Existential Health Care Ethics

This issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics is dedicated to addressing ethical questions at the intersection of human extinction and health care.These questions include some of the following: Should clinicians be considered to hold special obligations to ensure humanity's survival?Would such obligations conflict with traditional codes of health professional ethics?And, if so, what might this mean for clinical care, public health, or health law?How one responds to such inquiries has pragmatic implications for any agent aiming to promote health.While this special issue draws inspiration primarily from existential ethics, an emerging discipline in contemporary moral philosophy concerned with human extinction, 1 it is rooted in 20th-century health activism on nuclear war and the environment.Despite these cross-disciplinary influences, existential ethics remains largely separate from health care ethics and unknown to most clinicians.To understand why, we must look back on a long, winding history of ideas, one in which science, health care, philosophy, and religion intersect in what Albert Schweitzer referred to as a "struggle for a satisfactory world-view" that "unrolls itself like a tragic drama." 2

Epistemology · Existentialism · Sociology · Ethics in medical practice · Medicine · Nursing · Philosophy · Psychology