Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1007/s10730-020-09401-z
Nir Ben-Moshe
{"title":"Conscientious Objection in Medicine: Making it Public.","authors":"Nir Ben-Moshe","doi":"10.1007/s10730-020-09401-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-020-09401-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The literature on conscientious objection in medicine presents two key problems that remain unresolved: (a) Which conscientious objections in medicine are justified, if it is not feasible for individual medical practitioners to conclusively demonstrate the genuineness or reasonableness of their objections (\"the justification problem\")? (b) How does one respect both medical practitioners' claims of conscience and patients' interests, without leaving practitioners complicit in perceived or actual wrongdoing (\"the complicity problem\")? My aim in this paper is to offer a new framework for conscientious objections in medicine, which, by bringing medical professionals' conscientious objection into the public realm, solves the justification and complicity problems. In particular, I will argue that: (a) an \"Uber Conscientious Objection in Medicine Committee\" (\"UCOM Committee\")-which includes representatives from the medical community and from other professions, as well as from various religions and from the patient population-should assess various well-known conscientious objections in medicine in terms of public reason and decide which conscientious objections should be permitted, without hearing out individual conscientious objectors; (b) medical practitioners should advertise their (UCOM Committee preapproved) conscientious objections, ahead of time, in an online database that would be easily accessible to the public, without being required, in most cases, to refer patients to non-objecting practitioners.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 3","pages":"269-289"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-020-09401-z","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37779397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-09-01Epub Date: 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1007/s10730-021-09457-5
Bryan Pilkington
{"title":"Considerations of Conscience.","authors":"Bryan Pilkington","doi":"10.1007/s10730-021-09457-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-021-09457-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The proper role of conscience in healthcare continues to be a topic of deep interest for bioethicists, healthcare professionals, and health policy experts. This issue of HEC Forum brings together a collection of articles about features of these ongoing discussions of conscience, advancing the conversations about conscience in healthcare from a variety of perspectives and on a variety of fronts. Some articles in this issue take up particularly challenging cases of conscientious objection in practice, such as Fleming, Frith, and Ramsayer's contextually rich piece on midwives in Scotland or Harter's professionally grounded analysis; others engage the changing institutional landscapes which impact considerations of conscience, such as Cummins' work on the role of employers in institutional policies about conscience and Ben Moshe's discussion of publicity and institutional committees. Pieces by Howard and Pilkington both raise conceptual considerations about how we think about the role of conscience in medicine, questioning the use of \"conscientious objection\" in these discussions, and Byrnes pushes back on the most influential work in this area by Mark Wicclair. The issue concludes with a piece by Wicclair, which engages each of these distinct offerings, further extending the discussions of conscience in healthcare and helpfully connecting key themes discussed by authors in this issue to his contributions and to the longer tradition of discussions of conscience in medicine. This issue challenges readers to engage different arguments from different perspectives and asks them-in some cases-to be open to revising how they think about the role of conscience and the existence of and justification for conscientious objection in the dynamic, interdisciplinary fields of healthcare.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 3","pages":"165-174"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-021-09457-5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39190352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1007/s10730-020-09417-5
Dana Howard
{"title":"Civil Disobedience, Not Merely Conscientious Objection, In Medicine.","authors":"Dana Howard","doi":"10.1007/s10730-020-09417-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-020-09417-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Those arguing that conscientious objection in medicine should be declared unethical by professional societies face the following challenge: conscientious objection can function as an important reforming mechanism when it involves health care workers refusing to participate in certain medical interventions deemed standard of care and legally sanctioned but which undermine patients' rights. In such cases, the argument goes, far from being unethical, conscientious objection may actually be a professional duty. I examine this sort of challenge and ultimately argue that these acts of conscience done in the interest of reforming professional norms or medical regulations are best understood as episodes of civil disobedience rather than episodes of conscientious objection. In contrast to the private, exempting nature of conscientious objection, civil disobedience is a public breach of a norm or law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in governmental policies or professional standards. Consequently, clinicians may have a duty to engage in civil disobedience even while professional societies are right to declare limitations on the ethical appropriateness of conscientious objection.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 3","pages":"215-232"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-020-09417-5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38286796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-09-01Epub Date: 2021-08-20DOI: 10.1007/s10730-021-09458-4
Mark R Wicclair
{"title":"Commentary: Special Issue on Conscientious Objection.","authors":"Mark R Wicclair","doi":"10.1007/s10730-021-09458-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-021-09458-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This special issue of HEC Forum includes articles on a wide range of specific topics that make significant contributions to conscientious objection scholarship. In this commentary, it is not feasible to provide a comprehensive analysis of each of the articles; and I have not attempted to do so. Instead, for each article, I have selected specific issues and arguments on which to comment.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 3","pages":"307-324"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-021-09458-4","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39331776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1007/s10730-020-09395-8
Bryan C Pilkington
