Question

Using the duty based approach to ethics, how would you solve the ethical dilemma of a world wide plague that only your 8 year old son's blood can cure, but to do so means draining all of your son's blood, thereby causing your son to die. Would you sacrifice your son? Explain your reasoning under a duty based approach

Answer 1

The theory of deontology is based on the notion that an act will be considered as moral when it is conducted on the basis of certain rules or principles and the act fulfills its duty.

In other words a person for being moral is required to fulfill the duty or obligation of acting in compliance with some set of principles no matter what the outcome of that action will be. So the end result or the consequence of an action stands unimportant here.

Thus for any act to be right it needs to act in accordance of predetermined rules whom its his duty to follow and thus an act is wrong if it will violate the rules and does not fulfill the duty

Now after understanding the concept of duty based ethics it can be concluded that i need not to see the outcome but to fulfill the duty.

If the concept of duty based ethics is applied to the above dilemma it's clear that the outcome of the act here is the death of my child and the duty on my part is to fulfill my dity or attempt to save the people from plague.

Well , looking at my part of obligation it is important that i fulfill my duty, by acting accordance some rules , but that is only to be done through sacrificing my son is not implied.

I agree for being moral i need to think about fulfilling my duty, but keeping apart that i play a role of a mother in this dilemma, morality does not imply that duty will be discharged when i will attempt to save life of people but at expense of death of an innocent child.

Thus my decision in this regard to solve the ethical dilemma and to act moral would be :

I will agree to give my son's blood for attempting to cure the disease (as part of my duty) but the blood will be given to the amount that my son's donating blood will not harm him or will not put any bad impact on his healthy self.

By that way my duty will be discharged and my son will also be saved. As my duty was to act as per a rule and think about the cure of plague, not whether my action will be able to cure the plague or not.

So for me Its not my duty to think whether that small amount of blood actually cures the disease .

Thankyou.

Hope i provided the best solution to solve the dilemma

Sorry for any mistake in spelling

Rate if satisfied with my answer.

Good luck to you , shine and God bless.