Ethical Dilemma – Stolen Treatment For Terminal Illness
Posted by guffyconservative on 08/24/2011
At school, I’m taking an ethics class and my semester-long assignment is to come up with ethical dilemmas and discuss them. I’ll post those that relate somewhat to politics here. Note: I did not actually come up with this dilemma. Professor Honeycutt mentioned it in class – I do not know if he came up with it or got it from somewhere else.
These will also be stored under this “Ethical Dilemmas” page.
In this instance, I would have to conclude that a) the treatment should be returned if it has yet to be used or some arrangement for paying for it should be reached if it has been used, and b) the man should face some consequences (what those are would be up to the justice system). There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the man broke the law. Even in a case where someone is ethically in the right, they should be willing to face the consequences of their actions. If that is not followed, then to what degree the law is followed will vary for each and every person; in such a situation, law and order breaks down. Not facing consequences would only encourage repetition. Please note that I am not saying that the man is in the wrong for breaking the law. It is certainly conceivable that his conscience should be clear, but he must still face consequences.
The second reason has to do with whether or not his action was, in fact, ethical. Doctors, in general, do not simply demand a sizeable sum of money for no reason, even if that reason is not readily apparent. How many years of the doctor’s life have gone into the research for this treatment? What has he sacrificed? How much money has he poured into it? These questions are all relatively trivial (one man’s finances are not more important than the life of another’s wife), but worth asking.
More importantly, the doctor probably has one of two reasons for demanding so much money. The first is straightforward: money. The doctor wants money, either for profit or to compensate for his expended resources or to put into further research and development. This may or may not be a matter of greed (see the questions above), but it comes down to the same thing. Now, if that is his motivation, why would he demand an amount beyond an ill person’s means? He gains nothing in that scenario and would do so for only one of two reasons that I can conceive. If the treatment simply costs that much (requires a lot of costly chemicals or some such thing), then why should the doctor be the one to pay? While sympathy drives us to side with the sick woman, bankrupting researching medical doctors cannot possibly be in humanity’s best interest – note that this sort of situation could likely arise around research involving any terminal illness or condition and allowing such thievery to transpire would have the end result of destroying medical research on fatal sicknesses. Then where would we be?
Or perhaps the cost of the treatment is relatively small, but it is a matter of supply and demand. There could be half a dozen people with the same condition, but only one “dose” of available treatment to go around. The doctor is not seeking money, but raising the cost is the only way he knows to reduce the number of patients to match the supply. Perhaps essentially giving the treatment to the most financially rich patient is not the best way to choose who gets it, but neither is giving it to the patient with the most dedicated relative or the patient with the least amount of respect for the law. In either of those cases, murderous members of the Mafia would likely take precedence over a farmer, or a doctor, or a teacher or police officer.
Am I saying that the man was ethically wrong? No – for all we know, the doctor is a sadist who gets off watching people die with salvation just out of reach (although why such a man is researching cures to illnesses is beyond me). Am I saying that I wouldn’t do the same thing (after exhausting all preferable alternatives, of course)? No. This situation is extremely different from any of my experiences, so I cannot say with any certainty how I would act. But, in conclusion, the man must face the consequences of his actions and reparations must be made (either by returning treatment and paying to fix any damages such as broken windows or by paying for the used treatment).
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