Beneficence, Justice, and Health Care

Distributive justice and health care.

Between beneficence and justice: the ethics of stewardship in medicine.

In an era of rapidly rising health care costs, physicians and policymakers are searching for new and effective ways to contain health care spending without sacrificing the quality of services provided. These proposals are increasingly articulated in terms of an ethical duty of stewardship. The duty of stewardship in medicine, however, is not at present well understood, and it is frequently conf...

Justice or Beneficence: What Regulatory Virtue for Nano-Governance?

With nanotechnology we are not only moving into a new technological world but into 'a new legal, ethical, economic, social, cultural and political one too'. The article examines the questions of value preference in this transition to the new technological world and proposes to employ the moral concept of beneficence as a regulatory virtue for the governance of nanotechnology. Setting up the con...

Justice and rights to health care.

Justice and equal opportunities in health care.

The principle that each individual is entitled to an equal opportunity to benefit from any public health care system, and that this entitlement is proportionate neither to the size of their chance of benefitting, nor to the quality of the benefit, nor to the length of lifetime remaining in which that benefit may be enjoyed, runs counter to most current thinking about the allocation of resources...