This paper examines an under-explored issue in organ donation: whose decision making authority should be privileged posthumously in the context of known, explicit consent for donation? Current practices in Canada support the family as the ultimate decision maker, despite the existence of legislative support in many Canadian provinces for the potential donor as legitimate decision maker. Arguments for and against privileging the family and the potential donor are identified. Informing the question of “who should decide” are considerations of individual and (...) relational autonomy, distributive and social justice, personhood, and arguments “from distress”. Tensions and competing obligations emerge from an exploration of these considerations that call for further, inclusive dialogue and deliberation on this important organ donation issue. (shrink)

Within bioethics, two prevailing approaches structure how we think about the role of medical surrogates and the decisions that they must make on behalf of incompetent patients. One approach views the surrogate primarily as the patient's agent, obediently enacting the patient's predetermined will. The second approach views the surrogate as the patient's custodian, judging for herself how to best safeguard the patient's interests. This paper argues that both of these approaches idealize away some of the ethically relevant features of advance (...) care planning that make patient preferences so inscrutable and surrogate decision-making so burdensome. It proposes a new approach to surrogate decision-making, the Fiduciary Agency Approach. On this novel approach, the surrogate has authority to not only act on the patient's behalf as the patient's agent but also to decide on the patient's behalf as the patient's fiduciary. One upshot of this new approach is that surrogates must sometimes go against the expressed dictates of the patients' advance directives not necessarily because doing so would be in the patient's best interest but rather because doing so would best represent the patients' will. (shrink)

Abstract:Respect for persons protects patients regarding their own healthcare decisions. Patient informed choice for altruism (PICA) is a proposed means for a fully autonomous patient with decisionmaking capacity to limit his or her own treatment for altruistic reasons. An altruistic decision could bond the patient with others at the end of life. We contend that PICA can also be an advance directive option. The proxy, family, and physicians must be reminded that a patient’s altruistic treatment refusal should be respected.

The substituted judgement principle is often recommended as a means of promoting the self-determination of an incompetent individual when proxy decision makers are faced with having to make decisions about health care. This article represents a critical ethical analysis of this decision-making principle and describes practical impediments that serve to undermine its fundamental purpose. These impediments predominantly stem from the informality associated with the application of the substituted judgement principle. It is recommended that the principles upon which decisions are made (...) about health care for another person should be transparent to all those involved in the process. Furthermore, the substituted judgement principle requires greater rigour in its practical application than currently tends to be the case. It may be that this principle should be subsumed as a component of advance directives in order that it fulfils its aim of serving to respect the self-determination of incompetent individuals. (shrink)

In this essay, I suggest that a slightly modified version of Freedman’s formulation of the clinical equipoise requirement is justified. I begin this essay with a brief discussion of the equipoise r...

Physicians and families need to interact more meaningfully to clarify the values and preferences at stake in advance care planning. The current use of advance directives fails to respect patient autonomy. This paper proposes using the family covenant as a preventive ethics process designed to improve end-of-life planning by incorporating other family members—as agreed to by the patient and those family members—into the medical care dialogue. The family covenant formulates advance directives in conversation with family members and with the assistance (...) of a physician, thereby making advance directives more acceptable to the family, and more intelligible to other physicians. It adds the moral force of a promise to the obligation of respecting a patient’s preferences about end-of-life care. These negotiations between patient, family, and physician, from early planning phases through implementation, should greatly reduce the incidence of family disagreements on what the patient would have wanted. The family covenant ensures advance directive discussions within the family, promotes and respects the autonomy of other family members, and might even spur others in the family to complete advance directives through additional covenants. The family covenant holds the potential to transform moral quagmires into meaningful moral conversation. J Am Geriatr Soc 51:1155–1158, 2003. (shrink)

Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of (...) an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold. (shrink)

Despite clear legislative and judicial support, a well established ethical consensus, and increased efforts at information dissemination and education, proxy decision making for incapacitated patients continues to produce moral muddle and poor resolutions in end-of-life care.In her analysis of the proxy-doctor relationship, Nancy Dubler spells out the institutionalized patterns that keep the promise of proxy directives so often unrealized. Facing medically complex care of an incapacitated patient, health care teams are apt to view the proxy as a potentially indecisive or (...) unrealistically demanding decision-maker, less a stand-in for the patient than an interloper whose improper, misguided, or self-interested decisions will work against the patient's best interests. So perceived, proxies are routinely relegated to the edges of care planning discussions, left relatively uninformed and unconsulted, and then suddenly thrust center stage to face decisions they find overwhelming. Confronting such decisions, proxies need support and compassion. What they often find is isolation and distrust, a web of professional and institutional practices that trammel their efforts to understand and execute their role. (shrink)

The case of Twin B involves the decision to send a newborn to a less intensive Level 2 special care nursery (SCN) than to the Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) that is considered optimal by the physician. The physician’s acceptance of the transfer is against the child’s best interest and is due to parental convenience. In analyzing the case, we reject the best interest standard. Our rejection is partly supported by the views of Douglas Diekema, John Hardwig, and (...) Lannie Ross. Instead of the best interest standard, we offer and defend an approach we base on a microeconomic analysis of externalities, such as those involved with automobile emissions. This extends our previously presented general microeconomic approach to patient decision-making. It provides a clearer way to evaluate situations, like those of Twin B, in which burdens faced by family members may be used to determine the appropriate level of treatment for a decisionally incapable patient. (shrink)

Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of (...) an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold. (shrink)