Challenging the Idea of Corporate Responsibility : Physician's Obligation to Disclose Information

"Impairing loyalty: corporate responsibility for clinical misadventure" interestingly addresses a new ethical requirement for the doctor/patient relationship, by adding a third party involvement (biomedical companies) in the assessment of moral responsibility. However, the author does not provide, in our opinion, sufficiently strong arguments for new moral obligations toward the patient. Our aim is to present each of the following elements: first, we will provide a possible defence of the moral wrongness of Dr. Baker’s professional acts, deriving from a different Beauchamp & Childress’ principle (i.e. not grounding it on a violation of the principle of beneficence, as the author does, but on an infringement of the respect for autonomy); second, we will challenge the concept of agency/partnership providing an argument about the different moral weight of actions in Mrs Robbins’ case (i.e. addressing the ultimate responsibility to the professional virtue of fidelity). Finally, we’ll discuss some undesirable consequences (the obstruction of scientific knowledge application from the bench to the bedside) that could originate from the relationship between society and science defended by the author