Ethicist: In emergency medical triage, doctors correctly prioritize patients who can benefit most from immediate intervention over those with more severe but largely untreatable conditions. This protocol is justified because the overarching goal is maximizing overall survival given strictly limited resources. Similarly, when a government allocates its limited environmental conservation budget, it ought to direct funding primarily toward moderately degraded ecosystems that are highly recoverable, rather than exhausting resources on ecosystems that are on the verge of total, irreversible collapse.
Which of the following statements, if true, identify relevant points of disanalogy that undermine the ethicist's argument? (Select all that apply.)
- The total collapse of a single ecosystem often triggers cascading environmental failures in surrounding regions, whereas a patient succumbing to an untreatable condition does not biologically accelerate the physical deterioration of other patients.Answer
- The efficacy of medical interventions in triage can be statistically predicted based on established clinical histories, whereas the actual recoverability of a degraded ecosystem is virtually impossible to assess prior to intervention.Answer
- In medical triage, the definition of a single patient is biologically absolute, whereas the boundaries of what constitutes a single ecosystem are fluid, arbitrary, and highly debated among ecologists.Answer
- DEcosystems on the verge of total collapse typically require exponentially more financial investment to stabilize than moderately degraded ecosystems do.
- EThe severity of a patient's medical condition in triage is often naturally occurring, whereas the degradation of an ecosystem is almost exclusively caused by anthropogenic industrial activity.
Answer
The correct statements are those identifying cascading environmental failures, the impossibility of assessing ecosystem recoverability, and the fluid boundaries of ecosystems.
An argument by analogy relies on the assumption that the source domain and the target domain share the structural properties necessary for the underlying principle to work. The ethicist's principle is quantitative utility maximization: counting discrete units and saving those most likely to survive independently. The correct options dismantle this mapping by proving the target domain lacks these necessary properties: ecosystems are not independent (abandoning one harms others), they are not epistemically predictable (we don't know which are 'treatable'), and they are not discrete, countable units.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Evaluating Arguments by Analogy through identifying structurally relevant disanalogies.