What is Ethics?

There can be more than one way to explain what ethics involves, but a common way---and a very basic way---is to say that ethics is about what is right versus wrong and what is good versus bad in human life. Right and wrong connect to our choices and actions and how we justify or defend them. While choosing or acting in an ethical way can be complicated, it is possible to identify some familiar steps or factors:

• Consider everything that is at stake for everybody affected, not just what is most obvious and not just what affects oneself
• Think carefully and systematically about consequences and their likelihood
• Evaluate assumptions being made and one’s habits in terms of choosing or acting
• Examine a particular situation or condition from different perspectives
• Ask insightful questions to help ensure that little is overlooked or missed
• Creatively identify possible ways to respond and evaluate which holds up best to questions and challenges

The concepts of good and bad connect to what are our personal commitments and our characters. A synonym for "commitments" is values; in other words, what has worth or meaning for each of us such that values serve to guide us in how we live. Values come from our families, personal experiences, religious/spiritual belief systems, ethnic or cultural membership, important relationships, and so on. Character is much more than just someone’s personality. Character is instead about enduring virtues, that is, qualities a person considers central to who she is and how she wants other people to know her.

WHAT IS ETHICS IN TERMS OF HEALTH?

One way to begin to understand health ethics is to first distinguish among research ethics, patient- or client-centered ethics, professional ethics, and organizational or institutional ethics. Such distinctions matter when it comes to talking about treatment and care of a particular patient or group of patients versus talking about conducting research using human beings versus talking about the kinds of policies and programs that a hospital system or a society in general should adopt. Furthermore it is worthwhile to clearly separate questions or decisions that involve ethics from questions or decisions that involve politics, economics, religion/spirituality, the law, or in the context of health, medicine. For instance, there are important differences in asking:

"What type of rehabilitation exercise results in the shortest recovery time?" (= medical)

"Medical treatment X is expected to deliver certain benefits for patients with this condition. But for this particular patient, how willing is he to accept the risks, uncertainties, and burdens that are associated with treatment X? (= ethical)

"What will be the costs of providing therapy Y to patients in their homes versus in a day clinic?" (= economic)

With this said, however, it is important to acknowledge that ethical factors can be involved in decisions that are initially appear to be just economic, political, legal, and so on. For example,

"In terms of who has access of a patient’s medical record, what does the provincial law say?" (= legal). But a further or associated question may be "Does the applicable law adequately respect my privacy?" (= ethical)

"What will reduce the spread of the cancerous cells?" (= medical). At another level may be the question "How will I relate to my own body if a particular body part is removed?" (= ethical)

Turning directly to health and ethics, the kinds of opportunities, challenges, and concerns are wide-ranging, in part because of innovative technologies, changing societal perspectives, and the inescapable complexities of human beings and their relationships.