Never Let Me Go Ethical Issues

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Recommended: Personal reflection on medical ethics

“Life is precious” is a common quote that has been used throughout the ages. In the medical world of today, we do all we can to preserve life. We go to such lengths that some wonder where we would stop. If you could save hundreds, or even millions of lives, by taking the lives of a few, would it be right? In the book titled “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro this question is explored in more depth. Using Ishiguro’s fictional book, along with historical documents of actual human experiment cases, we will explore the moral and ethical dilemma of sacrificing the lives of some in order to further medicine treatment of many.
The book “Never Let Me Go” is about a girl named Kathy and her friends, who were made and raised to ultimately donate their organs to society. The book takes Kathy’s perspective, giving insight into how it might be if you were raised so that ultimately you would die donating organs. This fictional book has many similarities to the historical document “Hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Health: Quality of Health Care- Human Experimentation, 1973”
The Senate Hearing …show more content…

In these situations, the risk to human life could have been minimized had science used more ethical reasoning, especially when targeting these vulnerable populations. In the book children were chosen to be experimented on in order to further scientific medicine and prolong the lives of others. They were purposely kept uninformed and seen as lesser members of society, just as all of the Senate hearing studies were. Ethical reasoning was discredited so that society as a whole could medically advance. All of these scenarios tried to justify sacrificing the lives of some in order to save a larger population and that is where all of these scenarios went wrong. They did not value the life of the individuals who were taking part in the

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