Are patients morally responsible for their errors?

Buetow, S. and Elwyn, Glyn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0917-6286 2006. Are patients morally responsible for their errors? Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (5) , pp. 260-262. 10.1136/jme.2005.012245

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Amid neglect of patients’ contribution to error has been a failure to ask whether patients are morally responsible for their errors. This paper aims to help answer this question and so define a worthy response to the errors. Recent work on medical errors has emphasised system deficiencies and discouraged finding people to blame. We scrutinise this approach from an incompatibilist, agent causation position and draw on Hart’s taxonomy of four senses of moral responsibility: role responsibility; capacity responsibility; causal responsibility; and liability responsibility. Each sense is shown to contribute to an overall theoretical judgment as to whether patients are morally responsible for their errors (and success in avoiding them). Though how to weight the senses is unclear, patients appear to be morally responsible for the avoidable errors they make, contribute to or can influence.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Medicine
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Publisher:	BMJ Publishing Group
ISSN:	0306-6800
Last Modified:	27 Oct 2022 09:09
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/64600

Citation Data

Cited 23 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item