Ethical Reflection on the Distribution of Medical Resources in Public Health Emergency / 中国医学伦理学

ABSTRACT

How medical resources can be fairly distributed in a public health emergency such as COVID-19. There have been mature or comparatively mature studies on this issue in both traditional ethics and contemporary ethics the traditional ethics has the "maximum happiness principle" represented by utilitarianism, while the contemporary ethics has the new principle doctrine and the medical justice theory, which respectively put forward the methods suitable for the distribution of emergency medical resources, and defended their respective theories from different perspectives. However, when COVID-19 broke out, the actual medical resource distribution methods were still the traditional medical resource distribution methods, but did not use the contemporary mainstream ethical medical distribution approach, which was due to the limitations of the emerging medical ethics distribution theory. Therefore, in order to better provide ethical services to the medical and health field, the contemporary emerging theory of distribution of health care needs to introduce global bioethics, with its tolerance and respect, give full play to its advantages, and improve its shortcomings, so as to solve the problem of medical resources distribution.