Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon in health care. Mark Wicclair offers a comprehensive ethical analysis of conscientious ...objection in three representative health care professions: medicine, nursing and pharmacy. He critically examines two extreme positions: the 'incompatibility thesis', that it is contrary to the professional obligations of practitioners to refuse provision of any service within the scope of their professional competence; and 'conscience absolutism', that they should be exempted from performing any action contrary to their conscience. He argues for a compromise approach that accommodates conscience-based refusals within the limits of specified ethical constraints. He also explores conscientious objection by students in each of the three professions, discusses conscience protection legislation and conscience-based refusals by pharmacies and hospitals, and analyzes several cases. His book is a valuable resource for scholars, professionals, trainees, students, and anyone interested in this increasingly important aspect of health care.
For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques ...for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology. Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be.
The book presents a novel approach to ethics. It draws on the work of F. H. Bradley and his principal commentator, Richard Wollheim, and is underpinned by naturalistic metaphysical and psychoanalytic ...perspectives. It proposes an analysis of objectively true moral statements. The first part of the book demarcates the perspective offered from contemporary analytic ethics, and gives an account of the philosophical foundations of the subsequent analysis. The second part discusses the growth of the moral sense in the individual, and identifies three vertices in the moral life: first, the Station of Narcissus, concerning the self-fulfilment of the individual; second, My Station and its Duties, concerning the place of the individual in society; and third, Universal Moral Vision, concerning global moral consciousness. This second part concludes with an analysis of the Good as a supervenient phenomenon. The third part describes various contexts of moral decision-making that arise in life, and discusses a variety of examples of moral dilemmas, including ones drawn from literature and modern controversies. It will be of value to all students and faculty members in philosophy departments, as well as lay readers, with an interest in moral philosophy.
Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually ...have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. There was, however, an earlier period where leaders in medicine and in the humanities worked closely together and both fields were richer for it. This volume begins with the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment when professors of medicine such as John Gregory, Edward Percival, and the American, Benjamin Rush, were close friends of philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. They continually exchanged views on matters of ethics with each other in print, at meetings of elite intellectual groups, and at the dinner table. Then something happened, physicians and humanists quit talking with each other. In searching for the causes of the collapse, this book identifies shifts in the social class of physicians, developments in medical science, and changes in the patterns of medical education. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. Again, the book asks why, finding answers in the shift from acute to chronic disease as the dominant pattern of illness, the social rights revolution of the 1960’s, and the increasing dissonance between physician ethics and ethics outside medicine. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue.
Why has Egypt, a pioneer of organ transplantation, been reluctant to pass a national organ transplant law for more than three decades? This book analyzes the national debate over organ ...transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major social and political transformation—including mounting dissent against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamic revival. Sherine Hamdy recasts bioethics as a necessarily political project as she traces the moral positions of patients in need of new tissues and organs, doctors uncertain about whether transplantation is a “good” medical or religious practice, and Islamic scholars. Her richly narrated study delves into topics including current definitions of brain death, the authority of Islamic fatwas, reports about the mismanagement of toxic waste predisposing the poor to organ failure, the Egyptian black market in organs, and more. Incorporating insights from a range of disciplines, Our Bodies Belong to God sheds new light on contemporary Islamic thought, while challenging the presumed divide between religion and science, and between ethics and politics.
Psychologists are in a position to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic through research, practice, education, and advocacy. However, concerns exist about the ethical implications associated with ...transitioning from face-to-face to online or virtual formats as necessitated by stay-at-home orders designed to enforce the social distancing required to flatten the curve of new COVID-19 cases. The purpose of this article is to review potential ethical issues and to provide guidance to psychologists for ethical conduct in the midst of the current crisis and its aftermath. In addition to contextualizing relevant ethical considerations according to the principles and standards of the current American Psychological Association's ethics code, vignettes are presented to exemplify the ethical dilemmas psychologists in various roles may face when responding to COVID-19 and to offer suggestions and resources for resolving potential conflicts.
Public Significance Statement
This article provides psychologists with guidance for addressing ethical issues that may arise while providing services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The information included in this article will be useful for psychologists working across settings (e.g., independent practice, hospitals, clinics, universities or colleges, research centers) and various roles (e.g., clinicians, scientists, educators, advocates).
Background:
Nursing care is rapidly evolving due to the advanced technological and medical development, and also due to an increased focus on standardization and the logic of production, permeating ...today’s hospital cultures. Nursing is rooted in a holistic approach with an ethical obligation to maintain and respect the individual’s dignity and integrity. However, working within time limits and heavy workload leads to burnout and ethical insensitivity among nurses, and may challenge nurses’ options to act on the basis of ethical and moral grounds in the individual care situation.
Aim:
The aim of this study is to describe and discuss ethical dilemmas described and experienced by nurses in clinical practice today.
Method:
The study was performed as a literature review following the matrix method allowing to synthesize literature across methodological approaches. A literature search was performed, including relevant studies published between 2011 and 2016. A total of 15 articles were included and analyzed focusing on their description of ethical dilemmas.
Ethical consideration:
We have considered and respected ethical conduct when performing a literature review, respecting authorship and referencing sources.
Results:
The analysis revealed three themes, relating to important aspects of nursing practice, such as the nurse–patient relationship, organizational structures, and collaboration with colleagues. The findings are summarized in the following three themes: (1) balancing harm and care, (2) work overload affecting quality, and (3) navigating in disagreement. Ethically difficult situations are evident across settings and in very diverse environments from neonatal care to caring for the older people. Organizational structures and being caught in-between professional values, standardization, and busyness was evident, revealing the complexity of nursing practice and the diversity of ethical dilemmas, concerns, and distress experienced by clinical nurses.
Conclusion:
Nursing practice is challenged by organizational structures and the development of the health care system, inhibiting nurses’ professional decision-making and forcing them to compromise basic nursing values.
The use of social media as a recruitment tool for research with humans is increasing, and likely to continue to grow. Despite this, to date there has been no specific regulatory guidance and there ...has been little in the bioethics literature to guide investigators and institutional review boards (IRBs) faced with navigating the ethical issues such use raises. We begin to fill this gap by first defending a nonexceptionalist methodology for assessing social media recruitment; second, examining respect for privacy and investigator transparency as key norms governing social media recruitment; and, finally, analyzing three relatively novel aspects of social media recruitment: (i) the ethical significance of compliance with website "terms of use"; (ii) the ethics of recruiting from the online networks of research participants; and (iii) the ethical implications of online communication from and between participants. Two checklists aimed at guiding investigators and IRBs through the ethical issues are included as appendices.
PDF
