"Facilitated consensus," "ethics facilitation," and unsettled cases

J Clin Ethics. 2011 Winter;22(4):345-53; author reply 358-62.

Abstract

In "Consensus, Clinical Decision Making, and Unsettled Cases:' David M. Adams and William J.Winslade' make multiple references to both editions of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation in their discussion of two assumptions that are supposed to be at the heart of the facilitated consensus model's inability to handle unsettled cases; that is, that: 1. Consultants "should maintain a kind of moral impartiality or neutrality throughout the process," "explicitly condemn[ing] anything resembling a substantive 'ethics' recommendation, and 2. "What counts as the proper set of allowable options among which the parties are to deliberate will itself always be clearly discernible' Herein, I argue that neither of these assumptions is required by ASBH's ethics facilitation approach. I then conclude by suggesting that, despite their fundamentally mistaken interpretation of the ASBH approach-perhaps even because of it-Adams and Winslade have made two important contributions to the ethics consultation literature.

Publication types

  • Comment

MeSH terms

  • Chromosomes, Human, Pair 18
  • Consensus*
  • Decision Making / ethics*
  • Ethics Consultation*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Moral Obligations*
  • Organizational Policy*
  • Palliative Care / ethics*
  • Trisomy*

Supplementary concepts

  • Chromosome 18, trisomy 18p
  • Chromosome 18, trisomy 18q