Medicine, Futures, and the Prevention of Human Extinction.

Abstract

This article draws a parallel between ethical reasons why people alive today have obligations to members of future generations and ethical reasons why physicians have obligations, besides helping improve patients' quality of life, to help some patients confront their own deaths and human extinction. This article argues for the view that many clinicians tend to express-daily, and one patient at a time-ethical values that support human extinction prevention as a project of medicine.