1,721,092 research outputs found
Doctors and Patients
No full textGillon outlines some prima facie moral duties of physicians to
patients that have emerged from his previous articles in a series on
philosophical medical ethics. These duties follow from four general ethical
principles--respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and
justice--plus the self-imposed supererogatory duty of medical beneficence.
From these principles the author derives such duties as providing adequate
information and advice on treatment options, encouraging patient participation
leading to informed decisions, maintaining competence and exposing
incompetence, admitting errors, disclosing personal medico-moral standards,
and acknowledging that other interests may occasionally supersede those of the
individual patient. Gillon concludes that, where self interest conflicts with
medical beneficence, the claim of medicine as a profession requires that the
patient's interests take priority. (KIE abstract
Justice and Allocation of Medical Resources
No full textIn one of a series of short articles on philosophical medical ethics,
Gillon examines the principle of justice as it applies to adjudicating
competing claims for the distribution of scarce medical resources. He
describes Aristotle's theory of justice--with its demands of formal equity,
impartiality, and fairness--and then considers various substantive criteria
that have been proposed to justify choosing among competing candidates for
scarce resources. In the absence of an acceptable way to give consistent
moral priority to any of the criteria, he concludes, practical systems should
be set up to resolve conflicts by taking into account the fundamental moral
values of respect for autonomy, beneficence, and nonmaleficence while
incorporating Aristotle's formal principle of justice. (KIE abstract
Autonomy and the Principle of Respect for Autonomy
No full textAutonomy is defined as the capacity to think, decide, and act freely
and independently on the basis of such thought and decisions. Three types of
autonomy are distinguished: autonomy of thought, which embraces the wide range
of human intellectual activities called "thinking for oneself"; autonomy of
will, or the capacity to decide to do things on the basis of one's
deliberations; and autonomy of action, the absence of which is illustrated by
the situation of a patient whose voluntary muscles are paralyzed by curariform
drugs and who thus cannot tell the surgeon that the anesthetist has forgotten
the nitrous oxide. Autonomy is viewed as a prerequisite for all the virtues,
rather than as a virtue in its own right. The arguments of Immanuel Kant and
John Stuart Mill concerning the principle of respect for autonomy are
summarized as exemplars respectively of the deontological and utilitarian
philosophical approaches. (KIE abstract
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