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Possible Topics for Your Ethics Paper

You may choose one of the following ‘questions for thought’ to create an argument off of or you can find your own ethics issue. Either way, you will need to do some research and incorporate it into your paper to complete the project.

At present there is no vaccine for a serious viral disease. A vaccine is developed and appears effective in animal trials. Only a comparative experiment with human subjects in which a control group receives a placebo can determine the true worth of the vaccine. Is it ethical to give some subjects the placebo, which cannot protect them against the disease?

“Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials are the gold standard for evaluating new interventions and are routinely used to assess new medical therapies.” So says an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that discusses the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. This article isn’t about the new treatment, which offers hope of reducing the tremors and lack of control brought on by the disease, but about the ethics of studying the treatment. The law requires well-designed experiments to show the new drugs work and are safe. Not so with surgery. We often don’t know whether many common surgeries are worth the risk. To find out, we would need to do a proper experiment. In the case of Parkinson’s disease, the promising treatment involves surgery to implant new cells. The placebo subjects get the same surgery but the cells are not implanted. Is this ethical?

Students sign up to be subjects in a psychology experiment. When they arrive, they are told that interviews are running late and are taken to a waiting room. The experimenters then stage a theft of a valuable object left in the waiting room. Some subjects are alone with the thief, and others are in pairs – these are the treatments being compared. While the subject report the theft? The students had agreed to take part in an unspecified study, and the true nature of the experiment is explained to them afterward. Do you think this study is ethically OK?

One of the most important goals of AIDS research is to find a vaccine that will protect against HIV. Because AIDS is so common in parts of Africa, that is the easier place to test a vaccine. It is likely, however, that a vaccine would be so expensive that is could not (at least at first) be widely used in Africa. Is it ethical to test in Africa if the benefits go mainly to rich countries? The treatment group would get the vaccine, and the placebo group would later be given the vaccine if it proved effective, so the actual subjects would get the vaccine, but future benefits would go elsewhere. What do you think?

A survey asked teenagers whether they had ever consumed an alcoholic beverage. Those who said “Yes” were then asked, how old were you when you first consumed an alcoholic beverage? Should consent of parents be required to ask minors about alcohol, drugs, and other such issues, or is consent of the minors themselves enough? Explain.

The decision to ban medical experiments on federal prisoners followed the uncovering of experiments in the 1960’s that exposed prisoners to serious harm. But experiments that are not harmful are also banned from federal prisons. Because of the difficulty of obtaining truly voluntary consent in a prison, is it necessary to ban even experiments in which all treatments appear harmless?

Many people are concerned about the ethics of experimentation with living animals. Some go so far as to regard any animal experiments as unethical regardless of the benefits to human beings. Is there an ethics issue here? Where do we draw the line? The following are example situations…

1) Military doctors use goats that have been deliberately shot (while completely anesthetized) to study and teach the treatment of combat wounds. Assume that there is no equally effective way to prepare doctors to treat human wounds. Is this ethically acceptable? (It might be helpful to consider whether or not we can use this same method with people.)

2) Several states are considering legislation that would end the practice of using cats and dogs from pounds in medical research. Instead, the overflow of animals would lead to many more being euthanized. Is there a correct choice here?

3) The cancer-causing potential of chemicals is assessed by exposing lab rats to high concentrations. The rats are bred for this specific purpose. Should this practice be stopped? (Would your opinion differ if dogs or monkeys were used?)

You may create or find your own situation that raises ethical questions. Make sure to check it with me first, before you start your argument.

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