{"title":"Conscience Dissenters and Disagreement: Professions are Only as Good as Their Practitioners.","authors":"Bryan C Pilkington","doi":"10.1007/s10730-020-09395-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-020-09395-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper, I consider the role of conscience in medical practice. If the conscientious practice of individual practitioners cannot be defended or is incoherent or unreasonable on its own merits, then there is little reason to support conscience protection and to argue about its place in the current medical landscape. If this is the case, conscience protection should be abandoned. To the contrary, I argue that conscience protection should not be abandoned. My argument takes the form of an analysis of an essential feature of the conscience dissenter's argument, the role of disagreement within \"the medical profession.\" Conscience dissenters make certain assumptions within their arguments about the profession, disagreements within the professions, and how such disagreement should be adjudicated. If it is the case that these assumptions are accurate reflections of the current medical landscape, then the advocate of conscience protection has one less leg to stand on. I aim to show that this is not the case and that the assumptions of the conscience dissenter are not only mistaken but are mistakes of significant magnitude, so significant as to raise serious questions about the merit of their position. If the argument in this paper is sound, then, at the very least, the conversation over conscience protection in medicine, in particular, and health care, in general, must continue.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 3","pages":"233-245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-020-09395-8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37689496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-06-01Epub Date: 2021-03-06DOI: 10.1007/s10730-020-09438-0
Rachel M B Greiner
{"title":"The Cost of Safety During a Pandemic.","authors":"Rachel M B Greiner","doi":"10.1007/s10730-020-09438-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-020-09438-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A first-person account of some victims of the virus, the author puts faces and circumstances to the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic. Told from a chaplain's point of view, these narratives will take the reader beyond the numbers and ask questions like: What is the cost of keeping families separated at the end of life, and, if patient/family centered care is so central to healthcare these days, why was it immediately discarded? Is potentially saving human lives worth the risk of damaging them beyond repair?</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 1-2","pages":"61-72"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-020-09438-0","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25451694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-06-01Epub Date: 2021-03-23DOI: 10.1007/s10730-021-09448-6
Brian H Childs, Laura Vearrier
{"title":"A Journal of the COVID-19 (Plague) Year.","authors":"Brian H Childs, Laura Vearrier","doi":"10.1007/s10730-021-09448-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-021-09448-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The essays in this special issue of HEC Forum provide reflections that make explicit the implicit anthropology that our current pandemic has brought but which in the medical ethics literature around COVID-19 has to a great extent ignored. Three of the essays are clearly \"journalistic\" as a literary genre: one by a hospital chaplain, one by a medical student in her pre-clinical years, and one by a fourth-year medical student who reports her experience as she completed her undergraduate clerkships and applied for positions in graduate medical education. Other essays explore the pandemic from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives, particularly how triage policies have been found to be largely blind to structural healthcare disparities, while simultaneously unable to appropriately address those disparities. Central issues that need to be addressed in triage are not just whether a utilitarian response is the most just response, but what exactly is the greatest good for the greatest number? Together, the essays in this special issue of HEC Forum create a call for a more anthropological approach to understanding health and healthcare. The narrow approach of viewing health as resulting primarily from healthcare will continue to hinder advances and perpetuate disparities. Health outcomes result from a complex interaction of various social, economic, cultural, historical, and political factors. Advancing healthcare requires contextualizing the health of populations amongst these factors. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us keenly aware of how interdependent our health as a society can be.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 1-2","pages":"1-6"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-021-09448-6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25507984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.1007/s10730-021-09446-8
Lauren Bunch
{"title":"Correction to: A Tale of Two Crises: Addressing Covid‑19 Vaccine Hesitancy as Promoting Racial Justice.","authors":"Lauren Bunch","doi":"10.1007/s10730-021-09446-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-021-09446-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 1-2","pages":"155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-021-09446-8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25451695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-06-01Epub Date: 2021-01-13DOI: 10.1007/s10730-021-09439-7
Vivian Anderson
{"title":"Academic During a Pandemic: Reflections from a Medical Student on Learning During SARS-CoVid-2.","authors":"Vivian Anderson","doi":"10.1007/s10730-021-09439-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-021-09439-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The current pandemic represents unprecedented times in medical education. In addition to the already strenuous demands of medical school, the SARS-CoVid-2 pandemic introduced a new source of ethical and moral pressure on students. Medical students navigated finishing their didactic years in isolation and initiated their clinical rotations in a pandemic environment. Many medical students found themselves in the frustrating position of being non-essential healthcare workers but still wanting to help. This paper follows the personal and shared experiences of a second-year medical student transitioning to their third year. In particular, this paper examines the author's personal ties to the disability community through their family, and how this impacted their approach in striving to aid in the pandemic.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 1-2","pages":"35-43"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s10730-021-09439-7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38818510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hec ForumPub Date : 2021-06-01Epub Date: 2021-01-15DOI: 10.1007/s10730-020-09435-3
Nanette Elster, Kayhan Parsi
{"title":"Oral Health Matters: The Ethics of Providing Oral Health During COVID-19.","authors":"Nanette Elster, Kayhan Parsi","doi":"10.1007/s10730-020-09435-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10730-020-09435-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Oral health is a critical part of overall health. The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of oral health. In this article, we describe how dental practice has been impacted by COVID-19, identify the public health response to COVID-19, and explain the gradual resumption of dental care after the initial disruption due to the pandemic. Finally, we discuss how long-standing health disparities in oral health have been exacerbated by the current pandemic.</p>","PeriodicalId":46160,"journal":{"name":"Hec Forum","volume":"33 1-2","pages":"157-164"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7809093/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38822138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}