A lecture on COVID-19 tragies, on code black triage and fair innings, doing ‘fast philosophy’, on what distinguishes a tragedy from a F*up, on how a pandemic can force clinicians and applied ethicists to have harmful thoughts, how that in itself may be inevitable hence tragic; on Wolf, Wittgenstein, and Williams.
Video recording of the lecture (given on June 16th).
Please get in touch if you have any comments 🙏
(Spoiler: no.)
In the Netherlands, there’s now a triage script, formulated by medical/IC specialists consulted by medical ethicists, about how to make decisions in “code black” cases: that is, cases in which there are no medical grounds on which to make priority choices, and clinicians or triage teams would have to make life and death decisions on non-medical i.e. ethical grounds. The document explicitly opts for making decisions on the basis of the so-called ‘fair innings’ (FI) argument.
The document says that for instance a 50-year old person has a “stronger moral claim” on getting IC bed than an 80…
By Fleur Jongepier (Assistant Professor of (Digital) Ethics at Radboud University Nijmegen) and Karin Jongsma (Assistant Professor of Bioethics at University Medical Center Utrecht). This article is loosely based on a Dutch article which previously appeared on the philosophy weblog Bij Nader Inzien. Translation by Radboud Recharge and the authors. The English version of this article was published on Open for Debate.
If intensive care beds or ventilators run out, who should be saved? And how should such decisions be morally justified? These are horrible, indeed impossible, decisions that clinicians currently face, or may be confronted with in the (near)…
Or: why you should read Eleanor Gordon-Smith’s new book
NB. This is a (mostly) Google-translated — hence here and there somewhat clumsily translated — version of a Dutch review I wrote that appeared in the newspaper Trouw.
Stop met redelijk zijn: Het leven is geen debat
Eleanor Gordon-Smith (vertaling Huub Stegeman)
Uitgeverij Ten Have, 192 blz., € 20,99
★★★★★ (Yes, all the stars I had at my disposal.)
You can order the Dutch translation of the book here. Or the original here.
The author Yes, who is Eleanor Gordon-Smith? I had never heard of her, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from her. In the distant…
Fleur Jongepier
Assistant prof of (digital) ethics @iHub — blogger/co-founder @filosofieblog — philosophy reviewer @Trouw — likes coffee, climbing & non-philosophy generally
