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Biomedical subjects

W Ruddick

Publications and source records attributed to W Ruddick.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Why not a general right to health care?

Common objections to a right to health care reflect questionable assumptions about the nature of rights, power, illness, inequality, and money. A right to health care can be based on other more general rights to life, liberty, and health, as well as on considerations of equality and the medical profession's professed moral commitments. However based, it need not "enslave" or coerce physicians and nurses, nor force us to sacrifice other social goods. But consensus is unlikely except on specific rights to certain kinds of health care.

Health Services Accessibility↗
PubMed1987

A short answer to "who decides"?

Technology increases the control which experts and the medical professions exercise over conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. However, it is women and women alone who should make the ultimate decisions regarding their own childbearing.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1985

Objections to hospital philosophers.

Like morally sensitive hospital staff, philosophers resist routine simplification of morally complex cases. Like hospital clergy, they favour reflective and principled decision-making. Like hospital lawyers, they refine and extend the language we use to formulate and defend our complex decisions. But hospital philosophers are not redundant: they have a wider range of principles and categories and a sharper eye for self-serving presuppositions and implicit contradictions within our practices. As semi-outsiders, they are often best able to take an 'external point of view,' unburdened by routine, details, and departmental loyalties. Their clarifications can temporarily disrupt routine, but can eventually improve staff morale, hence team practice and patient welfare.

Codes of Ethics↗