Medicine, health care, and philosophy
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Med Health Care Philos · Jan 2001
Advance directives in patients with Alzheimer's disease. Ethical and clinical considerations.
Advance patient directives are various forms of anticipatory medical directives made by competent individuals for the eventuality of future incompetence. They are therefore appropriate instruments for competent patients in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease to document their self-determined will in the advanced stages of dementia. ⋯ Advance directives, when utilized intelligently, represent appropriate instruments for shared decision-making by patient, family members and physician. They should be utilized to a greater extent, particularly for the treatment planning of demented patients.
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In the literature three mechanisms are commonly distinguished to make decisions about the care of incompetent patients: A living will, a substituted judgment by a surrogate (who may or may not hold the "power of attorney"), and a best interest judgment. Almost universally, the third mechanism is deemed the worst possible of the three, to be invoked only when the former two are unavailable. In this article, I argue in favor of best interest judgments. ⋯ My approach in this article is primarily negative, that is, I criticize the alleged superiority of the living will and substituted judgment. The latter two mechanisms gain their alleged superiority because they are supposedly morally neutral, whereas the best interest judgment entails a value judgment on behalf of the patient. I argue that on closer inspection living wills and substituted judgments are not morally neutral; indeed, they generally rely on best interest judgments, even if those are not made explicit.
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The question of corporate moral responsibility--of whether it makes sense to hold an organisation corporately morally responsible for its actions, rather than holding responsible the individuals who contributed to that action--has been debated over a number of years in the business ethics literature. However, it has had little attention in the world of health care ethics. Health care in the United Kingdom (UK) is becoming an increasingly corporate responsibility, so the issue is increasingly relevant in the health care context, and it is worth considering whether the specific nature of health care raises special questions around corporate moral responsibility. ⋯ However, this feature does not seriously diminish the importance of the corporate responsibility issue, and the importance of the latter is enhanced by recent developments. But there is one major area of difference. Health care, as an activity with an intrinsically moral goal, differs importantly from commercial activities that are essentially amoral, in that it narrows the range of opportunities for corporate wrongdoing, and also makes such organisations more difficult to punish.