This article explores the intersectionality between clinical medical ethics and catalytic approaches for diplomatic relations. Currently, global geopolitical stability is extraordinarily fractured, with active military engagement on multiple continents, pervasive outbreaks of violence, and contentious interactions in foreign affairs.
Contemporaneously, challenges to mitigate mortality and morbidity rates exist in every sovereign nation. Such challenges are exacerbated when attention and resources are diverted to militaristic or law enforcement action.
Sovereign states struggling with inadequate fiscal capital and infrastructure, dependency on international donors, or nascent governmental regimes confront especially daunting tasks to develop multinational pluralistic thinking. Yet the need for efficacious statesmanship in this environment is more critical than ever. New methodologies must be developed to foster diplomacy and to promote parity of voice amongst the most socioeconomically and geopolitically challenged nations so that their positions within world affairs do not become even more marginalized.
The Utility of Clinical Ethics as a Catalytic Model
Clinicians around the world strive to practice medicine ethically, a quest that transcends disparate therapeutic interventions, divergent political views, and the intersectionality of identity. Scientific advances increasingly present complex ethical dilemmas, which would benefit considerably from collaborative exchanges about principled approaches to optimal patient care. International consortia can inspire perceptions that, despite different backgrounds and beliefs, there is a ubiquitous commitment to render ethical healthcare.
Amid the cacophony of the challenges to healthcare lie opportunities for collaboration to share, to presume good intentions, and thus to dispel disdain simply because of dissension. This requires reflection about the underpinnings of respective views and the commitment to listen to others’ positions, which inexorably leads to refinement of views and improved understanding of the views of others. Understanding diverse ethical paradigms of other approaches, thereby, becomes a catalytic model for improved relations in other contexts, such as diplomatic dialogues, by understanding approaches divergent from one’s own, enabling possible refinement of one’s views, and fostering humility about rigidity to convention.
A key, albeit perhaps ostensible, underlying presumption for this approach is that there is a universal desire to render healthcare ethically, notwithstanding variable views about what constitutes that. Patient care can be optimized by gaining insights into different approaches to clinical ethics, which foster reflection about the foundational basis for one’s own approaches.
This is a radically new approach, one that helps to give voice to developing countries that lack comparative prominence in the international arena, which is especially needed during these divisive times in which we live. The objective is not to achieve capitulation through compromise or to create a harmonized or standardized code of conduct. Rather, the approach aspires to develop methodologies that presume that the ultimate virtue in this context is not uniformity but understanding.
Bases for Anticipated Efficacy of Catalytic Model
The construct enables radical empathy and exchanges of ideas about clinical ethics to improve not only ethical healthcare but also to create a model that recognizes that ethical intention can be leveraged as a strategic inflection point for transformative, improved international relations generally.
Understanding different ethical paradigms also presents an important opportunity to build a vibrant and interconnected society. Respectful dialogue predicated on presumptively principled, albeit disparate, approaches portend improved diplomatic relations. The novel approach engenders empowerment of and respect for those who have been marginalized, exposes societal resilience that crosses generations, bridges ideological divides, leverages and values caregiving roles, and emphasizes humanity’s interconnectedness. This presages a strategic inflection point for transformative international relations predicated on the universal pursuit of health, subverts biases based on differences in education, economic status, or credentials, and evinces the ubiquity of efforts to do the right thing, even in the face of entrenched presumptions that approaches that differ from one’s own are to be reflexively deemed misguided.
The approach has significant potential for transformative impact because explanations about one’s ethical paradigms induce deliberation about the underpinnings of the approaches, which dispels righteousness by rote; this in turn stimulates consideration of different perspectives. Furthermore, and most significantly, the initiative inexorably leads to overt acknowledgement that all participants strive to ethically optimize patient care, exposing their innate goodness and fostering presumptions of laudable intentions. Because the approach contemplates a forum for developing countries to express their respective ethical models for patient care, industrialized countries gain an important opportunity to integrate or adopt other exemplars. The enterprise heralds enhanced interaction with those in less developed nations who otherwise would have scant capacity even to share their approaches. Laudable motives in the clinical care arena can then be catalyzed in other contexts to enable equitable multi-state collaboration.
Ultimately, the demonstrable perception of ubiquitous ethical adherence in the clinical healthcare context serves as a model for presumptions about good intentions in international relations in a wider context about power imbalances amongst developed and developing countries, resource allocation determinations, and dependence on discretionary funding by developed nations that implicates dependence and susceptibility to political and economic shifts.
This presages opportunities to infuse trust even in the face of discomfort from inevitable tensions amongst inconsistent views. Discourse about different perspectives in the context of goal-concordant care of patients mirrors discourse in the broader context of how to achieve robust, respectful, agile, and collaborative relations that transcend glocalization or harmonized consensus. Ultimately, analysis of barriers to ethical ways to ensure that health flourishes can emulate ethical ways to ensure peace and amity more generally. Eventually, empathy and compassion will redound beyond disparate ethical paradigms in healthcare contexts. The international, multi-specialization of the cohort affords exemplars for ongoing learning about how to engage with diverse value systems.
This proposal expressly seeks not to achieve consensus about principles in the context of healthcare, but instead to engender respect for and understanding about dissimilar approaches as a means of empowering marginalized voices and promoting understanding about disparate ethical constructs. This can stimulate understanding about intersectional identities, instill empathy for the universal commitment to provide ethical patient care, and achieve improved international relations through the process itself.
Application to International Diplomacy
Developing nations will benefit from being heard and from influencing more prominent world powers to refine, or at least to reflect on, their own approaches. This fosters cultural intelligence, as opposed to grudging tolerance of others’ principles. Even greater impact devolves from the collaborative exchange of ideas. After all, an investment in endeavoring to understand others is an investment in ourselves.
The work can resonate with others as they recognize the commonality in purposeful patient care. The objective is not to “bestow” values on others, but rather to inspire listening by remaining open to changing or refining one’s own views and to engaging in radical empathy and reflexive presumptions about the commitment by others to likewise act with integrity. Solidarity may be achieved through discourse to advance understanding of different perspectives and paradigms, based on presumptions that beliefs are grounded in good intentions.
Ultimately, the approach is predicated on collaboration and comity, rather than on capitulation. This becomes a strategy for promoting global geopolitical stability and parity of access to a voice in the international arena, especially for states that lack sufficient funding or infrastructure, that depend on international donors, or that are undergoing regime transition or reform. Shared exchanges about clinical ethics serve as an exemplar for shared exchanges about multinational pluralistic thinking.
Conclusions
At its core, the work orients us within our broad international community, enabling us to retain a sense of individual proprioception within the world. Disparate ethical paradigms are not merely respected based on comity but rather as an incremental, synergistic collaboration that recognizes, with pragmatism and with humility, that resources are scarce, that the state of knowledge is never absolute, and that ethical constructs are cultivated through trust and integrity.
The point is not to task healthcare specialists with diplomatic objectives as regional representatives responsible for international conflict resolution. The point is to leverage reflections about disparate academic and clinical approaches in the medical context to diplomatic contexts. The ethical discussion in the healthcare context is a paradigm, not a product for improved international relations.
The world has become increasingly fragile, as war rages on multiple continents, political divisiveness fragments societies, and poverty and disease pervade every region. Before we can begin to devise solutions to address issues, we must ensure comparable forums for different voices to be heard and for the foundations and etiologies of ethical frameworks to be better understood. To address the most profound challenges, we must devise ethical solutions that create sustainable incentives and opportunities for collaborative alliances as a catalytic model for improved diplomatic relations.
