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Commentary
On the elusiveness of higher-order risk attitudes
  1. Jasper Debrabander
  1. Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
  1. Correspondence to Jasper Debrabander, Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; jasper.debrabander{at}ugent.be

https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2023-109331

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    Makins1 formulates a deference principle which states that patients’ attitudes towards the health outcomes associated with different treatment options should drive decision-making and not physicians’ attitudes towards these health outcomes.

    Although this deference principle is widely agreed on, it is less obvious which role patients’ risk attitudes should play. Makins takes patients’ attitudes towards health outcomes to be sufficiently analogous to patients’ risk attitudes in order to extend his deference principle. His extended deference principle states that patients’ attitudes towards the health outcomes and risks associated with different treatment options should drive decision-making and not physicians’ attitudes towards these health outcomes and risks. This extension is not only taken to be ethically preferable, but also practically realisable as one can reliably trace patients’ (risk) attitudes.

    Problematic situations arise when patients exhibit risk attitudes they do not reflexively endorse. For instance, patients might systematically make more risky choices than they think they should make. In response to these kinds of situations, Makins proposes to revise his deference …

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    Footnotes

    • Funding This research was made possible by grant BOFSTG2020002501 of Ghent University’s Special Research Fund.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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