From Twilight to Breaking Dawn? Best Interests in Medical Ethics & Law
5:00pm - 7:30pm /
Monday 13th June 2016
/ Venue: The Gallery Foresight Centre (Block J)
Type: Seminar /
Category: Research
- Marketing, Recruitment and Events Team
- Admission: Free
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Public Lecture for the Health Law and Regulation Unit
Richard Huxtable, Professor of Medical Ethics and Law
The “best interests” test is a legal standard that is used in many countries and contexts. The term (and purported synonyms, like “welfare”) is also familiar in bioethical analyses. As both a legal and bioethical tool, the standard offers an insight into the cross-pollination of law and bioethics, yet the extent to which the respective understandings coincide is under-explored. The Wellcome Trust-funded project “Best Interests in Medical Ethics and Law (BABEL)” seeks to plug this gap, by exploring how patients’ best interests are, and should be, interpreted in various situations. In this paper, I focus on how the term is applied in the context of treating – or not treating – incapacitated patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS). I specifically explore recent English legal judgments pertaining to such patients and seek to ascertain whether, or to what extent, bioethical understandings of best interests are echoed (explicitly or implicitly) in legal judgments. By analysing the values that are brought into play in legal judgments about the best interests of patients in the MCS, we can explore judges’ engagement with bioethics. Doing so should deepen our understanding of best interests in particular cases, and inform a broader narrative about the best interests standard across a range of bioethically-charged cases.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-twilight-to-breaking-dawn-best-interests-in-medical-ethics-law-tickets-21666700685
Richard Huxtable, Professor of Medical Ethics and Law
The “best interests” test is a legal standard that is used in many countries and contexts. The term (and purported synonyms, like “welfare”) is also familiar in bioethical analyses. As both a legal and bioethical tool, the standard offers an insight into the cross-pollination of law and bioethics, yet the extent to which the respective understandings coincide is under-explored. The Wellcome Trust-funded project “Best Interests in Medical Ethics and Law (BABEL)” seeks to plug this gap, by exploring how patients’ best interests are, and should be, interpreted in various situations. In this paper, I focus on how the term is applied in the context of treating – or not treating – incapacitated patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS). I specifically explore recent English legal judgments pertaining to such patients and seek to ascertain whether, or to what extent, bioethical understandings of best interests are echoed (explicitly or implicitly) in legal judgments. By analysing the values that are brought into play in legal judgments about the best interests of patients in the MCS, we can explore judges’ engagement with bioethics. Doing so should deepen our understanding of best interests in particular cases, and inform a broader narrative about the best interests standard across a range of bioethically-charged cases.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-twilight-to-breaking-dawn-best-interests-in-medical-ethics-law-tickets-21666700685