Join PSU's Philosophy Department and Socratic Society for a talk. We'll be joined by Dr. Tyler Tate, a practicing palliative care physician and an assistant professor of pediatrics at OHSU's School of Medicine.
"Love Your Patient as Yourself: Why Medical Ethics Needs More Love, and Less Principles"
Within medical ethics' dominant doctrine of principlism, to act ethically toward a patient is to successfully coordinate the demands of autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. Yet this legal-moral framework skews the central relationship of medical care, a relationship where the well-being of clinician and patient should be joined in the mutual project of flourishing. In place of principlism, I will draw both from personal experience as a pediatric palliative care physician, and the philosophical work of Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and Augustine of Hippo, to describe a practical ethical approach grounded in a conception of neighbor love - specifically, the virtue of love understood as attention to a sufferer's humanity. Here, the sufferer's needs enter the sphere of the caregiver's self-concern and happiness and join them in a unique form of reciprocity and friendship. By reimagining the patient-clinician relationship as a loving relationship - with all of the complexities, conceptual baggage, and partiality that the concept "love" may entail - the stage is set for a medical ethic that contains within itself the resources to resist the fear, dehumanization, and mistrust that proliferate in many healthcare settings today.