The history of medical ethics has provided, at various junctures, focus on major principles such as justice, fidelity,autonomy, beneficence, etc. When deontological (rule-based) perspectives received competition from utilitarian (results-based) methods of analysis in the 19th century, changes in emphasis helped pave the way for ethical assessment of theDarwinian, Mendelian, Freudian...

Outcomes from cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) remain distressingly poor. Overuse of CPR is attributable to unrealistic expectations, unintended consequences of existing policies and failure to honour patient refusal of CPR. We analyzed the CPR outcomes literature using the bioethical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice and developed a proposal for selective use ...

BACKGROUND Surgery is one of the important palliative methods for patients withesophageal cancer. In addition to concerns related to clinical decision making, various moral challenges are encountered in palliative surgery. Some of them are related to patients and their illness, others to surgeons, their attitudes, skills and knowledge base. METHODS Pertinent moral challenges are addressed and...

Reciprocal Altruism or reciprocity occurs when an individual performs a costly act for the benefit of another individual in anticipation of receiving beneficence via a costly act in return (Trivers 1971, Connor 1986, Rothstein and Pierotti 1988). Thus the key defining feature of reciprocity is that in any given exchange an individual would do better by, in the absence of punishment, not recipro...

In medical practice, ethical conflicts frequently occur between the principle of beneficence and the principle of non-maleficence, and if we accept these two principles without any modification, it is impossible for us to comply with both simultaneously in many cases. Thus, in order to make the two principles consistent, it is necessary to provide a means of interpretation, or a set of rules, t...

In this article, we use the principlist approach to identify, analyse and attempt to solve the ethical problem raised by a pregnant woman's request for cesarean delivery in absence of medical indications. We use two different types of premises: factual (facts about cesarean delivery and specifically attitudes of obstetricians as derived from the EUROBS European study) and value premises (princi...

The aim of the study was to identify nurses' ethical values, which become apparent through their behaviour in the interactions with older patients in caring encounters at a geriatric clinic.Descriptions of ethics in a caring practice are a problem since they are vague compared with the four principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.A Grounded Theory methodology was used....

BACKGROUND Transplantation medicine is associated with several ethical issues related to the lack of organs. Major questions concern the regulations for giving permission for organ removal, informing the public about organ donation, setting of organ allocation priorities, waiting list access, and strategies to counteract scarcity. METHODS This contribution is based on analyses of legal regula...

PURPOSE To survey the attitudes of the general public in Sweden to biobank research and to discuss the findings in the light of some well-known ethical principles. METHODS A questionnaire was used to survey the opinions of the general public in Sweden, and an ethical analysis (using the principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice) was performed to discuss the possible con...

Ethics are related to the structure and culture of the society. In addition to specialized ethics for every profession, individuals also hold their own personal beliefs and values. This study aimed to investigate Iranian occupational therapists' perception of ethical practice when working with children. For this purpose, qualitative content analysis was used and semi-structured interviews were ...