Category: Philosophy

Kelsey Berry

Is a physician always justified in acting as his or her patient’s agent?

This question is familiar to clinical and population-level bioethicists alike, though I hesitate to say that it is age-old. There are a variety of ways to approach a response to this question, as evidenced by extensive treatment of this topic in the philosophical and bioethics literature (which I will not survey here). One popular approach involves raising candidate circumstances that may justify deviations from the principal-agent relationship that obtains between physicians and patients* – for instance, ethicists might consider whether a physician is justified in deviating from acting as his or her patient’s agent under circumstances in which (a) the action that is in the best interest of the patient conflicts with the action that in the best interest of the population health, (b) the action that is in the best interests of the patient requires inefficient use of community resources on some criteria, or (c) what the patient perceives to be in his or her best interests conflicts with what the physician recommends, etc. This list is woefully inexhaustive, but it highlights a theme in this thread of argumentation. In each scenario, we’re invited to accept the initial assumption that the physician is justified, if not all of the time, at least most of the time, in acting as his or her patient’s agent. Then we are led to consider whether the candidate circumstances raised qualify as an exception to this rule.

The often-unarticulated premise, that the physician is typically justified in acting as his or her patient’s agent, is not without philosophical support from several prominent theories. We also have pragmatic reasons to begin with this premise, for there are few specific actors (to whom we can easily point) that compete with the patient for a principal-agent relationship of the type that obtains between a physician and his or her patient. Of course, other patients under care are obvious contenders, as are other potential patients. Though adjudicating between a physician’s obligations to both existing and potential patients raises interesting issues, the conflicts these principal-agent relationships give rise to still trade on the basic assumption that the physician has reason to maintain the basic fiduciary relationship in most circumstances. Read More