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.
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.
In the September 2014 issue on physicians as agents of social change, Dr. Audiey Kao, editor-in-chief of Virtual Mentor interviewed Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development or USAID.
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.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.