Can be used to justify or critique entries in professional codes of ethics as well as general policies and practices in health care and organizations

Healthcare ethics

Knowingly stating falsehoods with the intent to deceive

Intentionally misleading someone, whether by lying, pretense or other means

Emphasizes human rights

Right conduct respects rights

Focuses on duties and principles

Right action follows moral rules

Duty to respect autonomy

Prioritizes actions that maximize overall good

Intrinsic good

Emphasizes character

Right action reflects good character

Based on religious beliefs and teachings

Focuses on practical consequences and context

Pluralism

Rights ethics

Duty ethics

Utilitarianism

Virtue ethics

Religious ethics

Pragmatism

Protects patient autonomy and informed consent

Ensures healthcare professionals fulfill their obligations to patients

Balances benefits and harms to provide the best overall outcome for most people

Promotes compassion, honesty, and other virtues in healthcare professionals

Guides healthcare decisions following religious principles

Considers specific situations and finds solutions that work in practice

Consists of the clash of rights and the question is which right has priority in the situation

Morally right when and because it respects human rights

Ascribing human rights to each person is one way to express the dignity and the authority of individuals to be counted as moral equals to other individuals

Universal, inalienable, and inherent to all human beings regardless of nationality, race, religion or other status

Cannot be taken away

All human rights are equally important, and none can be fully enjoyed without the others

Mature and competent adults have the ability, ad well as the morao authority, to assert these claims

Infants and incapacitated adults need to rely on others to assert their claims on their behalf

People can also authorize others to exercise rights on their behalf, as when they sign a durable power of attorney document, stipulating who has the right to make healtchcare decisions should they be rendered unable

Areas of freedom and benefits recognized in a particular legal system

John Locke formulated the first systematic rights ethic, listing the most basic rights as life, liberty and property

Rights not to be interfered with

Negative rights

Rights not to be killed, not to be kidnapped, and not to have one’s property stolen

Positive rights

Rights to receive essential goods when one is unable to earn those goods on one’s own and when the community has the resources to provide them

Arise from contracts, promises, legislation, school membership, and relationships with professionals

Refer to particular relationships and memberships

Object to taxing people to support government welfare programs such as medicate and unemployment compensation

Constitute a minority among rights ethicists, most of whom believe that human rights include both liberty and welfare rights

Building strong communities

Believe in welfare as well as liberty rights

Emphasize that rights must be understood within moral communities based on mutual respect and goodwill

Focuses on actions being “right or wrong” based on rules and principles, rather than the consequences

Locke believed that we should not lie under circumstances and that this was a rule that could not be broken regardless of the consequences

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only

Always show moral RESPECT toward yourself and others

Commiting suicide or neglecting one’s takents violates the duties of self respect

Tell the truth and keep your promises

Criticism of this model is that the rules prescribed can be too rigid and inflexible

Genuine duties that sometimes habe exceptiona when they conflict with other duties having greater importance in a given situation

Deriving from one’s own actions, either in making commitments

Causing harm to others

Deriving from other people’s acts of service toward oneself

Maintain fair distributions of benefits and burdens

Based on the sheer opportunity to help others

Linked to opportunities to develop one’s talents

Not injuring others

Produce the most good for the most people, equally the interests of each person affected by one’s actions

UTILITARIANISM

An act is right when it maximizes good effects, more than any other options available in a situation

Moral decision making requires one to identify all the feasibke options in each situation, to weigh likely good snd bad consequences for each option, and then to select the option that maximizes the good overall

People should follow a particular set of rules that, were they adopted in a society, would maximize overall good

Only intrinsic good

Only intrinsic bad

Sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self protection

Intrinsic good consists in satisfying human preferences, as manifested in how individuals spend their money

Organ allocation, triage during a disaster

Character ethics

Shifts the focus to these latter concerns, especially to the kinds of person one should aspire to be

The virtue governing the appetites, enabling one to locate the mean between harmful self-denial and overindulgence

Irtue of confronting danger by locating the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness

Virtue of giving, whose mean lies between stinginess and wastefulness

Resides in the mean between lacking candor and revealing everything, even when it violates confidentiality or causes great harm to others

Focuses greater attention on moral motivation and moral psychology

VIRTUE ETHICS

Moral motivation

Virtue of love paramount

Emphasizes compassion

Emphasizes righteousness and justice

Emphasizes piety and pursuit of excellence

Emphasizes harmony, peace of mind, health, well-being and beauty

Explores how responsible moral judgment can be exercised without resorting to a comprehensive theory

These means includes rights, responsibilities, and ideals of character even though they cannot be encapsulated in comprehensive and systematic theories

Refers to a cluster of approaches to ethics that are wary of abstract rules and elaborate systems of principles

Heavily emphasize the importance of context— of looking closely at the facts and values pertinent to particular situations

Emphasize paradigms— clear cut cases

Unclarity about how to apply moral concepts and principles

More than one plausible moral interpretation if a situation

Principles pointing in different directions

Differing viewpoints among involved persons