Overview

Walton offers a comprehensive, flexible model for physician-patient decision making, the first such tool designed to be applied at the level of each particular case. Based on Aristotelian practical reasoning, it develops a method of reasonable dialogue, a question- and-answer process of interaction leading to informed consent on the part of the patient, and to a decision--mutually arrived at--reflecting both high medical standards and the patient's felt needs. After setting forth his model, he applies it to three vital ethical issues: acts of omission, the cessation of treatment, and possible side effects of treatments. In the final chapter, Walton shows how his method functions in light of the real-life complexities of the clinical encounter and how it bears on ethical questions concerning health-care policy, attitudes toward treatment and toward the medical profession, reasonableness of expectations, and the setting of realistic goals of treatment.

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9780313248887

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DOUGLAS N. WALTON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Winnipeg and is currently a Killiam Research Fellow (1987-1989) of the Canada Council. His writings on various aspects of philosophy, pragmatics, linguistics, ethics, logic, and education have been published frequently and widely since 1971 and include numerous articles in scholarly journals as well as contributed chapters to books. He is the author of Informal Logic and Practical Reasoning and coauthored Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies. He also wrote Ethics of Withdrawal of Life Support Systems: Case Studies on Decision-Making in Intensive Care (Greenwood Press, 1983 and paperback by Praeger Publishers, 1987), Physician Patient Decision-Making (Greenwood Press, 1985) and Arguer's Position (Greenwood Press, 1985). In 1989-1990, Walton will be Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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