Duties to rescue: individual, professional and institutional
Clinicians and researchers can often rescue patients or research participants from serious harms. Indeed, they often have a duty to do so—a duty to rescue. Duties to rescue are frequently discussed in the medical ethics literature, but according to Tina Rulli and Joseph Millum they are under-theoris...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
BMJ Publ.
2016
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| In: |
Journal of medical ethics
Year: 2016, Volume: 42, Issue: 4, Pages: 207-208 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Clinicians and researchers can often rescue patients or research participants from serious harms. Indeed, they often have a duty to do so—a duty to rescue. Duties to rescue are frequently discussed in the medical ethics literature, but according to Tina Rulli and Joseph Millum they are under-theorised and more problematic than is normally acknowledged.1Rulli and Millum outline two widely discussed conceptions of rescue duties: a so-called duty of easy rescue, applying to all moral agents (including healthcare professionals), and the rule of rescue, applying specifically to institutions. They raise concerns about both.The duty of easy rescue is, as its name suggests, a duty to rescue that obtains only where the rescue can be effected at minimal cost to the rescuer. It is normally understood as applying to all individual moral agents, and is perhaps the most frequently discussed duty to rescue. But Rulli and Millum argue that it faces problems.Chief among these is that it seems at risk of over-extending. Most inhabitants of wealthy nations can easily rescue impoverished people in Africa simply by donating small amounts of money to charity. Does this imply that they each have a duty to rescue each impoverished individual whom they can rescue at minimal cost? There are two potential worries here. One is an epistemic problem—a problem with identifying how far the duty of easy rescue extends. The second is a normative problem—it might seem that if the duty of easy rescue ends up being very broad in scope, then it will in fact be highly demanding. Though the cost of effected any individual rescue that falls under the duty will be low, in aggregate, the costs of fulfilling the duty may be extremely high, and this might be thought to cast doubt on whether there really is such … |
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| ISSN: | 1473-4257 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of medical ethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1136/medethics-2016-103526 |