Wednesday 10/23
Kantian Case Analysis
Readings
Texts
- "Bad Blood": A Case Study of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project
- Stephen Goldby, Saul Krugman, M. H. Pappworth, and Geoffrey Edsall: The Willowbrook Letters, "Criticism and Defense"; Paul Ramsey, "Judgment on Willowbrook"
Notes
Cases
Synopsis
We began today considering the gulf, if you will, between the theoretical perspectives offered by utilitarianism, on the one hand, and deontology, on the other. In particular, we considered some of the decidedly grim history of human experimentation and discussed the exchanges between critics and researchers in the Willowbrook Hepatitis experiments. What we found, of course, were in some respects radically different ways of thinking about moral normative issues. It is clear from this discussion that such debates are extremely important in terms of both the judgments being made and in terms of the theoretical divide grounding those judgments. The history of human experimentation, particularly those instances where especially vulnerable populations are exploited (and for whom no particular benefit can reasonably be anticipated) demonstrates in particular the sharp division between utilitarian and kantian approaches to ethics.
We then proceeded to read and discuss (as a class, not in groups this time) at some length the Keeping Track. The interesting question arising from this case is whether the parents, under the guise of "wanting to keep him safe", are in fact treating their son as a means only and not as an end in himself. To be sure, this is a difficult question, inasmuch as it relies to a considerable extent on parental intentions, which are very hard to determine. Normally we assume parents treat their children as ends in themselves, and never as means only. Yet we have counter-examples like "toddlers in tiaras" and the chattel approach to parenting strongly suggesting otherwise. How in this case to ascertain intentions is challenging to determine, to say the least. Nevertheless, asking these sorts of questions (about means-ends, say, and intentions) invites a deeper analysis of the case at hand than we might at first blush be inclined to give it. It also illustrated some of the difficulties Kantian Ethical Theory presents in application.
Next time we take up an alternative to both utilitarianism and deontology--so-called contractarianism. First, though, we take time to demolish a disturbingly popular ethical theory as a step towards understanding contractarian approaches to ethics.