After providing a novel taxonomy of lottery procedures for fairly distributing scarce goods, I defend a new weighted lottery theory. This taxonomy is necessary because the debate between unweighted ...and weighted lottery theorists overlooks a range of cases, overlap cases, in which conducting an unweighted lottery is impossible or implausible. Therefore, to account for all such cases, lottery theorists must adopt a weighted lottery. However, while no extant weighted lottery is adequate in overlap cases, my new weighted lottery theory is. I conclude by discussing my theory’s practical implications (e.g., for bioethics and cases involving potentially unsuccessful attempts to benefit).
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
For an explicit example, consider the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s recently published ethical guidelines for allocating the initial supplies of COVID-19 vaccine, arguably the ...single most influential statement of operational ethical principles for that allocation throughout the USA.2 When they elaborate on the justification and implementation of their first operational principle to ‘Maximise benefits and minimise harms’, they state that allocating such supplies to certain essential workers will help to protect the health of others by preserving services (eg, healthcare worker resources) available in the future. ...parsimony in operational principles is a practical merit, because an excessive number of such principles (or overcomplicated principles) can lead to difficulties and costly delays in the development or implementation of allocation policy. ...insofar as policy makers are already sensitive to negative dynamics as evidenced by the cases above, adding an additional sustainability principle could lead policy makers to give negative dynamics excessive importance (eg, by double-counting the reasons of beneficence and sustainability).
Using cases from this symposium, I illustrate a distinction between clinical trials that harm research non-participants’ health and clinical trials that reduce a distinct health benefit to research ...non-participants. This distinction is ethically relevant for the design and justification of clinical trials. The relative stringency of the ethical duty to avoid harm makes it more important, all other things being equal, to avoid harms rather than avoid reduction of benefits. This is especially ethically important as it is often difficult to identify research non-participants who will suffer health harms due to research, let alone obtain their informed consent. In these difficult cases, all other things being equal, we have ethical reason to prefer clinical trials that only reduce non-participants’ health benefits to those that only involve harms to non-participants’ health. When such trials are not feasible and we are unable to get consent for the significant harms to research non-participants, these (and other) countervailing considerations must be outweighed by substantial social benefits in order for the trial to be ethically justified. Ethical research design must not just be concerned with the magnitude of adverse health effects on research non-participants but also the types of those effects.
When it is most fair for a claimant to receive a particular chance of benefiting (e.g. 50%) but they instead receive a different chance of benefiting (e.g. 40%), this lower chance is not ideally ...fair. I specify the often-overlooked type of individual unfairness evident in differences of this kind and argue for four intuitively supported criteria that a measure of this unfairness must meet. I defend the Asymmetrical Proportional View, which meets these criteria and is a measure of how individually unfair any particular difference of this kind is. Finally I conclude with the View's implications for theories of distributive fairness.
We identify three distinct ethical problems that can arise with risk displacement. Risk displacement is the shifting of extant risk from one or more individuals to other individual(s) such that the ...reduction of risk to the first group is causally implicated in increasing risk to the second group. These problems are: concentration of risk in inequitable ways; transfer of risk to already vulnerable or disadvantaged populations; and exercise of undue influence over potential research participants. The first two arise in both public policy and research initiatives, whereas the third is a special concern that only applies to research initiatives. We argue that when one or more of these is of high magnitude, then the study or policy intervention may be ethically wrong. Finally, we conclude that although some risk displacement is ethically permissible, researchers and policymakers still have ethical reasons to reduce the magnitude of these problems.
It is exceedingly plausible that the normative reason involving relations, 'more reason to do than' and 'is rationally preferred to', are transitive. Many philosophers and economists use the ...plausibility of covariation between these reason involving relations and the 'better than' relation to argue - or more often, to insist - that the 'better than' relation is also transitive. But Rachels, Temkin and Baumann provide powerful arguments for non-transitive betterness. Conversely, some defenders of non-transitive betterness, such as Friedman, use the covariation of betterness and reason to argue that the reason involving relations are also non-transitive. I will argue that both types of covariation argument are overly hasty. To do so, I will present two functions that input a non-transitive axiological ranking and output a transitive deontic ranking. I then argue that an ethical principle involving these functions has independent plausibility and avoids important objections associated with non-transitive betterness.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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