# Deference or critical engagement: how should healthcare practitioners use clinical ethics guidance?

## TL;DR

The paper explores whether healthcare professionals should follow ethical guidelines or critically engage with them in decision-making.

## Contribution

It introduces 'critical engagement' as a better approach to ethics guidance than blind deference.

## Key findings

- Deference to ethics guidance raises issues with moral value, understanding, and error.
- Critical engagement with ethics guidance is proposed as a more effective approach.
- Ethics guidance is framed as a form of moral testimony from colleagues.

## Abstract

Healthcare practitioners have access to a range of ethical guidance. However, the normative role of this guidance in ethical decision-making is underexplored. This paper considers two ways that healthcare practitioners could approach ethics guidance. We first outline the idea of deference to ethics guidance, showing how an attitude of deference raises three key problems: moral value; moral understanding; and moral error. Drawing on philosophical literature, we then advocate an alternative framing of ethics guidance as a form of moral testimony by colleagues and suggest that a more promising attitude to ethics guidance is to approach it in the spirit of ‘critical engagement’ rather than deference.