Ethical Issues in Scientific Research by Edward Erwin Sidney Gendin Lowell Kleiman

Author:Edward Erwin, Sidney Gendin, Lowell Kleiman [Edward Erwin, Sidney Gendin, Lowell Kleiman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medical, Ethics, Science, Research & Methodology, Social Science, Philanthropy & Charity
ISBN: 9780815306412
Google: hLa5QgAACAAJ
Publisher: Garland
Published: 1994-01-15T02:51:34+00:00

Most of them, I suspect, are unaware that this was meant satirically. (Another line runs:

Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,

When it’s so lucrative to cheat.)…

But many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest. Then again, what Clough presumably had in mind by ‘officious’ striving was striving to prolong the lives of those whose lives were either approaching their end anyway, or were becoming something of a burden to themselves or others. It is hardly officious striving to administer, to an adult in his prime or to a small child, an injection designed to cure or prevent a disease that is likely otherwise to bring worthwhile life to a tragic and premature end. But all the same, perhaps one could argue that it is just this that distinguishes the conduct of Jones and Arrowsmith (before his change of heart) from that of my fictitious doctor with his asthmatic hypertensives. The latter was actually killing his patients, whereas Jones and Arrowsmith were merely letting theirs die. And perhaps what is so horrifying about the Lanman case is that the doctors did not simply let these babies go blind, when it was in their power to prevent it, but actually did something to make them go blind.

It is, however, difficult on reflection to see how the distinction between killing and letting die, or between actions and omissions in general, can, as such, have any moral significance. As has frequently been pointed out,14 deliberately not to rescue a drowning man, when one was in a position to do so at minimal cost to oneself, does not really seem any less bad than pushing him into the water in the first place, knowing that he could not swim, provided the motive is the same in each case. And why should it? As Sartre says, ‘Not to act is to act’. Standing idly by and watching someone drown may not be a very energetic action, but it is an action, of sorts, nevertheless. And so was Jones’s in standing by—though not idly (rather, making notes and collecting swabs)—as patients in his care died of a disease that a simple injection would most likely have prevented.

It might be objected that the analogy between a strong swimmer’s rescuing or not rescuing a drowning man and a doctor’s curing or not curing a sick man is a poor one, and that therefore no particular moral should be drawn for the topic we are here concerned with. In fact, though, there are grounds for thinking that any imperfections in the analogy actually work against the person who would argue that the acts-omissions distinction is, or ought to be, of relevance in medicine. After all, simple humanity seems to demand that the able bystander should jump in and save the drowning man, even if he is a total stranger, with whom, therefore, the bystander has no special ties of obligation. With doctor and patient, though, there would normally be thought to exist a special bond of obligation: it

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