fixing of certain traits is moral or not. While this knowledge presents great possibilities for curing diseases, it also brings about the scary thought of creating a superior race that contains only the traits that are desirable to the maker, whoever the “maker” might be. This is where the situation may get to a place where it could be considered immoral. As we started to mention in class, when a person is genetically engineered by his or her parents, it is solely the decision of the parent/s. When you start changing the trivial traits, such as hair and eye color or intelligence vs. physical ability, it becomes a risk because the child may have wanted some other trait than what the parent chose. In this case, the engineered person has a person to blame for not having the traits that he or she personally desires. In normal reproductive cases, it is a random chance that decides these traits and therefore no one to blame. It seems that when someone engineers a baby, they are thinking about the child as possessing the same personality as themselves; this is not the case, as every person has their own personality separate from anyone else. When it comes to curing a disease such as Parkinson’s before the person is born, it is hard to imagine a case when the engineered person would be angry because they had the procedure done to him or her. I believe that the difference appears in the rights of the child being formed, and they should be able to be whoever they want in their life.

Blog week #11 begins here -- this is a separator post to help you see which posts to focus on.

Blog week #10 begins here -- this is a separator post to help you see which posts to focus on.

In the discussion today, we were talking about how the better education of contraceptive options for women in these eastern cultures would lessen the need of abortions, especially late term abortions. I do not think that this would change much because the need for the abortions does not spring from the education of the women; it springs from the conflict of the society and the culture. The culture of Confucianism states that people should strive to have a family, and that this is the highest good. But then the society forces a family to only have one child. This conflict causes the women to initially think that having a family is a good idea, and therefore not worry about getting pregnant. But after the fact, they realize that it will hurt themselves financially and also hurt others. This causes the emotional conflict leading to abortions later in the pregnancy, when the women finally decide to go through with it. In this way, the need for late abortions in most cases does not come from the inaccessibility of contraceptives, but the conflict in a person’s mind between the importance of the society she lives in and the moral beliefs that she holds. If a woman was never pressured to choose the side she did not agree with, then more pregnancies would be carried the full term because a higher ratio of pregnancies would be women that were positive in their decisions to have a child.

Friday in class many people were agreeing with the position that women should be allowed to have an abortion if they can't support the baby. Thus, the birth of the baby would result in the child growing up in a horrible atmosphere and not having the same opportunities that you and I are accustomed to. Also, that the government shouldn't tell people that they can't abort their baby. I find it ironic that today’s discussion was centered on arguing for life, for the ability to reproduce, even when abortion is legal. The babies that are born in China, those that aren't aborted because the parents want more then one child face the same fate that unwanted children in America face. For example one of the cases presented in the book was about a mother starving herself in order to pay the fine to keep the baby, if the parents can not support themselves how are they going to support two children? The government policy is only in place because China is unable to sustain itself with the population influx. I do not agree with it because of the late term abortions that tend to happen and the outrageous amount of baby girls that are killed. There is no easy way to control population and in fact the opposite is happening in Europe. Europe’s birth rate is declining and has dropped to 1.5 births per women. This is mostly attributed to women waiting until they are much older to have children because they are more focused on their careers first and family second. Although population is a hard thing to control, China needs to come up with a better way to handle the situation and my belief is that without sexual education for men and women, this problem is never going to be solved and will ultimately hinder China’s economic success as a country.