Duty to extract

The duty to protect.

Privilege and confidentiality are central to the physician–patient relationship. These concepts are protected by law in almost all jurisdictions (1,2). Breaches of confidentiality have long been considered unethical and, in many situations, actionable. In this regard, physicians have been governed by their standards of practice, by the regulations of their professional colleges, and in many jur...

Contrary-to-Duty Obligations

We investigate under what conditions contrary-to-duty (CTD) structures lacking temporal and action elements can be given a coherent reading. We argue, contrary to some recent proposals, that CTD is not an instance of defeasible reasoning, and that methods of nonmonotonic logics are inadequate since they are unable to distinguish between defeasibility and violation of primary obligations. We pro...

A professional duty to inform.

Rescuing the duty to rescue.

Clinicians and health researchers frequently encounter opportunities to rescue people. Rescue cases can generate a moral duty to aid those in peril. As such, bioethicists have leveraged a duty to rescue for a variety of purposes. Yet, despite its broad application, the duty to rescue is underanalysed. In this paper, we assess the state of theorising about the duty to rescue. There are large gap...

No duty to warn in California: now unambiguously solely a duty to protect.

In 2013, legislation went into effect clarifying that the Tarasoff duty in California is now unambiguously solely a duty to protect. Warning the potential victim and the police is not a requirement, but a clinician can obtain immunity from liability by using this safe harbor. In situations in which a therapist believes warning might exacerbate the patient's risk, however, alternative protective...