Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Bioethics and health informatics: an introduction
- 2 Medical informatics and human values
- 3 Responsibility for computer-based decisions in health care
- 4 Evaluating medical information systems: social contexts and ethical challenges
- 5 Health care information: access, confidentiality, and good practice
- 6 Ethical challenges in the use of decision-support software in clinical practice
- 7 Outcomes, futility, and health policy research
- 8 Meta-analysis: conceptual, ethical, and policy issues
- Index
2 - Medical informatics and human values
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Bioethics and health informatics: an introduction
- 2 Medical informatics and human values
- 3 Responsibility for computer-based decisions in health care
- 4 Evaluating medical information systems: social contexts and ethical challenges
- 5 Health care information: access, confidentiality, and good practice
- 6 Ethical challenges in the use of decision-support software in clinical practice
- 7 Outcomes, futility, and health policy research
- 8 Meta-analysis: conceptual, ethical, and policy issues
- Index
Summary
Telling right from wrong often requires appeal to a set of values. Some values are general or global, and they range across the spectrum of human endeavor. Identifying and ranking such values, and being clear about their conflicts and exceptions, is an important philosophical undertaking. Other values are particular or local. They may be special cases of the general values. So when “freedom from pain” is offered in the essay by Professors Bynum and Fodor as a medical value, it is conceptually linked to freedom, a general value. Local values apply within and often among different human actions: law, medicine, engineering, journalism, computing, education, business, and so forth. To be consistent, a commitment to a value in any of these domains should not contradict global values. To be sure, tension between and among local and global values is the stuff of exciting debate in applied ethics. And sometimes a particular local value will point to consequences that are at odds with a general value. Debates over these tensions likewise inform the burgeoning literature in applied or professional ethics. In this chapter, Bynum and Fodor apply the seminal work of James H. Moor in an analysis of the values that apply in the health professions. What emerges is a straightforward perspective on the way to think about advancing health computing while paying homage to those values.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics, Computing, and MedicineInformatics and the Transformation of Health Care, pp. 32 - 42Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997