my take on the heinz dilemma and healthcare system is disgusting

THROWS PHILOSOPHY VOMIT AT NUF

Heinz Dilemma

Once upon a time, there was a desperate man with a dying wife. There was only one drug that could possibly save her, and Heinz’ neighbor the pharmacist who invented it intended to charge 2000$ for the single small dose Heinz’ wife needed. The catch was that this pharmacist only paid 200$ to make the medicine. Being a law abiding virtuous citizen, Heinz asked all his friends and opened a gofundme to get the money for his wife’s medicine- he managed to scrounge up 1000$ before he went to go beg the pharmacist to enter a repayment plan so his wife would yet live. However, the pharmacist flatly refused him, and stated, “I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” Therefore, Heinz got desperate and broke into the pharmacist’s laboratory to steal the drug, which was the clearly virtuous thing to do, with a few conditionals. In this essay, we shall explore a few different philosophies and what actions they dictate could be done in Heinz’ situation. A combination of different philosophies performed simultaneously will yield Heinz the best result.

Utilitarian’s seek to provide the greatest good for all, even if one person suffers. If Heinz were a utilitarian, he had a few options open to him in his philosophy. There is of course, killing the pharmacist who is clearly working against the greater good and providing his recipes and resources to the greater population for everyone’s benefit (Timmons). However, virtuous and law abiding as he is, Heinz would likely be a rule utilitarian, for whom the means to get the end matter just as much as the end itself. If he was a rule utilitarian, his options would be limited to what is clearly accepted by a majority of people as a morally acceptable action, ruling out murdering the pharmacist. In that case, regrettable as it is, the morally acceptable action would be waiting until his wife died while collecting evidence of his struggles; and then suing the pharmacist for every penny he is worth and using the money and the martyrdom of Heinz’ family to enact laws to protect the majority of the people from suffering the fate of Heinz’ family and ensuring pharmacists cannot exploit vulnerable populations in the future. Stealing the medicine would simply not adhere to the categorical imperative, and would do nothing to maximize utility, since it would be a singular gain for Heinz’s individual family as opposed to society as a whole.

A weakness of utilitarianism alone would be the lack of intuitive appeal. Rarely would one think that committing murder or allowing a loved one to die in suffering and misery, would be the correct moral choice. The problem with utilitarianism is that it demands that each individual be a martyr for the sake of the greater good. Humans, being selfish creatures, are willing to do some amount for the betterment of their community; but when mentally healthy would not martyr themselves on a dime. Ergo, utilitarianism has weaknesses in both intuitive appeal and internal support, as it does not align with normal healthy beliefs about morality nor match our societies beliefs as a whole. To focus more on individual benefit, we can move onto another philosophy.

A virtue ethicist’s final goal would be an individual’s personal eudaimonia, which would be an individual’s flourishing and inevitable happiness. Notably, this is not hedonism, this is the tempering of the human character with purposeful habits to force themselves to learn to be their own best self- and finding fulfillment on that journey. For example if one is prone to arson, instead of insisting they immediately lose all fascination for the flame, it is suggested they simply aim for the far opposite, and perhaps are lauded for making a bonfire and light deforestation when they really want to set the town on fire with murderous arson (Fisher). A virtue ethicist would state that; indeed, it is quite virtuous for Heinz to merely steal the medicine and heal his wife, when he likely desires to murder the pharmacist and destroy his shop. That would be a practice of self-control and temperance, for the indignities the pharmacist tyrant would impose and Heinz’ natural reaction to that. Additionally, it simply would not be virtuous to allow your spouse to die when there was anything you could do to stop it.

The best thing to do if one were Heinz, and wished to benefit both the individual as well as society, would be to steal the medicine and then gift it to a foreign pharmacist with payment being that Heinz allegedly got it from that other pharmacist. This merges both the utilitarian desire to help all, and also the necessary virtue of protecting oneself and one’s family. This would be utilitarian since Heinz would be freeing anyone who needed this new medicine from being at the mercy of a tyrant, allowing multiple vendors to sell it and preventing a monopoly. This would be virtuous since Heinz would be saving his wife and absolving himself of the guilt by also paying it forward to help anyone else who may need this life saving medicine, as well as avoiding martyring himself and getting arrested. However, this is conditional on how Heinz has already tried to get the medicine following the rules and been thwarted at every corner- for if he simply stole the medicine and distributed it, he would only be virtuous by happening to help others while exercising his urge to steal, and not rule utilitarian since the means would not justify the ends.

In conclusion, Heinz should indeed have stolen the medicine and then distributed it. However, he should only have stolen after going through the process of trying to get the medicine the correct way, and his action is only truly virtuous in the most optimal manner by distributing it elsewhere after it was stolen. This is because at that point it was no longer a selfish theft that only benefits Heinz, and instead the act was a liberation of an essential good from a tyrant, making Heinz a hero instead of a criminal. A hero would be someone who sacrifices themselves to help everyone, a criminal would be someone who sacrifices someone else to improve his personal wellbeing- as the pharmacist intends. The pharmacist was a crook, charging 10 times base costs- Heinz would be in the wrong if the cost was between a 10% and 100% markup, but the pharmacist marked up the cost by 1000% and was undeniably in the wrong. It is certain that the community which lent the poor Heinz 1000$ and yet still couldn't make a difference for Heinz would approve of the theft and rejoice that their money is returned, and if they or their family required the life-saving radium it would not be as exorbitant as it is within the greedy grasp of the tyrant pharmacist. Both modes of reasoning are required as humanity cannot be represented with only one mode of reasoning. Principled and unprincipled, feelings and logic, humanity requires both to thrive- without one type of reasoning humans are either wild animals or robots. Combining those modes of reasoning does not create any conflict, utilizing both yields the best result. Heinz should steal and then distribute after failing to acquire within the system to remain virtuous.



Works cited

Timmons, M. (2012). Moral Theory : An Introduction. Vol. 2nd ed, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=507661&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Fisher A, et al. (2013). Aristotelian virtue ethics. Philosophical thought. Open library. https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/virtue-ethics/