uh one thing I do want to say is this is a very heavy introduction to the material it's not going to be all this dark and Grim but there's some very serious um and sobering cases that they cover in chapter one but I do think they illustrate the point of you know the importance of ethics and asking these bigger questions what is right what is wrong uh so on and so forth that um although they're very tough um I do think that they uh help show us like what exactly we can expect from this and why uh ethics is important so to begin uh this is a quote from Socrates and Plato's Republic it says we are discussing no small matter but how we ought to live and that's essentially what ethics is how we ought to live so the problem of definition moral philosophy is a study of what morality is and what it requires of us as Socrates says it's how we ought to live and why it would be helpful if we could begin with a simple uncontroversial definition of what morality is unfortunately we cannot there are many rival theories uh each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally and any definition that goes beyond Socrates simple formulation is bound to offend at least one of them and in fact we're going to be spending a lot of this course looking at these different theories uh this should make us cautious but it need not paralyze Us in this chapter I'll describe the minimum conception to so the minimum conception is something you need to understand and also the definition of ethics that we talked about of morality uh as the name suggest the minimum concept conception is a core that every uh moral theory should accept at least as a starting point first however we will examine some moral controversies having to do with handicapped children uh this discussion will bring out the features of the minimum conception so here we are uh these three uh examples are again uh pretty tough but again I think they're important for us understanding the minimum conception and what exactly morality is so the first one is baby Teresa so she was born in '92 uh with this terrible condition essentially where you know these babies that have this condition most of them um you know are born still born and those that aren't uh they only live like nine days tops kind of thing and she was one of these cases and so her parents wanted to take you know her vital organs and such and give them I mean she was basically born without a brain actually she just had a brain stem um so you know it was a terrible fate for this child and so what they wanted to do was take her organs and donate them you know to save other babies you know that might need them as well you know her physician thought hey that's a great idea and uh thousands of infants needed transplants each year and there are Never Enough organs available um however Teresa's organs were not taken because Florida law forbids the removal of organs until the donor has died and by the time that baby Teresa died N9 days later I was too late her organs had deterior deteriorated too much to be transplanted so this case was widely debated uh should she have been killed so that their organs could have been used to save other children a number of professional ethicists people who get paid by universities hospitals and law schools that think about such things were asked to uh by the press to comment most of them disagreed with the parents instead appealing to time-honored philosophical principles it just seems too horrifying to use people as means to other people's ends said one such expert another explained it's unethical to kill person a to save person b and a third added uh what the parents are really asking for is kill the kill this baby kill this dying baby so that its organs may be used for someone else well that's really a horrendous uh proposition and so the question is like is this horrendous um on one hand yes you are killing this child on the other hand it does seem like hey like there isn't a chance for life here and what you could be doing is actually saving a lot of people um but like is this the best way to go about like should we willingly kill somebody um for the greater good maybe right and this is a tough question you can see the reasons that you know the ethicist gave it's like yeah these are good arguments to give why it would be wrong but also the reason that the parents had um it seems like a solid reason as well and this is a tough dilemma and depending upon where you end up uh in this course of which ethical framework you might take you might have a better understanding of how to answer this question maybe you already have a very clear understanding from your intuition just from me reading it um this is usually the part where I'd like to discuss the pros and cons and get everyone's feedback but obviously I can't but uh do put it uh in the discussion board and maybe that'll lead to some great discussions right so there is the benefits argument the parents believe that Teresa's organs were doing her no good because she was not conscious it was bound to die soon the other children however could have been helped uh thus the parents seem to have reasoned if we can benefit someone without harming anyone else then we ought to do so transplanting the organs would benefit the other children without harming baby Teresa therefore we ought to transplant the organs is this correct uh and then they start to talk about that right um and why it could or could not be correct but then the next argument that we should not use people as means so the first was based on the idea it's wrong to use people as means to other people's goals uh this is something that you know Kant kind of first formulated but it's this idea that we should always use people as treat people as ends and and of