Short answer questions

Sarah: "I have been sober for 6 months, thanks to AA meetings, but my mother and father were killed last week in a car crash, and at their funeral, I had a few drinks. I can't go back to an AA meeting now, because they will all say I'm a failure." What would someone who follows the Harm Reduction model say to Sarah that would be helpful?

Reiterate that she is not a failure, and find a way to ensure that she is in a safe and controlled environment, since her drinking again was bound to happen, and a traumatic event is likely to increase those chances. Mitigate her drinking by having fewer drinks and less powerful liquor. “Did you drive?”

Ned: "I'm a 'Res Kid"- a Native American born and raised on a reservation in Minnesota, where my mother and father, uncle and grandfather, all were such heavy drinkers that they often passed out, sometimes in car crashes. I guess I'm genetically doomed to be an alcoholic." Why might Cindy Ehlers agree with Ned in part, and why might sociologists agree with Ned, also in part?

Cindy might agree. She stated that Indians have a higher resistance to alcohol. Hence, people who are at higher risk for developing alcoholism seem to have an inherent tolerance or a low level of response to alcohol (50%). Therefore, in Ned’s case, it seemed to be his fate. Think half and half → Genetic and social. With sociologists, they would place the stereotype of how common alcoholism is in the Rez.

Better never to have been born," so argues anti-natalist David Benatar, who argues that life itself for humans is a harm. How can Benatar be answered by distinguishing different meanings of "harm"?

A way to define harm is less than ideal, less than normal. Benatar states that life is less than normal, so that could be a form of harm. (CH5)

Comparative harm means making someone worse off than they otherwise would have been, or worse off than some counterfactual baseline (e.g., existing in a state of non-suffering).

Non-comparative harm (often championed by theorists like Benatar) suggests that a condition can be bad or harmful simply in virtue of its intrinsic qualities (e.g., containing pain), even if there is no alternative baseline where the person is better off.

Critics argue that "harm" is fundamentally a comparative concept. To be harmed logically requires that a subject exists to be made worse off. 

Octomom: "My 8 kids can't complain. If I had aborted 7 of them, 7 wouldn't exist." How would Kant argue that although the Octomom's kids were not harmed by being born, she was still wrong to gestate them this way? In other words, how would Kant use the distinction between harming and wronging in his reply?

As discussed with non-comparative versus comparative harms, an action can only harm an individual if it leaves them worse off than a relevant baseline.

Wronging: It does not judge an action solely by whether the net result produces happiness or suffering. Instead, it evaluates whether an action respects rational agents.

Most surgeons: "Surgeons Christiaan Barnard and William de Vries were both wrong to operate because each faced medical dilemmas that were unsolvable, but they operated anyway, seeking fame and glory for their grandiose egos." Explain why most surgeons thought this.

Christiaan Barnard (who performed the first human heart transplant in 1967) and William de Vries (who implanted the first permanent artificial heart, the Jarvik-7, in 1982) stems from medical ethics, professional caution, and the concept of unsolvable clinical dilemmas.

(a) How did critics think that forcing couples to pay their own money for assisted

reproduction, rather than have it covered by medical insurance, would shut down assisted

reproduction. (b) But such an arrangement backfired and assisted reproduction went on to

grow and prosper. Why?

(a.) They assumed that most couples would need insurance to help pay for assisted reproduction because it was an expensive process.

(b.) The couples were willing to go through drastic measures because years of infertility can make someone desperate. The couples had to pay with cash, so that made the process cheaper rather than having to go through insurance due to no interest fees, and overall reduced costs.

Couples look at how successful the IVF company is. Research was funded by the cash from the patients because there was no regulation. 

Disability activists fear that screening embryos for genetic "diseases" might create a new stealth Eugenics, but that fear confounds what happened in Nazi Germany and early 20th century America with parental choice, i.e., silent eugenics by voluntary parental choice is not involuntary, forced Eugenics by a coercive State. Explain.

A central government wielded its power to dictate what kind of population should exist. It used laws, police power, institutionalization, and forced sterilizations or terminations to eliminate individuals deemed "unfit" or "undesirable" for the collective good of the state.

The model from genetics believes that as a Native American, Ernie Crowfeather was

doomed to die young as an alcoholic. How would Kant dissect and refute the evidence for

this claim that alcoholism is a disease inherited in one's genes?

Kant would say that if you never had alcohol in the first place, you would not become an alcoholic. Factors that could jumpstart it would be trauma, frequent alcohol intake in the household, exposure to alcohol in utero.

How did Purdue Pharma flood America and Canada with Oxycontin? What went wrong

with American doctors and government that allowed this to cause so many Americans to die

from overdoses?

They pushed doctors to prescribe their patients with Oxycontin for a multitude of injuries. They stated that it was not addictive. (What is your pain level?) 

How would Harry Frankfurt and Kant conceptualize whether ordinary people have free

will over their weight?

Harry Frankfurt’s theory of free will If an overweight person genuinely identifies with their desire to maintain a certain lifestyle or diet—meaning their second-order volition fully endorses their actions—they are exercising free will, even if those actions lead to weight gain.

Kant would look past physical excuses like "my genetics dictate my weight" or "my metabolism makes weight control impossible." While those are real factors in the phenomenal (material) world, true agency for Kant means the capacity of practical reason to override natural inclinations.