Counterfactual reasoning in surrogate decision making – another look
Bioethics 25 (5):244-249 (2011)
Abstract
Incompetent patients need to have someone else make decisions on their behalf. According to the Substituted Judgment Standard the surrogate decision maker ought to make the decision that the patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Objections have been raised against this traditional construal of the standard on the grounds that it involves flawed counterfactual reasoning, and amendments have been suggested within the framework of possible worlds semantics. The paper shows that while this approach may circumvent the alleged problem, the way it has so far been elaborated reflects insufficient understanding of the moral underpinnings of the idea of substituted judgment. Proper recognition of these moral underpinnings has potentially far-reaching implications for our normative assumptions about accuracy and objectivity in surrogate decision making.DOI
10.1111/j.1467-8519.2009.01768.x
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Citations of this work
Patient preference predictors and the problem of naked statistical evidence.Nathaniel Paul Sharadin - 2018 - Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (12):857-862.
Should the deceased be listed as authors?Gert Helgesson, William Bülow, Stefan Eriksson & Tove E. Godskesen - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (5):331-338.