themselves and never as means to ends uh that that's part of what it means as you know an ethical person to treat people ethically that we should always consider others as ends in another themselves and if we were to just kill Teresa to harvest her organs then we're taking this person and treating them as a means to an end not as an end and then of herself um so is this argument sound you know again like using people typically involves violating their autonomy but you know maybe uh Teresa doesn't have autonomy we would be also using her organs without her permission would that make it wrong if we were to use them against her wishes versus like she has no wishes uh we might ask what's in the best interest uh for the baby uh what would she want if she could say it uh yeah like these different questions that we have to ask the next one is the argument from wrongness of killing uh it's wrong to kill one person to say another and that's what we'd be doing here and then it starts to talk about the pros and the cons of this as well um again I don't want to get too far into this um just because you know it's on here and I want to make this uh today's class rather short at least but then it gives the second example of jod and Mary um so they were born in Italy as conjoined twins um and they're uh sharing one heart and one pair of lungs between them and if we didn't uh well not if we but if the doctors didn't intervene then uh surely you know they both would have died and so the question was you know what should happen like jod was very much stronger than Mary and in fact was providing all of the blood to Mary um and so Mary was actually making jod weaker and that was killing both of them and so what the doctors were saying is without intervention both would die within six months the only hope was an operation to separate them uh but this would mean that jod would live and Mary would die immediately and the parents who were devout Catholics oppos the operation on the grounds that it would hasten Mary's death we believe that nature should take its course they said if it's God's will that both our children should not survive then so be it uh the hospital hoping to save jod petitioned the courts for permission to perform the operation anyway and the courts agreed and the operation was performed as expected jod lived and maryed died Mary died um and so we should also distinguish first who should make the decision right should it be the parents that made the decision or the courts to make the decision and then beyond that Beyond who should make the decision we should ask the question what should that decision be um and these are both very important questions to ask um in ethics you know it might be that perhaps you saying who should make this decision um well maybe when it's a matter of life or death these should be rules governed by the state or maybe it's because hey these are the children of these parents it should be the parents that do so um and that's going to be different depending upon where your ethical view is and then also saying what should the decision be you are killing Mary but you're saving jod um and that's a really tough thing to do on either side and so there's the argument that we should save as many as we can and it's like look without intervention both are going to die um but with intervention we can at least save jod although Mary would die there's the argument from the sanctity of human life that hey it's just it's wrong to kill people even if she's going to die naturally to hasten her death would be wrong you know in a sense like we're all going to die naturally eventually right um so then like the question is even with inty of human life like either way she's going to be dead it's like is that how strong of an argument should that be uh and then the third example is Tracy ladimer she was a 12-year-old with terrible case of cerebral py um by the time she was 12 she was still only 40 lbs and functioning at the mental level of a three-month-old baby and you know it was really taking a ton of stress and load on her poor parents and what her father and she was in severe pain uh her entire life and it was terrible pain you know that like it was a very terrible case and her father um killed her and you know he was tried for murder and uh you know he was found guilty that but but the judge didn't want to punish him severely so charged him with second deegree murder and uh recommended that the judge ignored the 10-year sentence it's maned for such a crime uh and agreed to send him to onee in prison but in his defense it may be said that Tracy's condition was so catastrophic that she had no prospects of a life in any but the mest biological sense um so like was it right for him to do that you know basically this was a mercy killing in a sense and is that okay cuz he's still taking alive and you know he was still convicted for that but beyond what the law said you know the question that we should ask is like what is the right thing to do in this case because law and ethics don't always match up uh a great example might be that you know it's illegal to speed um but how I mean you could make the case that like you're putting other people in danger and that's unethical but let's say you're on a completely abandoned Road um and it's no harm to you because you're going 5 miles more over the speed limit it's a straight line um you know is it unethical for you to speed then you know that kind of thing like maybe we would say it's not unethical but it is illegal nonetheless um versus some things that uh are unethical can still be legal so like lying right um granted perjury or like lying to the government is illegal but you know if I were to tell you like hey like um I think you're like I don't know