Principles Ethics - Suggested readings for how to apply?

[EthicsQuestions]

Hi guys,

As you will be able to see from some of my other messages I am new to Ethics. I am studying this in my own time in the hope of being able to learn something that I can apply. At this stage I have had a lot of trouble understand how what I have learned so far can be applied.

In any case, one of the things I have recently learned about is called "Principles". For those who are unfamiliar, there are four principles involved in this type of ethical decision making:

1. Autonomy - respect the rights of others.
2. Beneficience - do good.
3. Non-malificience - do no harm.
4. Justice - treat people fairly.

While these principles seem useful at first, I really don't understand how they could be applied in a real ethical dilemma. They are useful only when you don't actually need to make a hard decision. For example, how could these principles assist a medical doctor in making a decision to perform a risky surgery?

1. The patient wants the surgery.
2. The surgery is good - only if it works and does not kill the patient.
3. The surgery clearly does harm and has the potential to do harm.
4. Doing a risky surgery means that the doctor is not available to perform a less risky surgery on another patient (fairness).

What about another example - and this example is of the most interest to me. If you are given a job where you have $10,000 to give away each week, how would you decide who gets the money and how much? Let us say that you work in an office as a Councillor. None of your clients know that your wealthy employer allocates $10,000 to you each week to give to some of them. You need to choose to give the money to and you need to make the decision at the end of each counselling session. You cannot wait until the end of the week and then call the client. Some people have crippling debt and $3000 would be enough to help them - but that would only leave you with $7000 for everyone else you will see in the week. Also (this is the part I am most curioust about), how could you make an ethical decision about what to give the first person you meet without knowing the problems that all your other clients are going to tell you about throughout the week? Perhaps your first client has no money and has a severe tooth ache - you give him $4000 to see a dentist for a very expensive extraction. The next client is dying of disease X and it turns out that they need $10,000 for the cure - if you had not paid for the dentist, you could have saved someones life.

Are there any ethically correct answers to these questions?

Thanks for taking the time to read.

[Pantagruel]

Do you think that Ethics lends itself to actualization? Isn't there always a rather wide gap between ethical theories and ethical actions? You may be intellectually committed to enacting the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and be able to generate many interesting illustrative cases. But when it comes to practical application, my experience is that very often ethically-charged circumstances take us by surprise. Often it just comes down to 'following your gut' or trying to 'do the right thing'.

So I do hope that meditating on the virtues of actions which are good in and of themselves will prove beneficial to me, and will allow me to make the right choice, when the right circumstance arises. But it is always a long journey from theory to praxis...

[username_ok]

>where you have $10,000
>Some people have crippling debt and $3000 would be enough to help them
>a severe tooth ache - you give him $4000
>The next client is dying of disease X and it turns out that they need $10,000
>Are there any ethically correct answers to these questions?

>>
Here are some relevant Randoms:
>>
@Brokers charge large sums of money to surgically modify fingerprints.@
@I'm going into plastics anyway.@
>>
Here I'm going:
>>
it's obviously If you'd been moving 1 million bucks then You could bring the full financial force of the $1.000.000 to bear on one hundred of the client-cases.

It seems,
that's completely wrong to think an ethical stratum as such a mystically hidden or deep-thought-based side of the social reality.

Meanwhile,
the role of preventive measures mustn't be understated.

As an example,
the next ethical level can be picked up from the preventive health-care -
and so called the ethics of medicine prophylactic promises to save your money severalfold in comparing with the cost of the appropriate course to heal.

Thus, your $10,000 do )) so called MAGICALLY )) increase their effectiveness - )) but , yes, unfortunately it still looks like Einstein's relativeness))

Also, moving that way, we may pick up whatever else level that is to be higher (if we measure its moral conditions)
and
following this principle we have to merge the money and ethics with some tangible opportunity,
so to roughly speak,
for each of the ethical strata we can allegedly perform corresponding calculation of our relative gain expressed in a fixed sum of money.

So, anyway, we can rest assured,
the higher ethical level will allow us to have covered much more patients anyhow assessed as urgently needing care, and the good news - all that is still without leaving the total money frame of $10.000

But still:
We may dig out the next ethical level from the soil of:
>>>>
....Common social regulations (e.g. sport)
....Religion (Commandments), mystically-oriented systems
....Any State's ideology or political&economics philosophy
>>>>
I think we can thrive in such a structured environment.