The critical care unit of your local hospital calls you for ethical consultation. They have admitted 53-year-old JoEllen after she overdosed on prescription medications taken with alcohol. On admission, she tries to speak but soon becomes uncommunicative. As her condition deteriorates rapidly, her son arrives with a notarized advance directive in which JoEllen has specifically asked not to be placed on life support. People are looking to you for guidance.
This week, we return to the case of JoEllen. But this time, we will discuss it using two new moral theories we have been learning about: deontology and virtue ethics. One way to approach the case using deontology is to consider Kant’s notion of “respect for persons,” as discussed in Chapter 10 of your course text. With virtue theory, a good way to start is to think about virtues that are relevant to a decision like this (see the list in Section 12.2 of your course text). Which of the virtues do you think the ethics consultant and health care team should possess to make a sound moral judgment about what to do?
Read the following Internet selections:
Jankowiak, T. (n.d.). http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantview/#H5 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from
http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantview/#H5
Johnson, R., & Cureton, A. (2016). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/kant-moral/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Spring 2018 Edition. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/kant-moral/