The Person Nobody Wants to Be Right
Esther Berkowitz sits in hospital ethics committee meetings where the stakes are irreversible and everyone in the room knows it.
What actually happens is different from what the job description promises.
The established story about clinical ethics goes like this: it's a reasoned practice, a mediation between competing values, a way to surface the principles underneath the noise. Autonomy, beneficence, justice, respect. Apply these fairly and the right decision emerges.
They arrive after the conflict has calcified. The family has already decided they want their mother's feeding tube removed. The attending physician has already formed an opinion about whether this is medically appropriate.
Berkowitz is fluent in the vocabulary of autonomy and dignity and benefit-harm analysis. She can take what a family wants and reframe it as what the patient would have wanted. And take what a hospital fears and reframe it as what respects the patient's dignity.
