Talk:Utilitarian bioethics

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 January 2019 and 16 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Swiernicki. Peer reviewers: Averyw1086.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:12, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Is this for real?
I added Template:References, but it is very mildy put. I mean — is this for real? Is there any actual Philosophy research behind this topic? Or is it just tabloid crackpottery and corporate greed-talk?

Four further readings are provided and I see that one of them (25%) is Dean Koontz’s book — where he goes lengths to confuse the reader, by calling plain "Bioethics" to the wierd concept here named "Utilitarian bioethics", and in general plugging in for his creationist fundie friends.

If the whole thing is this shallow, then better move the whole thing to Conservapedia (*) and add Template:Delete instead.

(* Hm, Conservapedia wouldn’t welcome the anti-corporate slant…)

Tuvalkin (talk) 23:57, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, I got rid of Koontz's book as a reference. It's a good read, but just seeks to entertain, and about one or two paragraphs are really devoted to utilitarian bioethics. And even then it just describes the moral outrage of a discoverer. No real value as a rebuttal. --122.106.159.33 (talk) 06:52, 11 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I tried to add some neutral context, but I'm not sure this should be an article at all Bioethica Americana (talk) 16:35, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

This is really bad - it seems like the entire point is to present an argument against Utilitarian Bioethics. Unless there is a nice article on Deontological Bioethics or the like to use as a pattern I don't think this should exist. 99.50.232.87 (talk) 07:07, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

The way the content is portrayed in the article seems to suggest some bias for opposing utilitarian bioethics. Giving the only example of a nurse caring for a terminally ill patient or a patient in a vegetative state is a nurse that could have cared for a sick baby or a child gunshot victim seems to show utilitarian bioethics as a cold ethical practice. Using phrasing like "one less nurse" hints to the reader that the writer has a particular stance on the subject. At least this is how I perceive the tone of the article. I would probably delete the example and add some viewpoints of utilitarian bioethicists on controversial topics in modern bioethics. --Swiernicki (talk) 06:43, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Economic argument [edit]
I was thinking of adding the following couple of sentences along with citations after the the first sentence following "...required for treatment". (Open to any feedback and criticisms. Thanks.)
 * This would be most in line with the concept of QALY, which is a measure of benefit from treating or allocating resources to individuals based on the comparison of each individual's alternative outcome. Although there is controversy in regard to the equality of persons in this concept, philosopher and economist John Broome mentions that equality should be regarded as a separate issue when considering QALY, because if one uses a standard of measurement that produces the same amount of qualy for each individual, as proposed by G.W. Torrance, one of the economist credited to the creation of the concept, then there is unfairness when we consider different age groups, with the elderly getting a lower amount of qalys compared to younger groups. Another health care concept implicit in its' use of utilitarian ethics is the concept of triage, where the acuity of the patient is assessed and patients seen first are based on their acuity level. This allows for the best use of the resource pool to be used toward the most critical patient's first and thereby maximize the efficiency of resource utilization.    Swiernicki (talk) 05:15, 21 February 2019 (UTC)