Instead, the doctor or nurse must obey the same ethical principle in all cases. They must uphold their moral duty to save the lives of all of their patients, and dispense the highest quality care they can conceivably give under the circumstances.

However, while the Kantian ethics of duty might be useful when making individual moral decisions for healthcare practitioners, the idea of utilitarianism popularized by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham sometimes must prevail in the system as a whole, given that health care is dispensed in a world of finite, scarce resources (Mautner, 2004). Utilitarianism stresses the utility, or usefulness of every moral action for society, not simply the individual patient. For example, although it might be optimal for the individual to receive all the possible screening tests for every conceivable medical ailment, health care insurance companies will only pay for screenings deemed to be of a great...
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