Christopher O. Tollefsen: Autonomy and Authority: Recovering the Traditional Approach to Medicine скачать в хорошем качестве

Christopher O. Tollefsen: Autonomy and Authority: Recovering the Traditional Approach to Medicine

There is a contrast between two conceptions of medicine: According to the first, which we call “The New Medicine,” medicine comprises a set of technical skills that are to be put to work in service of patient-client preferences. Health care workers are in essence providers of services, and these services are for the sake of patient well-being, understood entirely in terms of the patient’s satisfaction of her subjective preferences and desires. Thus, medicine becomes de-moralized, and its proper ethic becomes what the philosopher H. Tristram Engelhardt has identified as a “morality of strangers” (Engelhardt, 1996) We call the second view The Traditional Approach, and see it as operating along two converging “ways”, which we will call the Way of Medicine, and the Way of the Natural Law. Our claim is that these two ways comprise the best understanding of both the nature of medicine and the medical profession, and the norms that medical professionals should take as authoritatively guiding in shaping, and thus also in acting in accordance with, their consciences....