Abstract
Over the past 25 years, I was privileged to consult on a large number of individual clinical encounters, during which I was seen, and served, as an “ethicist”. At the same time, these and other facets of health care attracted my philosophical interests. Accordingly, a distinction became necessary so to enable keeping very different sorts of questions and problems distinct.
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Notes
- 1.
As I note later, others—persons, professions, and institutions (with their departments, units, etc.)—are also invariably involved, albeit in different ways.
- 2.
The Hippocratic virtues—justice (dīke) and self-restraint (sophrōsyne)—commonly accepted as key to the Western medical traditions come into play at just this point.
- 3.
See, for instance, his Field of Consciousness, Duquesne University Press, 1964.
- 4.
By now, moreover, there seems little doubt but that the fetus also relates, in its own unique manner, to the womb bearing the fetus.
- 5.
As anyone will recognize, after even brief reflection, even a physician’s raised eyebrows at a specific moment during a conversation with a patient, can be taken by the patient as highly significant.
- 6.
As with all human action, things may change as the consultant begins and then proceeds; the consultant may well become a more central ‘issue’ than other ethical matters.
- 7.
A good case might be made for conceiving clinical ethics as such an interpretive discipline, as I’ve argued elsewhere.
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Zaner, R.M. (2015). Clinical Listening, Narrative Writing. In: A Critical Examination of Ethics in Health Care and Biomedical Research. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 60. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18332-9_8
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