Risk and Luck in Medical Ethics

Ethics is commonly assumed to be the one realm in which luck and risk do not<br /> intrude. It has been said that ‘While one can be lucky in one’s business, in<br /> one’s married life, and in one’s health, one cannot, so it is commonly<br /> assumed, be subject to luck as far as one’s moral worth is concerned.’ But<br /> although we do not normally hold people responsible for outcomes beyond<br /> their control, a serious examination of the role of luck and risk may lead<br /> us to conclude that very few outcomes are really within people’s control.<br /> This is the paradox of ‘moral luck’. <br /> <p><i>Risk and Luck in Medical Ethics</i> examines the ‘moral luck’ paradox in greater<br /> detail, relating it to Kantian, consequentialist, and virtue-based<br /> approaches to ethics. Dickenson applies the paradoxes of risk and<br /> luck to medical ethics, including timely discussion of risk and luck in the<br /> allocation of scarce health care resources, informed consent to treatment,<br /> decisions about withholding life-sustaining treatment, psychiatry,<br /> reproductive ethics, genetic testing, and medical research and<br /> evidence-based medicine.<br /> </p> <p>The book concludes with an examination of the relevance of risk and luck in<br /> a medical context to the study of global ethics. If risk and luck are taken<br /> seriously, it would seem to follow that we cannot develop any definite moral<br /> standards at all, that we are doomed to moral relativism. However, Dickenson<br /> offers strong counter-arguments to this view that enable us to think in<br /> terms of universal standards for judging ethical systems. This claim has<br /> direct practical relevance for practitioners as well as philosophers.</p>