Homework Question on Ethical Values and Considerations
- Address the following in a three-page paper:
- Identify a current event or contemporary social issue that involves ethical values. Your issue must be broad enough to sustain deep philosophical analysis and must have relevance to your community. A good choice of issue is one that (1) involves a decision that must be made that involves competing ethical values and considerations, (2) includes with various available options about which reasonable people can disagree, (3) concretely affects people’s lives, and (4) might be influenced by external and internal factors such as social norms, oppression, religious and other personal beliefs, socially-imposed constraints (such as laws), and physical limitations. Issues that only affect a few people or have only a minor impact are probably too narrow. Issues that you are not open to examining with an open mind will also not work well for this assignment. For some topic suggestions, you might want to browse the website of a reputable news organization or review some political blogs you follow.
- Identify at least two news articles on your topic located using reputable news outlets. Make sure that the articles you choose present at least two different accounts of the values that should be considered in addressing the issue and include information and facts that you can use to develop your arguments and analysis. If you cannot locate two news articles on your topic, or if all of the articles share the same perspective, you should choose another topic. You should cite the two articles using correct APA citation.
- Explain at least one ethical theory from your assigned readings. Cite support from the primary text selections in the chapter as well as authoritative secondary sources such as the course text and online lectures.
- Analyze the issue using the theory of ethics. For example, you might discuss utilitarianism, deontology, virtue/care ethics, or existentialism.
- Contrast this analysis with the approach a second theory would take. For instance, you might contrast deontology with utilitarianism by distinguishing duty from the principle of utility, or compare care ethics and existentialism by discussing the relative approaches to intersubjectivity.
Homework Answer on Ethical Values and Considerations
As genetic and reproductive technologies escalate, ethical concerns emerge. The Australian Women’s Weekly on February 2, 2015 reported a case of a new mother to non-identical twins, who had been born without a womb. USA Today (2014) reported successful womb transplants on nine women who had previously not been able to conceive. The wombs had been donated by family members in experimental procedures that have featured ethical concerns.
The said women are set to trials on whether they can get pregnant with the transplanted wombs. The eggs will be fertilized outside the body and later transferred to the mothers to be.The proponents of this procedure argue that it improves the quality of life of childless women. The procedure is temporal as the womb will be discarded after the mother gets baby number two. This is significant as the mother will stop taking anti-rejection drugs which are feared to cause health conditions, such as high blood pressure, swellings, cancer, or diabetes.
The aim of the experiment is to test whether the women can get their own babies. Some of the affected women were born without wombs, while the others had it removed due to complications such as cervical cancers (Don, 2015). This procedure ignites a lot of hope for women who have been unable to get pregnant. However, ethical concerns have emerged as to whether it is morally upright to use live donors in the experiment.