Question 1

Ethics can be defined as the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class
of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc. Ethics also can be defined as that
branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to
the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the
motives and ends of such actions. For example in the Queen v. Dudley and Stephens
case, in order to continue life survival, kills the orphan boy for the purpose of eating
his flesh, where murder is guilty according to law, although at the time of the act he is
in such circumstances due to fate and possibilities of a human to live longer or die
instantly. However, this is unethical because every human has dignity to live a life no
matter in any hard circumstances. Social responsibility is an ethical ideology or theory
that an entity, be it an organization or individual, has an obligation to act to benefit
society at large. Social responsibility is a duty every individual or organization has to
perform so as to maintain a balance between the economy and the ecosystem. There
are many ideas and theories I learn from this subject which have its own moral values.
One of the greatest ethical ideal that impressed me is utilitarianism. The
utilitarianism theory focuses on selecting the best act that offers the best consequences
of an individual. Utilitarians does not examine the differences in a chosen act that is
based on moral issues. They instead focus on the specific individual who is
performing the act. Utilitarianism will focus on morality only if the action is
considered an ideal act but if the action is not a preferred act, then morality does not
play a role.
Likewise, in utilitarianism ethics is not viewed when making a decision because all
decisions are based on the best result for an individual. Besides that, utilitarianism
ethics emphasize that action should be morally beneficial to a group. This course of
ethics is often known as the greatest good for the greatest number or simply put,
the greater good . In other words, the consequence of any ethical action should be
beneficial for all by mass appeal. Utilitarianism impressed me because it is defined as
putting the good of other people before you.

Question 2

Utilitarianism may also apply in health care. There are two moral ethical dichotomies
in health care where consequentialism versus deontology and individualism versus
collectivism. When the physician is faced with the dilemma of deciding between one
versus many, he often has to resort to the principle of promoting the greatest good for
the greatest number, or the principle of maximizing utility. Utilitarianianism is the
creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, the greatest happiness principle. It
holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong

as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. It embraces the four component of
consequentialism, maximization, aggregation and welfare. This paper analyses the
moral implications of applying utilitarian principles in healthcare decisions and
illustrate how they relate to the concept of welfarism.
Medicine is a costly science, but of greater concern to the health economist is that it is
also a limitless art. Every medical advance created new needs that did not exist until
the means of meeting them came into existence. Physicians are reputed to have an
infinite capacity to do ever more things, and perform ever more expensive
interventions for their patients so long as any of their patients health needs remain
unfulfilled. The traditional stance of the physician is that each patient is an isolated
universe. When confronted with a situation in which his duty involves a competition
for scarce medications or treatments, he would plead the patients cause by all
methods, short of deceit. However, when the physicians decision involves more than
just his own patient, or has some commitment to public health, other issues have to be
considered. He then has to recognise that the unbridled advocacy of the patient may
not square with what the economist perceives to be the most advantageous policy to
society as a whole. Medical professionals characteristically deplore scarcities. Many
of them are simply not prepared to modify their intransigent principle of unwavering
duty to their patients individual interest. However, in decisions involving multiple
patients, making available more medication, labour or expenses for one patient will
mean leaving less for another. The physician is then compelled by his competing
loyalties to enter into a decision mode of one versus many, where the underlying
constraint is one of finiteness of the commodities. Although the medical treatment
may be simple and inexpensive in many instances, there are situations such as in renal
dialysis, where prioritisation of treatment poses a moral dilemma because some
patients will be denied the treatment and perish.
Ethics and economics share areas of overlap. They both deal with how people should
behave, what policies the state should pursue and what obligations citizens owe to
their governments. The centrality of the human person in both normative economics
and normative ethics is pertinent to this discussion. Economics is the study of human
action in the marketplace whereas ethics deals with the rightness or wrongness of
human action in general. Both disciplines are rooted in human reason and human
nature and the two disciplines intersect at the human person and the analysis of human
action. From the economists perspective, ethics is identified with the investigation of
rationally justifiable bases for resolving conflict among persons with divergent aims
and who share a common world. Because of the scarcity of resources, ones success is
another persons failure. Therefore ethics search for rationally justifiable standards for
the resolution of interpersonal conflict. While the realities of human life have given
rise to the concepts of property, justice and scarcity, the management of scarcity
requires the exercise of choice, since having more of some goods means having less
of others. Exercising choice in turn involves comparisons, and comparisons are based
on principles. As ethicists, the meaning of these principles must be sought in the

moral basis that implementing them would require. For instance, if the
implementation of distributive justice in healthcare is founded on the basis of welfarebased principles, as opposed to say resource-based principles, it means that the health
system is motivated by the idea that what is of primary moral importance is the level
of welfare of the people. This means that all distributive questions should be settled
according to which distribution maximizes welfare.
Utilitarianism is fundamentally welfarist in its philosophy. Application of the
principle to healthcare requires a prior understanding of the welfarist theory as
expounded by the economist. Conceptually, welfarist theory is built on four tenets:
utility maximization, consumer sovereignty, consequentialism and welfarism. Utility
maximization embodies the behavioral proposition that individuals choose rationally,
but it does not address the morality of rational choice. Consumer sovereignty is the
maxim that individuals are the best judge of their own welfare. Consequentialism
holds that any action or choice must be judged exclusively in terms of outcomes.
Welfarism is the proposition that the goodness of the resource allocation be judged
solely on the welfare or utility levels in that situation. Taken together these four tenets
require that a policy be judged solely in terms of the resulting utilities achieved by
individuals as assessed by the individuals themselves. Issues of who receives the
utility, the source of the utility and any non-utility aspects of the situation are ignored.
Welfare economics refers to the framework for normative economic analysis that has
developed within the neo-classical economic tradition. It studies efficiency and the
overall well-being of society based on alternative allocations of scarce resources. It
extends the microeconomic analysis of indifference curves to society as a whole. It is
concerned with broad efficiency questions and criteria (e.g. Pareto efficiency) as well
as the more specific efficiency issues such as those of market failures, externalities,
and public goods. Questions which welfare economics attempts to address in
healthcare would include Are people are getting what they need and demand, and
how do we know if they are paying too much for health? Welfare economics have its
roots in the desire of many economists to maintain contact between theoretical
analysis and socially relevant themes. A typical characteristic of the old welfare
economics is the ethical belief that higher material welfare and a better provision of
essential goods are desirable targets, even though it is acknowledged that material
welfare and utility cannot be equated with general welfare or happiness. Two elements
occupy a central place in new or modern welfare economics: the notion of Paretooptimality and the role of perfect markets in connection with the Pareto-optimality.
The essence of welfare theory is that the performance of economic institutions can
and should be judged according to whether they provide economic goods in quantities
that accord with people's relative desires for those goods. In modern welfare
economics, economic systems are considered efficient if they display a close fit
between the relative terms on which economic goods are made available and people's
relative preferences for those goods.

References

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http://www.ijcim.th.org/past_editions/2004V12N3/ijcimv3n1_article6.pdf
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