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Weaponizing Principles: Clinical Ethics Consultations & the Plight of the Morally Vulnerable
Author(s) -
Fiester Autumn M.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
bioethics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.494
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1467-8519
pISSN - 0269-9702
DOI - 10.1111/bioe.12115
Subject(s) - competence (human resources) , liability , normative ethics , political science , law , psychology , law and economics , engineering ethics , sociology , social psychology , engineering
Internationally, there is an on‐going dialogue about how to professionalize ethics consultation services ( ECSs ). Despite these efforts, one aspect of ECS ‐competence that has received scant attention is the liability of failing to adequately capture all of the relevant moral considerations in an ethics conflict. This failure carries a high price for the least powerful stakeholders in the dispute. When an ECS does not possess a sophisticated dexterity at translating what stakeholders say in a conflict into ethical concepts or principles, it runs the risk of naming one side's claims as morally legitimate and decrying the other's as merely self‐serving. The result of this failure is that one side in a dispute is granted significantly more moral weight and authority than the other. The remedy to this problem is that ECSs learn how to expand the diagnostic moral lens they employ in clinical ethics conflicts.