No Ethical Answer

Is there an absolute standard of ethics? About everything, not just many things? Obviously not, and no, the reason people don’t agree on issues of ethics isn’t always politics or religion or bigotry or one side being stronger than the other.

I will cite a couple of instances. The first one is the miners scenario:

“Imagine 100 miners who are stuck in a mine. They are divided in two groups. You can either rescue 50 (with certainty), but then the other 50 will be lost (this is strategy 1). Or you can try a different rescue strategy, which may potentially save all of them, but only at a 50% probability; there’s another 50% chance that all will die (strategy 2). Which strategy would you choose?”

Many variants of this question exist. But here’s the key point: people have conflicting views on which is the more ethical choice and neither side can cite a reason to convince the other!

The other instance I have in mind is about medical trials. Joanna Monti-Masel wrote a great article about two Ebola treatment options, both experimental:

“We have recently seen much ethical hand-wringing around use of the two new and experimental treatments for Ebola...The first two patients to be treated were Americans. Prior to this came the old (and historically justified) fear of testing potentially dangerous new treatments on vulnerable populations in developing countries rather than on privileged first world patients. The first ever treatment was not given to an African doctor because of this concern. After Westerners were treated, complaints rose about giving infected Westerners access to a new drug while infected Africans went without. These two concerns are obviously mutually exclusive.”

Yes, the two concerns are indeed mutually exclusive, and yet don’t both concerns have their merits? So what is the right way in this situation? Can’t any reason you cite for one always be refuted by the other side?

Monti-Masel further asks whether, given that we don’t know whether either treatment even works, should we not being doing a randomized double-blind experiment with both drugs? (In simple terms, that means giving the drug to some and a placebo to others; and not letting either the doctor or the patient know who is getting what). If we do it this way, we will learn through statistically significant amounts of data whether either treatment works. Then we pick the drug that really works and use it to deal with any future outbreaks. The counter-argument is obvious: how can anyone conduct such an experiment with people who are dieing?

These are just 2 instances of ethical debates with no obvious right answers. And yet religions and their followers insist that an absolute concept of ethics does exist...