How Legal Theory Can Save the Life of Healthcare Ethics (eBook)

This book argues that legal theory provides a jumping-off point for the study of controversial topics related to the work of Practicing Healthcare Ethicists (PHEs). Healthcare ethics consultation has had a place in healthcare for many decades yet the nature of the work is not well understood by many of its critics as well as its defenders. PHEs have been described as compromised and ineffectual, politicised and undemocratic, and their promise to offer sound advice has been deemed irredeemably incoherent in the context of value pluralism.

Legal theorists have long attended to the relationship between law and morality, and the supposed tension between democracy and the role of an expert judiciary. An appreciation that these debates are not unique to the practice of healthcare ethics can help PHEs to engage critics with a renewed confidence and some fresh approaches to perennial, and hitherto unproductive, arguments.

This book will be of great interest to practicing healthcare ethicists, as well as those who rely upon their services (healthcare professionals and healthcare leaders, patients, and their families) as well as academics working in the broader field of bioethics.

Ann M Heesters is the Senior Director of Clinical and Organisational Ethics at the University Health Network and an Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health where she is a course co-director in the MHSc program at University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics. She has recently joined The Institute for Education Research (TIER) as a Clinical Investigator 2, and looks forward to forging exciting new relationships and reuniting with her old love, Education. Ann has practiced in the field of bioethics for more than twenty years and established ethics services in two Canadian provinces. Ann has an abiding interest professionalizing the work of health care ethicists and was a founding member of PHEEP (Practicing Healthcare Ethicists Exploring Professionalization) and an early director of CAPHE-ACESS (the Canadian Association of Practicing Healthcare Ethicists - Association canadienne des éthiciens en soins de santé). Ann is a student of Philosophy and generally endorses Ronald Dworkin's view that 'Absolute confidence or clarity is the privilege of fools and fanatics.'