Dallas Buyers Club Essay

Introduction In the film Dallas Buyers Club, Ron, the main character, gets diagnosed with AIDS. The doctors told him he only had 30 days to live, however, he set out to prove them wrong. After weeks of acquiring doses of a new AIDs trial drug by bribing a hospital worker, the worker told him that he could no longer gain access to the drug. Ron continued getting sicker and weaker, so he decided to go down to Mexico to get more. By the time he got to Mexico, he could barely stand. A doctor told Ron that the medication he was taking was only making him worse, and that the people selling the drug were just doing it to make money. The doctor kept him there for several weeks, giving him vitamins and proteins to heal. The supplements he was getting

According to utilitarian ethics, a certain action is decided right or wrong based on if the action would maximize a positive outcome, that is if the action would result in less pain and more pleasure for the most amount of people (Tseng & Wang, 2021). There are four tenets/core principles of utilitarian ethical theory that can all apply to the medical ethical dilemma at the Dallas Buyers Club. These four tenets are impartiality, consequentialism, hedonism, and sum-ranking. The utilitarian core principle of impartiality states “We must treat all individuals’ interests equally with one another” (Galen College of Nursing, n.d.). This applies to what Ron was attempting to achieve. He was trying to treat all people with HIV equally by providing an equal opportunity to get help regardless of their background. He did this because he was turned away from getting help from the healthcare system when he needed it and didn’t want other people to get denied treatment as well. The FDA did not have this same interest in mind for the people they were supposedly helping. They continued to give them their drug even when they saw the negative effects of it. They did not treat all individuals’ interests equally with one another. The next core principle is consequentialism. “Consequentialism: whether an act is morally right depends only on its consequences” (Galen College of Nursing, n.d.). The consequences of Ron