As high-tech care decisions led to value clashes in hospital corridors, ethics committees developed to respond to diverse viewpoints, families’ concerns, and clinicians’ moral distress. They now exist in almost all US health care organizations.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(5):546-553. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.5.mhst1-1605.
Wendy E. Parmet, JD and Claudia E. Haupt, PhD, JSD
Clinicians using governing authority to make public health policy are ethically obliged to draw upon scientific and clinical information that accords professional standards.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(3):E194-199. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.194.
Isabelle Freiling, PhD, Nicole M. Krause, MA, and Dietram A. Scheufele, PhD
Misinformation is an urgent new problem, so health professions communities need solutions as much as they need to be wary of ethical pitfalls of rushed interventions.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(3):E228-237. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.228.
Margaret Little, PhD and Anne Drapkin Lyerly, MA, MD
Society is best served by an approach to conscience that combines a progressive understanding of patients’ needs, a nuanced determination of when those needs translate into claims, and a limited role for conscientious refusal.
State laws prohibiting sodomy were on the books throughout US history until struck down by the US Supreme Court, which argued in Lawrence v Texas (2003) that the state cannot criminalize private sexual conduct.
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.
An argument that the concept of judicious dissent can resolve the debate over a physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to provide lawful services.