The default principle—that someone is free to do what he or she desires in the absence of a compelling reason why he or she should not—may make it possible to resolve ethical disputes without recourse to a particular moral framework.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(4):289-296. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.4.spec1-1504.
Physician employment adds a practice management stakeholder to the patient-physician encounter, a stakeholder whose financial interests differ from those of physicians in solo or group practice.
Equating conscience with clinical judgment challenges the way that ethics is marginalized in medical education. Ethics is simply an account of what good medical practice looks like in particular situations.
Narrative ethics derives its ethical force from continually comparing and critiquing new narratives against existing narratives that guide the way we live.
Frank A. Chervenak, MD and Laurence B. McCullough, PhD
A patient’s request for a treatment does not establish that treatment as medically reasonable according to evidence-based deliberative clinical judgment.
Julian Savulescu's writing on conscientious objection is guided by an emphasis on the principle of distributive justice that does not allow religion to have a special status as justification.
Publicizing physician ordering information as a way of peer-pressuring hospital employees into cutting costs is likely to have unintended consequences.