Outline: Applied Ethics Essay
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Week 8 Assignment – Outline: Applied Ethics Essay
Instructions
This assignment is designed to help you begin work on your Applied Ethics Essay due in Week 9. In this assignment, you will create an outline of what you will be writing in your essay. An outline is a tool used to organize your thoughts. You do not need to flesh out all your ideas, but briefly state your ideas along with supporting details that you will use in your final essay.
Begin by reading through the cases included below these instructions (there are four to choose from). Select one that interests you, and choose one of the moral questions to respond to. Then, develop an outline that you will use to structure your final essay.
Your outline must include the following:
Briefly state a clear position on the moral question presented.
List relevant facts of the case.
Identify clarifying concepts you will use to analyze the case.
Describe an ethical standard pertinent to the case.
Include at least four references with proper SWS citation and explain how the information in that reference is relevant to your position. At least two of these sources will be from your textbook and other course materials.
See Sample Outline for an example of how this might look.
This course requires the use of Strayer Writing Standards. For assistance and information, please refer to the Strayer Writing Standards link in the left-hand menu of your course.
The specific course learning outcome associated with this assignment is:
Analyze how ethical standards impact moral decision-making.
Case Study: Business Ethics/CSR
Patenting Genetically Engineered Life Forms (4)
In 1873, Louis Pasteur received a U.S. patent for the manufacture of a yeast that was free of disease. The first patent in the United States for a genetically engineered life form was granted in 1980 when the Supreme Court, in Diamond vs Chakrabarty, held that a human-created micro-organism was a new and useful “manufacture,” and hence patentable. Since then, more than three million genome-related patents have been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), some of which cover genetically engineered humans. The year 2007 marked the first application for a patent for an artificial, human-created life-form, a microbe.
Despite the legal status of biopatents, there is still considerable controversy about the morality of the practice. Canada does not permit patents for “higher life forms,” such as the OncoMouse. China, India, and Thailand prohibit the patenting of any animal. The European Union only permits such patents “provided the potential benefits of the ‘invention’ outweigh the ethical and moral considerations, in particular the suffering of animals.”
People who favor biopatents argue that researchers should be rewarded for their discoveries. People would not put the money and years into genetic research unless they had some mechanism for protecting their inventions and investment through patents. Those who are against it question the assumption that science will advance faster if researchers can have exclusive rights to their inventions. They also point out that the monopoly on certain products and the high royalty costs owed to patent holders may discourage product development, since the high costs would be passed on to the consumer, as is currently happening in the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, there is the question of whether it is moral to patent a part of nature or to own life forms.
Myriad Genetics currently holds a patent on two human genes that have been linked to breast cancer. Religious leaders have called for a moratorium on the patenting of life-forms because they believe to grant patents on animal or plant genomes is to usurp the “ownership rights of God.”
Choose one of the following questions:
Question 1: Do humans have an inalienable right to ownership of their body and is the patenting of individual human genes a violation of human dignity?
Question 2: Should companies hold patents on mammals or chimera (animals created with human DNA to make their organs harvestable and compatible with human DNA)?
Sources
1. Judith Boss. 2017. Analyzing Moral Issues. p. 488. McGraw-Hill Higher Education 6th edition textbook available at https://www.strayerbookstore.com
2. Judith Boss. 2020. Analyzing Moral Issues. p. 104. McGraw-Hill Higher Education 7th edition textbook available at https://www.strayerbookstore.com
3. Judith Boss. 2020. Analyzing Moral Issues. p. 447. McGraw-Hill Higher Education 7th edition textbook available at https://www.strayerbookstore.com
4. Judith Boss. 2017. Analyzing Moral Issues. p. 169. McGraw-Hill Higher Education 6th edition textbook available at https://www.strayerbookstore.com
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