Deference or critical engagement: how should healthcare practitioners use Clinical Ethics Guidance?

Abstract

Healthcare practitioners have access to a range of ethical guidance. However, the normative role of this guidance in ethical decision-making is underexplored. This paper considers two ways that healthcare practitioners could approach ethics guidance. We first outline the idea of deference to ethics guidance, showing how an attitude of deference raises three key problems: moral value; moral understanding; and moral error. Drawing on philosophical literature, we then advocate an alternative framing of ethics guidance as a form of moral testimony by colleagues and suggest that a more promising attitude to ethics guidance is to approach it in the spirit of ‘critical engagement’ rather than deference.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Davies, B. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4612-7894 Parker, J.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	moral deference; moral testimony; ethics guidance; professional ethics
Dates:	Published: June 2024 Published (online): 29 February 2024 Accepted: 20 December 2023
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of Philosophy (Sheffield)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number Wellcome Trust 221220/Z/20/Z
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	22 Dec 2023 15:00
Last Modified:	09 Sep 2024 08:29
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1007/s40592-023-00186-8
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:206848

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Deference or critical engagement: how should healthcare practitioners use Clinical Ethics Guidance?

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