Moral Responsibility and the Justification of Policies to Preserve Antimicrobial Effectiveness

Alberto Giubilini; J. Savulescu

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-27874-8_9

Moral Responsibility and the Justification of Policies to Preserve Antimicrobial Effectiveness

Review

In: Ethics and Drug Resistance: Collective Responsibility for Global Public Health [Internet]. Cham (CH): Springer; 2020. Chapter 9.

Wellcome Trust–Funded Monographs and Book Chapters.

2020 Oct 27.

Authors

Alberto Giubilini^{1

2}, J. Savulescu^{2

3

4}

Book Editors

Euzebiusz Jamrozik¹, Michael Selgelid¹

Affiliations

¹ Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
² Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
³ Visiting Professorial Fellow in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia
⁴ Distinguished Visiting Professor on Law, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Book Affiliation

¹ Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Excerpt

Restrictive policies that limit antimicrobial consumption, including therapeutically justified use, might be necessary to tackle the problem of antimicrobial resistance. We argue that such policies would be ethically justified when forgoing antimicrobials constitutes a form of easy rescue for an individual. These are cases of mild and self-limiting infections in otherwise healthy patients whose overall health is not significantly compromised by the infection. In such cases, restrictive policies would be ethically justified because they would coerce individuals into fulfilling a moral obligation they independently have. However, to ensure that such justification is the strongest possible, states also have the responsibility to ensure that forgoing antimicrobials is as easy as possible for patients by implementing adequate compensation measures.

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