By Jonathan M. Marron, Louise P. King, and Paul C. McLean
In medical ethics, we often speak of duties, such as the duty one has to patients, to society, to our families, to ourselves. In fact, deontology is a moral theory often cited in medical ethics based primarily on the consideration and application of such duties.
But we typically speak of duties under “normal” circumstances, and normal certainly does not describe the current COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear whether and how our typical conceptualization of duties – the duty of clinicians, of health care institutions, and of the public – apply under these unprecedented conditions. These questions are being considered in our hospitals, living rooms, the lay press, and on social media.
What follows is an edited version of a Twitter dialogue between surgeon Louise P. King and pediatric oncologist Jonathan Marron, both faculty members at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. Drs. King and Marron were responding to a tweet by Paul McLean, social media editor at the Center for Bioethics, on his personal account.