Drug treatment system

Question

Please respond to   posts, providing feedback about whether the person has identified a true moral dilemma, and how they can improve or expand upon their dilemma.

Consider the following questions as you provide feedback: 

- If you were in this situation, would it be difficult to decide what to do, or do you think there is a clear best action available?

- Are the reasons pulling in different directions moral reasons (vs. practical reasons)? Do they have approximately equal weight?

- If the described situation is not a dilemma, can you suggest any tweaks to help make it a dilemma?

- Are there additional details that you would like specified to ensure it is a dilemma? Additional details that will become relevant for deciding what to do?

POST 1.

You are a biomedical engineer that is currently working on a live saving drug treatment system for a currently untreatable progressive disease. You are passionate about this project because currently you have a family member that is affected by this disease. Currently, you have made it past the first steps of developing this treatment, and it has been shown to be safe as well as drastically stopping and reversing disease. Your family member urgently needs the treatment because they only have around 6 months to live, but they cannot get access to this treatment since it is not FDA approved. Full FDA approval would take around 2 years. Now, the treatment is undergoing its second stage, a random blind clinical trial. With you being the lead on this clinical trial, you are now faced with a dilemma. Option one is where you purposely assign your family member not part of the control group, thus guaranteeing them the treatment and saving their life. Option two is where you follow the trial as it should be done, but you take a gamble on your family member’s life. With picking option one you know your family member will live, but you have delegitimized the entire trial. If the FDA were to find out about this, they would make you either redo the whole trial or, even worse, cancel any change of this treatment ever being approved. Both punishments would cost lives because people would have to wait longer to get access to the treatment or no one would ever be able to get access to the treatment. With picking option two, you are taking a 50/50 chance on your family member, but you would save more people’s lives in the long term, assuming the treatment gets approved, because people would have access to the treatment in about two years.

POST 2

Almost everyone will form a family with their bf in the future, and maintaining a good relationship with family members has always been a good topic of constant debate. Here is an example that may happen in the future: before the marriage, I promised my wife that I would have a date with her each week, go home every night, and will never bring works back home. However, after working for a while, my boss said an important task was to be given to me and I needed to submit a report within two weeks. If I did well on what my boss gave me, then it was highly likely that I would be appreciated by my boss and get a promotion and a raise, which would allow me to get a bigger house and move out of the apartment with my wife. My wife will definitely understand, but internally, she will feel sad because I have broken my promise, and she has also said that she doesn't care about my position and salary, as long as she and I can live happily ever after. Now I have two options, one option is to explain the situation to my boss, tell him that my weekend will be exclusively for my wife and politely decline him, while the other option is for me to tell my wife that I will not be able to come home in the evening for the next two weeks and that our weekend dates will be canceled. If I choose the first one, my boss will not pay much attention to me because he will think I am not a very motivated person, and I will have very little chance to be promoted in the future, even if I will be the first one be laid off. But my wife will be very happy that I chose life over work. If I choose the second one, then my wife may show understanding, but she will still feel sad because of my broken promise, thus destroying the harmony of the family, but I can get the boss's appreciation and have a greater possibility of promotion and salary increase. My responsibility to my commitments will make me reject my boss and my job, but my responsibility to my family's future will make me reject my wife and our comfortable life.

 Post 3

I'm a director of software engineering at a large smartphone company. Nearly everyone in the US uses one of our smartphones, and we are the largest manufacturers in the US. We developed technology that can identify images that may be explicit - including ones that may be child abuse. We have decided that we would like to roll out our software on all our phones. This would allow guardians of children to filter explicit images, and also allow us to flag owners of phones that contain these images for law enforcement. We announce our plans to the public and there is immediate outcry - many users do not want us scanning all the images on their phones, regardless of the help to law enforcement it could do. Many users think it is an invasion of privacy and that they should at least have the choice to allow scanning (however, this would eliminate many of the benefits of scanning images). The choices I have are to either roll out the scanning software, or discontinue this project. On one hand, we could help the lives of countless children facing abuse and put criminals behind bars. On the other hand, this would be a massive invasion of privacy into the photos and images of millions of average citizens.

Post 4

You are an electrical engineer for a software design company that works to manufacture hardware components for computers. In order to keep up with the growing demand for technological advancements, you are given the timeframe of six months to develop new hardware for computers. However, as a result of the pandemic, your research has been delayed and you are running behind schedule. You have not been able to perform the adequate quality control tests and the companies in which you supply are pushing for a new hardware product by the end of the month. One of the available options to you would be to begin manufacturing the hardware and supplying the technological manufacturer. However, this could result in faulty hardware that could fail, causing the consumer to lose all of their data. Another option would be to force your quality control to work overtime so that the research process can be further along and be about 75% of the way complete. This option would have a lower risk of faulty hardware however, you risk losing your employees because they are going to be forced to work overtime which also means they will be away from their families. Along with this, it will also come at a cost for your company because you will have to pay a higher wage for overtime work. A final option that you could do is to do nothing. This would result in a hardware design that is prompt and on time. However, if the hardware comes back faulty you could lose the contracts that you have with the technological manufacturer. This would be catastrophic for your company as a majority of your revenue is from this company. This situation is a dilemma because it works to decide as to what ethical approach your company wants to have. It also works to question the reputation that you want to create for your company. When thinking about these situations, is doing the right thing and doing more research going to better help you in the long run even though the results may be catastrophic in the moment

Post 5

You are an agricultural engineer and are working on a new car design with a team. While designing the car you notice the engine has been designed with cheaper parts and will likely break down 5 years before it should. You want to tell your team that this should be changed as we are on purpose selling a faulty car that is designed on purpose not to last so they either have to come buy a new car or get it repaired on by our company's mechanics. Also you know though they company wants to make money and by designing the engine poorly it is going to cause more revenue for the company. Mentioning the engine could cause those higher than you to think you do not care about making money for the company and you also know a potential advancement is coming up that you want. These leads you with a few decisions. One you could tell people that the engine should be redone and have better parts to make it last longer. Two you could do nothing, continue your work and let the car go to market when it is designed to fail. This is a ethical dilemma mainly in the way of good vs profit challenge. This dilemma causes you to either make a bad product for the company so the customers have to buy more products from your company and gets more money from the project. The other end of the problem is to make a good product that last but then you are losing customers as now they do not need to come back for awhile. This makes it a tough dilemma because you do not want to sell a bad product to customers but the more money a project you helped on makes the better chance you would have for pay raises, and advancement in the company.