Theologian fears for traditional medical ethics

A Catholic theologian has spoken about fears that traditional medical ethics is being replaced by "the ethics of consumerism".

Speaking at the Irish Theological Association's annual conference at the weekend, Father David Smith, of the Milltown Institute, said the implications of trends in patient care indicated that "medicine will cease to be a profession and become a service industry".

With increasing emphasis on the right of a person to decide on his/her own medical treatments, the implication were that "the ethics of medicine will completely change", he said.

Some might even argue that the need for ethics of any kind would vanish "because the discipline of the market will replace the need for ethics".

But he thought it preferable to say that traditional medical ethics, "which have grown to protect the vulnerable patient against exploitation", would be replaced by the ethics of consumerism.

He felt it was significant to see how "this movement towards a consumer ethic" has become evident in recent court decisions in the EU, the US, and Australia. "Secular reappraisals of the rights of individuals to control their own lives, including the circumstances of their own deaths, have been followed by discussions which include voluntary euthanasia and suicide as part of an extensive list of rights to control oneself and to engage in con sensual acts with willing others," he said.

Advocates of the right to die terminology often refer to the principle of self determination, he noted.

"Thus the principle of respect for autonomy, which at the birth of bioethics, emerged out of specific concern to limit physician paternalism, becomes a general approach immunising patient choices from larger public scrutiny," he said.

Perhaps we need to consider medicine, "not as a mixed marriage between its own value neutral technique and some extrinsic moral principles but as an inherently ethical activity, in which technique and conduct are both ordered in relation to an overarching good, the naturally given end of health," he said.