Beneficence (ethics)

The idea that medical professionals and researchers would always practice beneficence seems natural to most patients and research participants, but in fact, every health intervention or research intervention has potential to harm the recipient. There are many different precedents in medicine and research for conducting a cost–benefit analysis and judging whether a certain action would be a sufficient practice of beneficence, and the extent to which treatments are acceptable or unacceptable is under debate.

Despite differences in opinion, there are many concepts on which there is wide agreement. One is that there should be community consensus when determining best practices for dealing with ethical problems.

Elements

These four concepts often arise in discussions about beneficence:

1. one should not practice evil or do harm, often stated in Latin as Primum non nocere
2. one should prevent evil or harm
3. one should remove evil or harm
4. one should practice good

Ordinary moral discourse and most philosophical systems state that a prohibition on doing harm to others as in #1 is more compelling than any duty to benefit others as in #2–4. This makes the concept of "first do no harm" different from the other aspects of beneficence. One example illustrating this concept is the trolley problem.

Morality and ethical theory allows for judging relative costs, so in the case when a harm to be inflicted in violating #1 is negligible and the harm prevented or benefit gained in #2–4 is substantial, then it may be acceptable to cause one harm to gain another benefit. Academic literature discusses different variations of such scenarios. There is no objective evidence which dictates the best course of action when health professionals and researchers disagree about the best course of action for participants except that most people agree that the discussions about ethics should happen.