Living ethics: a stance and its implications in health ethics.

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a "living ethics", described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process.

Experiential Fallibilism and Decision-Making Process: A Perspective from a Patient with Chronic Kidney Disease.

Patient choice in healthcare follows a process in which references to evidence and experience are intertwined. From the perspective of a patient with chronic kidney disease, I propose experiential fallibilism as the use of uncertain evidence and experience, along with knowledge gained in new contexts, situations, and experiences, to attain truth and promote shared decision-making. Thus, because of their uncertain nature, both the patient's experience and the doctor's focus on evidence should be integrated into a decision-making process through a co-learning perspective so that they can mutually enrich each other and prevent inappropriate actions and decisions in other clinical contexts. The risks perceived by both the patient and the doctor should be valued equally to encourage an honest discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed treatments after considering the patient's social, economic, and medical situation. Further, experience measurement tools, both quantitative and qualitative, should be used or developed to test their transferability and effectiveness in contexts involving healthcare decisions between doctors and patients.

Towards a transactional medicine approach to combating global emerging pathogens: the case of COVID-19.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and China reported the first case to the World Health Organization in December 2019, there was no evidence-based treatment to combat it. With the catastrophic situation that followed, materialised by a considerable number of deaths, researchers, doctors, traditional healers, and governments of all nations committed themselves to find therapeutic solutions, including preventive and curative. There are effective treatments offered both by modern medicine and traditional medicine for COVID-19 today. However, other therapeutic proposals have not been approved due to the lack of effectiveness and scientific rigour during their development process. Proponents of modern medicine prefer biomedical therapies while in some countries, traditional treatments are used regularly because of their availability, affordability and satisfaction they bring to the population. In this paper, we propose a transactional medicine approach where the interaction between traditional and modern medicine produces a change. With this approach, the promoters of traditional medicine and those of modern medicine will be able to acquire knowledge through the experience produced by their encounters. Transactional medicine aims to be a model for decolonising medicine and recognising the value of both traditional and modern medicine in the fight against COVID-19 and other global emerging pathogens.

The Impact of Socially Assistive Robots on Human Flourishing in the Context of Dementia: A Scoping Review.

Socially assistive robots are being developed and tested to support social interactions and assist with healthcare needs, including in the context of dementia. These technologies bring their share of situations where moral values and principles can be profoundly questioned. Several aspects of these robots affect human relationships and social behavior, i.e., fundamental aspects of human existence and human flourishing. However, the impact of socially assistive robots on human flourishing is not yet well understood in the current state of the literature. We undertook a scoping review to study the literature on human flourishing as it relates to health uses of socially assistive robots. Searches were conducted between March and July 2021 on the following databases: Ovid MEDLINE, PubMed and PsycINFO. Twenty-eight articles were found and analyzed. Results show that no formal evaluation of the impact of socially assistive robots on human flourishing in the context of dementia in any of the articles retained for the literature review although several articles touched on at least one dimension of human flourishing and other related concepts. We submit that participatory methods to evaluate the impact of socially assistive robots on human flourishing could open research to other values at stake, particularly those prioritized by people with dementia which we have less evidence about. Such participatory approaches to human flourishing are congruent with empowerment theory.

How to evaluate the quality of an ethical deliberation? A pragmatist proposal for evaluation criteria and collaborative research.

Ethics designates a structured process by which important human values and meanings of life are understood and tackled. Therein, the ability to discuss openly and reflect on (aka deliberation) understandings of moral problems, on solutions to these problems, and to explore what a meaningful resolution could amount to is highly valued. However, the indicators of what constitutes a high-quality ethical deliberation remain vague and unclear. This article proposes and develops a pragmatist approach to evaluate the quality of deliberation. Deliberation features three important moments: (1) broadening and deepening the understanding of the situation, (2) envisioning action scenarios, (3) coming to a judgment based on the comparative evaluation of scenarios. In this paper, we propose seven criteria to evaluate ethical deliberations: (1) collaborative diversity, (2) experiential literacy, (3) organization of experiences, (4) reflective capacity to instrumentalize the experiences of others, (5) interactional creativity, (6) openness of agents, (7) quality of the reformulation of scenarios. These criteria are explained and applied to the three moments of deliberation. Based on these criteria, three kinds of outcomes for deliberations are identified and discussed: good ethical deliberations, partial ethical deliberations, bad ethical deliberations. Our proposal will guide researchers and practitioners interested in the evaluation of the quality of ethical deliberations. It provides a reference tool that allows them to identify the possible limitations of a deliberation and to implement actions aimed at correcting these limitations in order to achieve the desired qualitative objectives.

Reasons for dialysis patients choosing or refusing kidney transplantation as renal replacement therapy: A qualitative study.

This paper aims to identify the reasons for choosing or refusing kidney transplantation as renal replacement therapy among patients with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Data were collected through interviews with CKD patients treated by dialysis. Health professionals were also interviewed. A thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Results show that various reasons account for CKD patients' refusal to have a kidney transplant: the perception of kidney transplantation as a renal replacement therapy without positive outcome, refusal to have an allograft. There are also situations such as the lack of organ, the age factor, the contraindications to kidney transplantation that not allow some CKD patients to have a kidney transplant. Among the patients who choose kidney transplantation, some insist on the high level of health literacy, others see kidney transplantation as a cure or a normal process. Ultimately, this paper shows that the choice of kidney transplantation depends on patients' perceptions of its outcomes. Some circumstances, such as the lack of an available organ or specific medical criteria, reduce CKD patients' participation in the decision-making process.