Question

Medical ethics

1) Give a brief statement of the main point of this article from Norcross. What is his argument in this article?

''Norcross - puppies pigs and people excerpt''

2) Give a brief statement of the main point of this article from James Rachels. What is his argument in this article?

''Active and Passive Euthanasia''

3) Give a brief statement of the main point of this article from Singer. What is his argument in this article?

''Equality for animals''

Answer 1

Norcross says that it is unfortunate that Fred can no longer taste chocolate but that's no excuse for abusing puppies. The Doctrine of Double Effect requires that an unintended bad effect should be foreseen and there should be an outweighing good effect. There is an important moral difference between actions with outcomes that are intended as a means to some particular end and actions with consequences that are merely foreseen. As far as the suffering of factory-raised animals is concerned, any claimed good outcome doesn’t outweigh the bad. The utilitarian arguments favoring moral vegetarianism cannot justify a complete prohibition of eating meat as forgoing meat will not always prevent pain, and so, on a utilitarian basis, it is good to be opportunistic carnivores rather than moral vegetarians. In the paper, ‘Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal cases,’ Norcross argues that causally impotent arguments are misguided. Norcross presents an analogous situation of chocolate mousse a-la-bama first, to argue that individually we are not causally impotent. Second, Norcross comes across with a threshold argument in which he argues that while individually we may be causally impotent when we adopt moral vegetarianism along with others, we become causally potent in the prevention of harm by factory farming. Norcross's responses ultimately fail to address his causal impotence objection. The former argument fails because it overly simplifies the world in which we live. Given the size of factory farming, it is reasonable to conclude that we are powerless to prevent harm to animals in factory farms in most cases. The latter argument fails because even if collective action will have an impact on factory farming, this does not provide us with an argument against being carnivores in certain circumstances.