Friday, January 30, 2009

Thoughts on "Healthy Hannah" Case


Healthy Hannah
is a case that I read in my Accounting Ethics class.

The story goes like this:

Hannah is a healthy 23 year-old woman who visits a hospital emergency room with
severe head injury. The doctors determine that they can treat Hannah and she will
fully recover in a few months. the cost of treating her will be about $250,000.
However, for a smaller cost of about $100,000 the doctors would let Hannah die
in the hospital and then harvest her vital organs to benefit many other people.
While the loss of Hannah would be tragic, many other lives could be saved with the
organ donations.

In this case, she has a high chance of recovering, except that the medical bill would be high. However, the true ethics should not be on a scale of how much it would cost. If we look at it from the principle of Kantian principle of "Practical Superlative", people should be treated as "an end-in-itself and never as a means". Even though Hannah's death can benefit more people, it is morally wrong to disrespect her rights of living.

As a reminder to myself, I should not look at things merely from the Principle of Utility--choosing an action that creates the greatest happiness or utility. Even if the chance of Hannah's survival is slim, the doctors should still give her treatment. However, in reality, doctors do have to consider who will pick up the medical bills. It is morally unethical, but that is how hospitals run their businesses.


1 comment:

  1. Reminds me of something I picked up on Dutch tv today about Icelandic banking business. The country may be the worst one hit by the financial crisis. As it now turns out, an Icelandic philosopher explained, people seem to have drifted too much into a mood of treating each other as means, not as human goals whom you can only respect (or not). So all transactions between people were seen as economic, not humanistic. And that lead to them speculating too much on the markets with foreign money, forgetting about how their own currency could drop, just like human dignity.

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