The “You Decide” assignment presents a difficult and painful dilemma, with you in an imagined professional role. Go through the You Decide presentation, make the decision it calls for, meet you’re your team or partner to discuss, and compose a paper and presentation that explains your decision and your reasoning and justification for it.

You are called upon to make a painful medical decision and to explain it both orally and in writing. Who benefits from what you decided, who gets denied a needed benefit, and why? You will compose an official memorandum that will be kept for the record and could potentially be read not only by your Peer Review Committee, but also by those involved in charitable fundraising, which supports hospital development, as well as by others with financial interests in the decision.

You will see notice that there is time pressure in the simulated situation, so remember that you would not have the luxury to dawdle in the decision-making process, and as the decision-maker, you would not have the luxury of consulting a broad spectrum of advisors. It falls on you and your team or partner to decide!

Include in the document and presentation the utilitarian ethical philosophy of John Stuart Mill (from the lecture and audio for this week) and one other ethical philosopher of your choosing that we have studied to date, and use both of those philosophies to bolster your decision. This paper will be at least 2 pages. Remember, both professional written form and potential audience, as well as tone when writing this sensitive memorandum.

Thomas Kuhn, the great historian of science, writes that there are two kinds of science: Theoretical Science and Normal Science. So, to use medicine as an example, two doctors might graduate in the same class at medical school, both with top grades. However, they choose two different paths for their careers.

The first one always admired his childhood family doctor, which is exactly why he went into medicine. He chooses to open his own family medical practice back in his own hometown. He uses all of his knowledge to treat families with colds, the flu, tonsillitis, and more serious problems, such as heart disease and cancer. He, of course keeps his knowledge up-to-date with continuing education courses.

His classmate has never much cared-for the idea of family medicine, but she loves involvement in the development of medical science in the laboratory. She gets hired by a big teaching hospital as a researcher, conducts many Lab experiments, and writes papers about new techniques and outlooks that she and her colleagues develop. She is, in fact, questioning all the time the boundaries of medical science and, in fact is constantly pushing knowledge beyond known boundaries.

begin by choosing a topic from the Final Paper Options list (located in your online classroom) to use in your writing assignments in this course. The next step is to formulate a specific research question that is important regarding this topic. You may review The Research Process (Links to an external site.) resource for more information. So, if your topic is gun control, you would formulate a specific question, such as, “Are universal background checks effective at reducing violent crime in America?”

Once you have formulated your question, conduct research from non-scholarly sources on the internet (e.g., news articles, op-eds, etc.) that present substantive reasoning on each side of the issue.

Your task is to present and evaluate the reasoning from a non-scholarly source on each side of your issue. There is no need to take sides on the issue at this stage. In your analysis, strive to be as objective as possible, evaluating the reasoning from a neutral point of view. For an example of how to complete this paper, take a look at the Week 1 Example paper.