Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Vulnerability, Moral responsibility, and Moral Obligations: the case of Industrial Action in the Medical and Allied Professions
AbstractThe article addresses issues at the nexus of physician industrial action, moral agency, and responsibility. There are situations in which we find ourselves best placed to offer aid to those who may be in vulnerable positions, a behavior that is consistent with our everyday moral intuitions. In both our interpersonal relationships and social life, we make frequent judgments about whether to praise or blame someone for their actions when we determine that they should have acted to help a vulnerable person. While the average person is unlikely to confront these kinds of situations often, those in the medical professio...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - August 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Beyond ethical post-mortems
Abstract:After WWII ethics has gone through a process of professionalization, developing approaches to ethical case deliberation as well as methods of practicing ethics in research and innovation (R&I). This process is described as having advantages and disadvantages. In addition, it is pointed out that foresight has been incorporated into ethical case deliberation with relative ease, whilst the incorporation of foresight in methods of practicing ethics in (R&I) has turned out to be more challenging. It is finally stressed that in a world with fast changing emerging technologies, ethicists ? to remain relevant - wi...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - August 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The significance of Emmanuel Levinas ’ ethics of responsibility for medical judgment
AbstractAt a time when the practice of medicine is subject to technical and biopolitical imperatives that give rise to defensive bioethics, it is essential to revitalize the ethical dimensions of care at the very heart of the clinic, in order to give new meaning to the moral responsibility that inhabits it. This contribution seeks to meet this challenge by drawing on the ethical resources of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In Levinas ’ view, ethical responsibility is the response to the injunction, the interpellation, of the other’s face, and humaneness is conceived entangled in the other’s face. Against this backgroun...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - July 31, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Pathologies and the Healing of the soul: medical terms as metaphors in philosophy
AbstractThis paper critically examines the metaphorical use of medical terms in philosophy. Three examples selected from distinct philosophical contexts demonstrate that such terms have been employed as metaphors both to describe the practice of philosophising and historically to diagnose philosophical positions. The selected examples are (i) the title of Avicenna ’s main philosophical work,The Book of Healing, (ii) the criticism of medical metaphors in Enlightenment philosophy, and (iii) recent historical diagnoses in philosophy. The underlying epistemological assumptions of all three contexts are reconstructed to criti...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - July 18, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Systemising triage: COVID-19 guidelines and their underlying theories of distributive justice
AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure. Although there are similarities between the documents, they vary considerably in how much weight their respective authors place on the different criteria that they propose. Since most of the recommendations do not come with ethical justification...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - July 7, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Maternal epigenetic responsibility: what can we learn from the pandemic?
AbstractThis paper examines the construction of maternal responsibility in transgenerational epigenetics and its implications for pregnant women. Transgenerational epigenetics is suggesting a link between maternal behaviour and lifestyle during pregnancy and the subsequent well-being of their children. For example, poor prenatal diet and exposure to maternal distress during pregnancy are linked to epigenetic changes, which may cause health problems in the offspring. In this field, the uterus is seen as a micro-environment in which new generations can take shape. Because epigenetics concerns how gene expression is influence...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 15, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Intergenerational contract in Ageing Democracies: sustainable Welfare Systems and the interests of future generations
AbstractAs the assumptions of perpetual economic and population growth no longer stand, the welfare systems built on such promises are in peril. Policymakers must reallocate the responsibility for providing care between generations. Democratic theories can help establish procedures for finding solutions, particularly in ageing democratic countries. By analysing existing representative and deliberative democratic theories, this paper explores how the interests of future generations could be included in such procedures. A hypothetical social health insurance scheme with the pay-as-you-go financial arrangement is selected as ...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 13, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Ethico-Political aspects of clinical judgment in opportunistic screening for cognitive impairment: Arendtian and aristotelian perspectives
This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, ...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 10, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The limitations of liberal reproductive autonomy
AbstractThe common liberal understanding of reproductive autonomy – characterized by free choice and a principle of non-interference – serves as a useful way to analyse the normative appeal of having certain choices open to people in the reproductive realm, especially for issues like abortion rights. However, this liberal reading of reproductive autonomy only offers us a limited ethical understanding of what is at stake in many kinds of reproductive choices, particularly when it comes to different uses of reproductive technologies and third-party reproduction. This is because the liberal framework does not fully captur...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 10, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

How to evaluate the quality of an ethical deliberation? A pragmatist proposal for evaluation criteria and collaborative research
This article proposes and develops a pragmatist approach to evaluate the quality of deliberation. Deliberation features three important moments: (1) broadening and deepening the understanding of the situation, (2) envisioning action scenarios, (3) coming to a judgment based on the comparative evaluation of scenarios. In this paper, we propose seven criteria to evaluate ethical deliberations: (1) collaborative diversity, (2) experiential literacy, (3) organization of experiences, (4) reflective capacity to instrumentalize the experiences of others, (5) interactional creativity, (6) openness of agents, (7) quality of the ref...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 9, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Solidarity and Public Health
AbstractWe argue that an unqualified use of the term solidarity in public health is not only equivocal but problematic toward the ends of public health. The term may be deployed normatively by public health advocates to strengthen the bonds among public health practitioners and refer to an ideal society in which the importance of interdependence among members ought to be acknowledged throughout the polity. We propose an important distinction betweenpartisan solidarity andsocietal solidarity. Because any moralized belief in a vision of a broad societal solidarity will be a contested political ideal, political reality would ...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 9, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Possibilities and paradoxes in medicine: love of order, loveless order and the order of love
AbstractWe have a desire to discover and create order, and our constitution, including our rational faculties, indicates that we are predisposed for such productivity. This affinity for order and the establishment of order is fundamental to humans and naturally also leaves its mark on the medical discipline. When this profession is made subject to criticism, frequently in terms of well-used reproofs such as reductionism, reification and de-humanisation, this systematising productivity is invariably involved in some way or other. It is, however, problematic that we rarely delve deeper and ask what order means, or reflect on...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 9, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Evaluating emotions in medical practice: a critical examination of ‘clinical detachment’ and emotional attunement in orthopaedic surgery
AbstractIn this article I propose to reframe debates about ideals of emotion in medicine, abandoning the current binary setup of this debate as one between ‘clinical detachment’ and empathy. Inspired by observations from my own field work and drawing on Sky Gross’ anthropological work on rituals of practice as well as Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythm, I propose that the normative drive of clinical practice can be better understood through the notion of attunement. In this framework individual types of emotions are not, as such, appropriate or inappropriate, but are evaluated depending on their synchronicity with ...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - June 6, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Why physicians have authority over patients
AbstractIn this article, we argue that physicians have normative authority over patients. First we elaborate on the nature of normative authority. We then examine and critique Arthur Isak Applbaum ’s view that physicians lack authority over patients. Our argument appeals to four cases that demonstrate physicians’ authority. (Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 17, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Deception of Certainty: how Non-Interpretable Machine Learning Outcomes Challenge the Epistemic Authority of Physicians. A deliberative-relational Approach
AbstractDevelopments in Machine Learning (ML) have attracted attention in a wide range of healthcare fields to improve medical practice and the benefit of patients. Particularly, this should be achieved by providing more or less automated decision recommendations to the treating physician. However, some hopes placed in ML for healthcare seem to be disappointed, at least in part, by a lack of transparency or traceability. Skepticism exists primarily in the fact that the physician, as the person responsible for diagnosis, therapy, and care, has no or insufficient insight into how such recommendations are reached. The followi...
Source: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy - May 10, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research