Abstract

Thousands of children with developmental disabilities are born each year with life threatening medical complications. For each of these children, a decision is made to either provide vigorous medical treatment or to withhold treatment. In the past, these decisions were made by the child's parents with their physicians. Recently, hospital bioethics committees have been given authority to monitor and sometimes to make the final decision to treat or to withhold treatment. The literature suggests that the guiding ethical paradigm for such decision making is, and should be, either Utilitarianism or a Deontological paradigm. At the same time, the literature suggests that the majority of professionals involved in the treatment of these children strongly believe in the principles of quality of life and social transcendence. It is the thesis of this research that bioethics committees using a guiding ethical paradigm of philosophical egoism, when vicariously applied, will produce treatment decision outcomes which are more concordant with the combined integrated principles of quality of life and social transcendence, than will bioethics committees using either a Utilitarian or a Deontological paradigm. ;Non-parametric statistical procedures were utilized to determine the differences and similarities among various ethical decision making paradigms when utilized by analog ethics committees in bioethical decision making. ;The research findings suggest the following conclusions. A majority of bioethical decisions attained by using either a Utilitarian or Deontological paradigm will be concordant with the combined, integrated principles of quality of life and social transcendence. However, by utilizing a vicariously applied ethical paradigm of philosophical egoism, such as Epicureanism, a significantly higher number of concordant decisions can be attained