Skip to main content
Open Book Publishers

4. Health Care Ethics

  • COMPOST Collective (author)
Chapter of: Bioethics: A Coursebook(pp. 45–72)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
Title4. Health Care Ethics
ContributorCOMPOST Collective (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0449.04
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0449/chapters/10.11647/obp.0449.04
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightCOMPOST Collective;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2025-05-12
Long abstractChapter 4 offers a comprehensive introduction to ethical questions raised in the context of health, disease, and well-being. Under the rubric of ‘health care ethics’, we address a wide range of topics including the patient-physician relationship, the role of AI in healthcare, the ethics of reproductive health, the fair allocation of public health resources, the ethics of health promotion and prevention, and the ethics of biomedical research. The chapter opens with an introduction to bioethics’ most-used toolkit: the principles of biomedical ethics. It offers an overview of these principles and explains how they relate to the moral theories discussed in previous chapters. Before delving into specific applications, the chapter presents important critiques that highlight the complexity of ethical theorizing and decision-making, and remind us of the need to involve a wide variety of perspectives, with particular attention to stakeholders. Throughout the chapter, the reader will learn how to apply these insights in a nuanced and context-sensitive way by working through a variety of ethical topics in the context of healthcare, public health, and clinical research.
Page rangepp. 45–72
Print length28 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

COMPOST Collective

(author)
Research Group at the Department of Philosophy at University of Antwerp
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/compost/

COMPOST Collective is a research group at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Antwerp. This interdisciplinary collective has a specific interest in (bio)ethics and is embedded in the department's Center for Ethics.

References
  1. Adam, Alison, ed. 1998. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London New York: Routledge.
  2. Annas, George J., and Michael A. Grodin, eds. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. Oxford University Press, 1992.
  3. Barnes, Elizabeth. 2018. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  4. Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2013. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 7th edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
  5. Boulton, Amohia. 2018. “Decolonising Ethics: Considerations of Power, Politics and Privilege in Aotearoa/New Zealand”. Southern African Journal of Social Work and Social Development 30 (1). https://doi.org/10.25159/2415-5829/3825
  6. Camporesi, Silvia, and Maurizio Mori. 2021. “Ethicists, Doctors and Triage Decisions: Who Should Decide? And on What Basis?”. Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12): e18–e18. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106499
  7. Charon, Rita, and Martha Montello, eds. 2002. Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. Reflective Bioethics. New York: Routledge.
  8. Cupples, Laura M. 2020. “Disability, Epistemic Harms, and the Quality-Adjusted Life Year”. IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 13 (1): 45–62. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijfab.13.1.03
  9. D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  10. Emanuel, Ezekiel J., David Wendler, and Christine Grady. 2000. “What Makes Clinical Research Ethical?”. JAMA 283 (20): 2701. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.283.20.2701
  11. Engelen, Bart. 2019. “Ethical Criteria for Health-Promoting Nudges: A Case-by-Case Analysis”. American Journal of Bioethics 19 (5): 48–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2019.1588411
  12. European Commission. n.d. “AI Act | Shaping Europe’s Digital Future”. Accessed 11 January 2025. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai
  13. Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  14. Frank, Arthur W. 2013. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo14674212.html
  15. Future of Life Institute. 2024. “High-Level Summary of the AI Act | EU Artificial Intelligence Act”. EU Artificial Intelligence Act, 27 February 2024. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/
  16. HLEG. 2019. “Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI”. Brussels: European Commision.
  17. Kara, Mahmut Alpertunga. 2023. “Is It Possible to Allocate Life? Triage, Ageism, and Narrative Identity”. The New Bioethics: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Biotechnology and the Body 29 (4): 322–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/20502877.2023.2261735
  18. Johnson, G. M. 2021. “Algorithmic bias: On the implicit biases of social technology”. Synthese 198 (10): 9941–9961. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02696-y
  19. Jones, James H. 1993. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New and expanded edition. Cambridge: Free Press.
  20. Kittay, Eva Feder. 2019. Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds. New York: Oxford University Press.
  21. Lurie, P., and S. M. Wolfe. 1997. “Unethical Trials of Interventions to Reduce Perinatal Transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in Developing Countries”. The New England Journal of Medicine 337 (12): 853–56. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199709183371212
  22. Obermeyer, Ziad, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2019. “Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations”. Science 366 (6464): 447–453. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax2342
  23. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence and amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act).
  24. Robertson, John A. 1983. “Procreative Liberty and the Control of Conception, Pregnancy, and Childbirth”. Virginia Law Review 69 (3): 405–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1072766
  25. Ross, W. D. 2009. The Right and the Good. British Moral Philosophers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  26. Rozée, Virginie, Anna De Bayas Sanchez, Michaela Fuller, María López-Toribio, Juan A. Ramón-Soria, Jose Miguel Carrasco, Kristien Hens, Joke Struyf, Francisco Guell, and Manon Vialle. 2024. “Reflecting sex, social class and race inequalities in reproduction? Study of the gender representations conveyed by 38 fertility centre websites in 8 European countries”. Reproductive Health 21 (150). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-024-01890-2
  27. Savulescu, J. 2001. “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children”. Bioethics 15 (5–6): 413–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8519.00251
  28. Scully, J. L. 2008. Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
  29. ——. 2022. “Being Disabled and Contemplating Disabled Children”. In The Disability Bioethics Reader, edited by Joel Michael Reynolds and Christine Wieseler. London: Routledge.
  30. ——. 2023. “Feminist Bioethics”. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Stanford: Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/feminist-bioethics/
  31. Silliman, Jael, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez. 2004. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
  32. Skloot, Rebecca. 2010. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Crown Publishing Group.
  33. Soled, Derek. 2021. “Public Health Nudges: Weighing Individual Liberty and Population Health Benefits”. Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (11): 756–60. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106077
  34. Tengland, Per Anders. 2016. “Behavior Change or Empowerment: On the Ethics of Health-Promotion Goals”. Health Care Analysis 24 (1): 24–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-013-0265-0
  35. Tolchin, Benjamin, Sarah C. Hull, and Katherine Kraschel. 2021. “Triage and Justice in an Unjust Pandemic: Ethical Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Setting of Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities”. Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (3): 200–202. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106457
  36. trail. 2024. “EU AI Act: Risk-Classifications of the AI Regulation”. Accessed 11 January 2025. https://www.trail-ml.com/blog/eu-ai-act-how-risk-is-classified
  37. Van Assche, Kristof, Serge Gutwirth, and Sigrid Sterckx. 2013. “Protecting Dignitary Interests of Biobank Research Participants: Lessons from Havasupai Tribe v Arizona Board of Regents”. Law, Innovation and Technology 5 (1): 54–84. https://doi.org/10.5235/17579961.5.1.54
  38. Vertommen, Sigrid, Bronwyn Parry, and Michal Nahman. 2022. “Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies”. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (1): 1–17. http://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37920