Ethics 1 & 2 Flashcards
Today nurses are expected to..
- Think critically
- Offer evidence-informed solutions
- Respectfully challenge physicians and other health care professionals when they have concerns about the treatment plans of patients.
Today, nurses face a myriad of ethical dilemmas
- The use of restraints
- Issues of consent
- Continuing futile care for terminally-ill patients
- Use of reproductive technologies to manipulate the creation of life
- Prioritize care for complex patient loads
Why must we study ethics?
We must study ethics to become better at justifying our ethical standpoint and contribute to important discussions about patient care.
Ethics
• A branch of philosophy that examines social morality, norms and practices.
Ethical Theory
• Provides a rigorous and systematic approach to justify decision making when considering moral problems
Biomedical Ethics
• Explores ethical questions and moral issues associated with health care.
Code of Ethics
• Explicit declaration of the primary goals and values of the profession that indicate the profession’s acceptance of the responsibility and trust with which it has been invested by society
Moral justification
The use of ethical theories and principles to make and defend ethical decisions
Ethical Dilemma
- A situation that requires an individual to make a choice between two or more alternatives when the best course of action is not clear.
- Often we must choose the best or the “least worst” course of action
Values
• An ideal that has significant meaning or importance to an individual, a group or a society.
Modes of values transition: Conciously
Learned through parents, teachers, mentors, religious leaders or social groups.
• Values may be formally adopted by groups and written into professional code of ethics, laws or philosophies.
Mode of values transition: Unconsciously
Modeling: persons act in a way to show others the preferred ways to behave.
Process of values clarification
• A process through which individuals come to understand the values they hold and the importance of these values relative to others.
Requirements for the process of values
- Open discussion
- Communication
- Active listening
- Understanding
- Mutual respect
Utilarianism
- Focuses on the ends and outcomes, the consequences of decisions/actions.
- The ethical choice is the one with the best consequences, outcomes or results.
Deontology
• Makes explicit the duties and principles that should guide our actions.
• Rules are established to determine what is right or wrong based on one’s obligation and duties.
• Consequences are irrelevant to moral evaluation.
• An act or rule is right if it satisfies the demands of some overriding principle or principles of duty.
= NO OUTCOME
Problem: by failing to consider possible consequences, potentially disastrous situations may be created
Feminist Ethics
• Focuses on the nature of relationships between people, the role of community as well as the issue of gender inequality.
Moral distress
Is a reaction to a situation in which there are moral problems with a clear solution yet we are unable to follow our moral beliefs because of external constraints
Morality
Social and cultural institution with a history and a code of learnable rules