uh something like you know does this stress make me look fat kind of a thing right like where uh you know maybe you want to lie to save the person um and say like no like you look great kind of thing um maybe you're lying and that would be unethical uh presumably by most standards uh but it's certainly legal for you to do that right so so that could be also a case where something might be unethical but legal and then we might see something that's illegal but still ethical uh so they're not always going uh in tandem uh there's not a perfect response so beyond again all that to say beyond what the law say um what is the right thing to do in this case so one argument would be that it's wrong to discriminate against a handicap uh the president of the Saskatoon voice of people with disabilities who has multiple sclerosis said nobody has right to decide my life is worth less than yours that's bottom line uh Tracy was killed because she was handicapped he said and that's immoral um but you know the father argued that Tracy's Cal poliy is not the issue people are saying this is a handicap issue but they're wrong this is a torture issue it was about mutilation and torture for Tracy just before her death Tracy had undergone major surgery on her backs hips legs um and more surgery was planned with a combination of a feeding tube r in her back the leg cut and the flopping around in bed sores said her father how can people say she was a happy little girl uh thus Mr ladimer Design denied that Tracy was killed because of her disability she was killed because she was suffering without hope of relief and then there's also the slippery slope argument which is you know well if we allow this to happen um you know we might be able to use this as a justification for um more egregious acts so on and so forth and there's the validity or invalidity of that that you can argue um but yeah so 1.5 uh after covering those three cases we can look at reason and partiality so what can we learn from these three cases uh about the nature of morality for starters we may note two points first moral judgments must be backed by good reasons and second morality requires the impartial impartial consideration of each individual's interest so these are are considered the minimum conception and we'll be looking at different ethical theories that um differ or argue against reason impartiality um but the minimum conception that they're going to be arguing involves one you have to have good reason U to make an ethical decision and two we must be impartial when making an ethical decision so that's important to note again moral judgments must be backed by good reasons and morality requires the impartial consideration of of each individual's interests so with moral reasoning uh it says here that we want to discover truth we must let our feelings be guided as much as possible by reason uh this is the essence of morality the moral morally right thing to do is always the best thing supported by the argument and a lot of people might argue hey that might not exactly be true um and we'll start to cover that towards the end of the semester but the beyond that we can figure out whether a reason is good how can we assess moral arguments and by what assessment it would be nice if there was a simple recipe for constructing good arguments and avoiding bad ones unfortunately there's not arguments can go wrong in many ways and we might always encounter a new kind of error yet this should not surprise us the road application of routine methods is no replacement for critical thinking and then there's also the requirement for impartiality that they talk about so it says the requirement of impartiality ity then is at the bottom nothing more than a rule against treating people arbitrarily uh it forbids treating one person worse than another when there is no good reason to do so so ending it on page 13 the minimum conception of morality uh we may now State the minimum conception morality is at the very least the effort to guide one's conduct by reason that is to do what there are the best reasons for doing while giving equal weight to the interest of each indiv individual affected by one's actions this paints a picture of what it means to be a conscientious moral agent young the conscientious moral agent is someone who is concerned impartially with the interest of everyone affected by what he or she does who carefully sifts facts and examines their implications who accepts principles of conduct only after scrutinizing them to make sure that they are Justified who will listen to reason even when it means revising prior convictions and who finally is willing to act on these deliberations as one might expect not every ethical Theory excepts this minimum this picture of the conscientious moral agent has been disputed in various ways however theories that reject it encounter serious difficulties this is why most moral theories Embrace a minimum conception and one form or another yeah so that's the end of chapter one um again there's some heavy examples there and I didn't go into all of the pros and cons but it gave Arguments for and arguments against and then even for each argument it gave the for against for that argument um which I encourage you to look at uh I'm sorry for you know starting the semester with such a you know sobering topic but um I do again think it's really important because there's a lot of good questions that we can ask there about what the right thing to do is and who should make the right decision um what does it even mean for something to be right but that's going to be the basis for our semester um other than that like I hope you have a great day and I will see yall tomorrow um and again please be sure that you're on top of the reading