Beyond Money: Conscientious Objection in Medicine as a Conflict of Interests
Alberto Giubilini, Research Fellow, Oxford Martin School & Wellcome Centre for Ethics and the Humanities
Wednesday, 12 June 2019, 11am to 12.30pm
Ethox and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities are based at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, Old Road Campus, Oxford OX3 7FZ. The talk will be held in seminar room 0.
ABSTRACT
Conflicts of interests (COIs) in medicine are typically taken to be financial in nature: it is often assumed that a COI occurs when a health care practitioner’s financial interest conflicts with patients’ interests, public health interests, or professional obligations more in general. Even when non-financial COIs are acknowledged, ethical concerns are almost exclusively reserved for financial COIs. However, the notion of ‘interests’ cannot be reduced to its financial component. Individuals in general, and medical professionals in particular, have different types of ‘interests’, many of which are non-financial in nature but can still conflict with professional obligations. The debate about health care delivery has largely overlooked this broader notion of ‘interests’. Here, we will focus on health practitioners’ moral or religious values as particular types of personal interests involved in health care delivery that can generate COIs, and on conscientious objection in health care as the expression of a particular type of COI. We argue that, in the health care context, the COIs generated by interests of conscience can be as ethically problematic, and therefore should be treated in the same way, as financial COIs.
Recording
Access the seminar recording on YouTube or our Centre website:
YouTube
https://youtu.be/HCQzIVJUHY4
Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities website
https://www.weh.ox.ac.uk/news/beyond-money-conscientious-objection-in-medicine-as-a-conflict-of-interests