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An integrated approach to ethical decision‐making in the health team
Author(s) -
Botes Annatjie
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of advanced nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.948
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1365-2648
pISSN - 0309-2402
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.01577.x
Subject(s) - nursing ethics , economic justice , meta ethics , health care , information ethics , telos , beneficence , sociology , engineering ethics , rationality , ethics of care , applied ethics , normative ethics , business ethics , ethical decision , argument (complex analysis) , isolation (microbiology) , military medical ethics , psychology , public relations , medicine , political science , epistemology , social psychology , law , autonomy , philosophy , microbiology and biotechnology , engineering , biology
An integrated approach to ethical decision‐making in the health team When making ethical decisions there are different perspectives that health care professionals may use. This may lead to conflict and insufficient co‐operation between the members of the health team. Two of these perspectives are the ethics of justice and the ethics of care. In a bid to gain a better understanding of the nature of ethical decision‐making in the health team, a comparison was drawn between the ethics of justice and the ethics of care. The investigation into and comparison between the ethics of justice and the ethics of care revealed that the deficiencies in each of the two perspectives in isolation, in fact, necessitate the application of a combination of both perspectives. The aim of the article is to describe how the members of the health team can, in an integrated manner, apply both the ethics of justice and the ethics of care in their ethical decision‐making. The central argument of the article is based on the following premises: (1) the inadequacy of the ethics of justice and the ethics of care in isolation necessitates that both these perspectives be applied; (2) the application of both these perspectives again requires an extended rationality and discourse and (3) discourse, in its turn, requires that the emphasis falls on a specific telos and that the participants in the discourse be endowed with certain virtues in order to abide by the rules of discourse.