Establishing and Defining an Approach to Climate Conscious Clinical Medical Ethics

Abstract

An anthropocentric scope for clinical medical ethics (CME) has largely separated this area of bioethics from environmental concerns. In this article, we first identify and reconcile the ethical issues imposed on CME by climate change including the dispersion of related causes and effects, the transdisciplinary and transhuman nature of climate change, and the historic divorce of CME from the environment. We then establish how several moral theories undergirding modern CME, such as virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and several theories of justice, promote both a flourishing of human medical practice and the environment. We conclude by defining an expanded the scope of CME as inclusive of not only patients, families, physicians, and other health professionals but other humans, non-humans, and their shared environment. We then apply this scope and theory to a widely used framework for applying CME, the Four Topics model, to construct a climate conscious approach to CME.

Keywords:

• Environmental bioethics
• feminist ethics
• health care delivery
• medicine
• virtues

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Greenwall Foundation under a Making-A-Difference Award; the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award number K08 CA273043.