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The nature of disasters and their challenges to healthcare ethics / JEFFERY EVANS
Swansea University Author: JEFFERY EVANS
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PDF | E-Thesis – open access
Copyright: The author, Jeffery Evans, 2022. Released under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No–Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) License. Third party content is excluded for use under the license terms.
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DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUthesis.61567
Abstract
Disasters are exceptional events that cause damages on a scale that result in widespread unmet human needs that are critical and urgent. The exceptional circumstances in disasters may render established ethical norms of healthcare practice inapplicable or inappropriate. Healthcare professionals who...
| Published: |
Swansea
2022
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Calder, Gideon ; Upton, Hugh |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa61567 |
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| Abstract: |
Disasters are exceptional events that cause damages on a scale that result in widespread unmet human needs that are critical and urgent. The exceptional circumstances in disasters may render established ethical norms of healthcare practice inapplicable or inappropriate. Healthcare professionals who work in disasters are faced with choices that have direct impacts on the life, death, and suffering of both disaster victims, and themselves. Some choices faced may be dilemmatic choices between competing irreconcilable moral principles. Whilst some choices reflect uncertainty as to how to realise moral precepts. In these situations, there is an appeal for guidance that is fitted to the circumstances found within disasters. Appealing to codes of professional conduct and ethics is problematic as many codes are either silent on the difficulties encountered in disasters, or overly demanding through the use of imperative language. Considering the relative weakness of published codes, universal principles of first do no harm and do good are offered as guiding principles. However, in disasters opportunities exist for harming through nondoing, creating the possibility that as aid is rendered to some, harm is occasioned to others. When considering doing good in disasters, maximising aggregate benefit is the established ethical framework employed. However, this framework’s foundational assumptions of aggregation of benefits and harms, commensurability of different ends, and the privileging of the greater number are open to critique. Thus, the principles of first do no harm and do good are problematic in disaster settings. Virtue ethics is proposed as a novel response to the difficulties faced by healthcare professionals in disasters. Virtue ethics provides an account of the healthcare professional as one who must choose with wisdom, courage and integrity in exceptional circumstances. Further, virtue ethics provides an understanding of how it is possible to act well in the tragic circumstances found within disasters. |
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| Item Description: |
ORCiD identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7914-2586 |
| Keywords: |
Disaster, disaster ethics, healthcare ethics, virtue ethics, triage |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |