Severing Clinical Ethics Consultation from the Ethical Commitments and Preferences of Clinical Ethics Consultants

Abstract

Recent work calls for excluding clinical ethics consultants’ religious ethical commitments from formulating recommendations about particular cases and communicating those recommendations. I demonstrate that three arguments that call for excluding religious ethical commitments from this work logically imply that consultants may not use their secular ethical commitments in their work. The call to sever clinical ethics consultation from the ethical commitments of clinical ethics consultants has implications for the scope of work consultants may do and for the competencies required for such work.