I’m working on a philosophy question and need the explanation and answer to help me learn.

 

1. You are the mayor of a major city and want to keep the streets as clean as possible. You send the city’s street sweepers to the more affluent neighborhoods, but you ignore the poorer neighborhoods because poor residents pay less taxes than rich people. Is this practice a violation of the impartiality principle? Why or why not?                              

2. Imagine that your preferred moral theory implies that racial discrimination is morally permissible – an implication that directly conflicts with your considered moral judgments. Would such a conflict suggest to you that the theory must be defective? Why or why not?                                         

3.A scientist is conducting an experiment using 100 adult subjects, hoping to finally discover a cure for liver cancer. Conducting this one last study can cure the disease and save the lives of countless people. But, the experiment causes long-lasting, horrible pain in the subjects, and they will not be able to benefit in any way from the study’s success. The researcher would ordinarily never be able to enlist any subjects for the study because of these two facts, so to ensure the cooperation of the subjects, he lies to them: he says that being a part of the study will be painless and that it will increase their lifespan. The study is completed, the cure is found, and the subjects spend the next year in agony. What would natural law theory say about the scientist’s actions?