Rights-Based Ethics In Health And Social Care

Rights-based ethics says that every individual should be given certain entitlements, liberties and protections. There are two major divisions that are natural and conventional as well as positive and negative. Natural rights relate to humanity and is considered moral rights. Conventional rights are related to specific social context and are created by humans. Positive rights (benefit rights) relate to duties of assistance as it is a person’s right to receive welfare. Negative rights (liberty rights) relate duties of non-interference of others as it is a right for a person not to be killed. It can be seen that benefit rights impose a cost on others such an obligation to do something whereas liberty rights do not impose a cost on others and choices must be respected. A rights-based approach says that certain acts are always wrong regardless of the benefits. It would be wrong to kill one person in order to save the lives of several more.

From this it can be observed that liberty rights results in one of the medical ethics values being autonomy.

People have the right to make a decision regarding whether or not they wish to go ahead with a particular treatment and they should not be coerced in any way. Benefit rights say a health care professional is obliged to do right by the patient and provide the necessary care they need and produce positive outcomes for the patient. Another value that arises from rights-based ethics is non-maleficence as it may be wrong or not good to quarantine a patient with Ebola because it is against their rights of freedom, however this is in order to avoid harming the greater good. Justice is also relevant in rights-based ethics

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Consequentialism bases everything on the fact that what is the best possible outcome or the good consequence of carrying out a particular action. An act such as allowing one to die and using their organs to save five other people may be seen as morally wrong from a rights-based perspective yet as long as it maximises the amount of good it is considered morally right from this ethical stance. Utilitarianism is a type of consequentialist that follows through with this key moral value. A utilitarian approach says that benefits that matter to one person also matter as much too all other persons and so everyone is counted equally. For example the allocation of patients to ICU beds based on how much they will benefit to maximise survival which brings to question of who receives what and how much they receive. This is where distributive justice comes in to play.
From this it can be observed that justice and beneficence arise from consequentialist approach because only the amount of goodness of the outcome matters and all peoples benefits matter equally.
Together it can be seen how a mix of rights-based ethics and consequentialism come together to form the 4 main values of medical ethics (Douglas 2015).