![]() ![]() Professional codes of ethics are always mixtures of creed and commandments (beliefs and rules). The Code has “performative force” because of its influence on nursing licensure, institutional accreditation, and curricula and its use in court cases as the document representing accepted professional values and standards. 5 (Hereafter it is referred to as the Code of Ethics for Nurses, or simply the Code.) The Code serves as a public declaration of the standards and values by which all professional nurses are expected to practice. 4 After several revisions, the code is now known as the Code of Ethics for Nurses With Interpretive Statements. 3 This document codifies nursing’s traditional involvement with the obligations that health care workers owe to those under their care. In 1950 the American Nurses’ Association (ANA) adopted a code of ethics to guide professional nursing practice. The next section discusses this document for nurses. Compliance with the law is not enough to guarantee morally correct decisions, so many nurses look for guidance to the ethical code proposed by their professional association. To approach such situations properly, nurses need more knowledge. So, legal risks are relevant data to consider when making moral decisions, but more analysis of a case is needed before moral decisions can be reached. ![]() For example, should nurses consider the legal risks they would be taking if they do not act consistently with their legal obligation to follow a physician’s orders to code a patient? This is certainly not the only information they should consider, but it is information that is clearly relevant to whether they should code their patients. 2 Such obligations are often taken to be limited by the risks of legal liability or financial loss that an agent might incur as a result of a particular choice. Some ethicists also claim that knowledge of one’s legal obligations, although not decisive for answering ethical questions, is necessary for discerning one’s ethical obligation. This is true because legal reasoning reflects our society’s perceptions on a subject and because the law has its roots in public acceptance and its adherence to fair and reasonable procedures for decisions on issues. Difficult ethical decisions can often be clarified by referring to the reasoning used by courts and legal scholars on the issue in question or related issues. On the other hand, law is not irrelevant to ethics. Ethics, then, is broader and more inclusive than law, and the nurse is not always able to gain direction for current ethical difficulties by consulting the law. Currently, the legal status of living wills (one kind of advance directive) is another issue that remains unresolved in some states, but ethical questions about the care of people who express their wishes in living wills must be addressed now in practice. For example, it took years for legislatures to enact statutes accepting brain death criteria as part of the legal definition of biologic death, yet nurses were faced with ethical decisions about the care of such patients long before these laws were enacted. The law often lags behind current ethical questions. Therefore, the assumption that if nurses do their legal duty and follow physician’s orders they will also be performing their ethical duty is not necessarily correct.Īnother difference between law and ethics is evident in the fact that existing laws do not always give direction for particular ethical problems. In fact, laws themselves are properly the subjects of ethical appraisal and evaluation. Laws themselves are not necessarily ethically sound. ![]() Similarly, abortion is now a legal alternative for pregnant women, but many persons question the morality of abortion. 1 For example, slavery was once legal in parts of the United States, but even at that time many persons questioned its morality, and most of us would agree today that slavery is ethically unacceptable. Admittedly, ethical choices are often reduced by pressures of the moment to worries about legal risk, but compliance with the law does not guarantee ethical behavior, nor is it an excuse for ignoring the ethical aspects of a decision. The former deals with moral behavior and the latter deals with legal behavior. Several crucial distinctions must be made between ethical and legal decisions.įirst of all, ethics and law are not the same thing. Although this may sometimes be true, it is certainly not always true. In other words, these nurses hold that when a nurse knows that a physician’s orders call for a code to be initiated, this fact alone ends any deliberation about whether it is ethical to code the patient in question. Some nurses even claim that their legal obligation always coincides with or determines their ethical obligation. Some nurses believe that when their legal obligation is clear their ethical obligation is also clear. ![]()
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