A recent update to the Geneva Declaration’s ‘Physician Pledge’ involves the ethical requirement of physicians to share medical knowledge for the benefit of patients and healthcare. With the spread of COVID-19, pockets exist in every country with different viral expressions. In the Chareidi religious community, for example, rates of COVID-19 transmission and dissemination are above average compared with other communities within the same countries. While viral spread in densely populated communities is common during pandemics, several reasons have been suggested to (...) explain the blatant flouting of public health regulations. It is easy to fault the Chareidi population for their proliferation of COVID-19, partly due to their avoidance of social media and internet aversion. However, the question remains: who is to blame for their community crisis? The ethical argument suggests that from a public health perspective, the physician needs to reach out and share medical knowledge with the community. The public’s best interests are critical in a pandemic and should supersede any considerations of cultural differences. By all indications, therefore, the physician has an ethical obligation to promote population healthcare and share medical knowledge based on ethical concepts of beneficence, non-maleficence, utilitarian ethics as well as social, procedural and distributive justice. This includes the ethical duty to reduce health disparities and convey the message that individual responsibility for health has repercussions within the context of broader social accountability. Creative channels are clearly demanded for this ethical challenge, including measured medical paternalism with appropriate cultural sensitivity in physician community outreach. (shrink)

Consequentialist and Kantian theories differ over the ethical relevance of consequences of actions. I investigate how they might differ too over the relevance of what actions are consequence of. Focusing on the case of group action and collective responsibility, I argue that there's a kind of analog to the problem of aggregating the value of consequencesthat Kantian theories will not confront and consequentialist theories will. The issue provides a useful way to characterize a deep difference between Kantian and consequentialist theories (...) and points, ironically, toward a way of making those views compatible. (shrink)

I argue for a conception of moral community as “ethical home,” in which home is a hybrid public and private concept, cohered through members’ complicit participation in the formation and endorsement of the community’s values and practices. In this essay I present and defend three premises that comprise my argument for this conception of moral community as an ethical home. First, I make a case for why “home” is an apt conception of moral community, defining the features of home relevant (...) to my claim, and clarifying which connotations of home I am abandoning by modifying home to be an “ethical” home. Second, I illustrate how when the concept of moral community is conceptualized as an ethical home, it is formed and defined by a community’s practices of moral self-definition, that occur within the ethical home-making process. Third, I claim that the process of ethical home-making, through moral self-definition around cohering values and practices, renders members of an ethical home as both rights holders within the ethical home, and as having shared responsibility for their fellow ethical home members. (shrink)