Good reasons to vaccinate: mandatory or payment for risk?
Mandatory vaccination, including for COVID-19, can be ethically justified if the threat to public health is grave, the confidence in safety and effectiveness is high, the expected utility of mandatory vaccination is greater than the alternatives, and the penalties or costs for non-compliance are proportionate. I describe an algorithm for justified mandatory vaccination.
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Journal of Medical Ethics is an official journal of the Institute of Medical Ethics and a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal. JME features articles on ethical aspects of health care relevant to health care professionals, members of clinical ethics committees, medical ethics professionals, researchers and bioscientists, policy makers and ...
Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th edn.
Beauchamp T L, Childress J F. Oxford University Press, 2001, £19.95, pp 454. ISBN 0-19-514332-9. The Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress is a classic in the field of medical ethics. The first edition was published in 1979 and “unleashed” the four principles of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice on the newly emerging field.
An autonomy-based approach to assisted suicide: a way to avoid …
In several jurisdictions, irremediable suffering from a medical condition is a legal requirement for access to assisted dying. According to the expressivist objection, allowing assisted dying for a specific group of persons, such as those with irremediable medical conditions, expresses the judgment that their lives are not worth living. While the …
Algorithms advise, humans decide: the evidential role of the …
Oct 9, 2024 · An AI-based ‘patient preference predictor’ (PPP) is a proposed method for guiding healthcare decisions for patients who lack decision-making capacity. The proposal is to use correlations between sociodemographic data and known healthcare preferences to construct a model that predicts the unknown preferences of a particular patient. In this paper, I highlight a distinction that has been ...
Balancing health worker well-being and duty to care: an ethical ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the risks that can be involved in healthcare work. In this paper, we explore the issue of staff safety in clinical work using the example of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the COVID-19 crisis. We articulate some of the specific ethical challenges around PPE currently being faced by front-line clinicians, and …
Reconsidering fetal pain - Journal of Medical Ethics
Introduction. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan wrote an article in Human Life Review that (to our knowledge) first directly raised the possibility that the fetus can “respond to pain”.1 Subsequently, the possibility of fetal pain was raised in a review in the New England Journal of Medicine,2 an accompanying editorial,3 and a clinical trial examining the use of analgesia and anaesthesia ...
The need for empathetic healthcare systems - Journal of Medical …
Medicine is not merely a job that requires technical expertise, but a profession concerned with making the best decisions and recommendations with reference to, and in consultation with, the patient. This means that the skill set required for healthcare professionals in order to provide good care is a combination of scientific knowledge, technical aptitude, and affective qualities or virtues ...
Blaming the unvaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic: the …
Individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 (C19) experienced prejudice and blame for the pandemic. Because people vastly overestimate C19 risks, we examined whether these negative judgements could be partially understood as a form of scapegoating (ie, blaming a group unfairly for an undesirable outcome) and whether political ideology (previously shown to shape risk perceptions in the USA ...
Integrating constructivism in the critical dialogue method of …
Oct 7, 2024 · In the wake of injustices in healthcare, the field of clinical ethics consultation would benefit from new methods that support ethicists in addressing the role of intersecting systems of oppression in healthcare decision-making.1 We argue for an expanded view of Delany and colleagues’ critical dialogue method to accomplish this by integrating a constructivist lens.2 By doing so, critical ...