Conscience and Health Care: A Bioethical Analysis - Paperback

by Joseph Meaney Phd (Author)

In his book, Dr. Meaney proposes the personalist ethical understanding of conscience and health care. He explains why health care is an activity in which protecting moral behavior is particularly important. Legislative and codes of ethics protections for the conscience rights of physicians and other health care workers, and even institutions such as hospitals, are vitally important safeguards and must be made more effective or increased. Unfortunately, recent years have shown an opposite trend towards the eroding of legal protections and the watering down of conscience provisions. If the exercise of conscience in health care is critically undermined, the remarkable power of modern advances in medicine will be increasingly placed in the hands of individuals selected because they are willing to "obey orders" rather than stand up for their conscientious objections. The important safeguard and witness value of medical professionals with robust consciences will be removed. In a worst case scenario, the horrors of "Nazi Medicine" could be revisited with health care professionals giving in to immoral mandates in a context where medical science is many times more potent than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It is unquestionably a grave ethical duty to promote and defend the conscience rights of health care workers committed to the "moral enterprise" of caring for and healing the sick.