Can Philosophy Influence Policy? A Hopeful Lesson

« CHN Board Member Gus Speth Visits University of SC and CHN SC Office

Can Philosophy Influence Policy? A Hopeful Lesson

April 5th, 2010

In 2003 Center Director of Bioethics Bruce Jennings was lead author on an influential policy analysis of access to hospice and palliative care. This report was entitled Access to Hospice Care: Expanding Boundaries, Overcoming Barriers. and is available for downloading at The Hastings Center website: http://www.thehastingscenter.org. Now a summary of this document has just be reprinted in a new book, Diane E. Meier, Stephen L. Isaacs, and Robert G. Hughes, eds., Palliative Care: Transforming the Care of Serious Illness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010, which is part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Series on Health Policy.

The editorial head note is interesting because it suggests something important about the ways in which research organizations such as the Center for Humans and Nature can have an influence on public policy. Commenting on Jennings’ work the editors say: “This influential report assess the barriers to good palliative care from the perspective of social justice, access, and fairness in public policy. It calls for expansion in access to hospice and palliative care based on patient’s and families’ need, not prognosis. Its thinking underlies the momentum of the recent growth in the palliative care continuum beyond the six-month prognosis constraints of the Medicare hospice benefit.”(Italics added).

In the policy areas of conservation, ecology, and environmental ethics, this is the kind of thing CHN is trying to do as well. The Center’s work can clarify and develop the underlying logic of new policy thinking and a new policy direction. And it can connect this policy logic with an ethical vision. That is to say, the work of The Center for Humans and Nature gives policy change a positive ethical impetus, a jolt of moral caffeine, a sense of how caring and health care can be changed not only to avoid doing wrong or harm, but also in order to do better, to promote the human good more effectively and richly. So, as Diane Meier et al says of The Hastings Center, so too CHN provides thinking that underlies momentum in policy reform: it can’t supply that momentum on its own (many, many larger forces and trends are required for that), but it can help to make that momentum more intelligent and clearer about its proper goals.

More posts about bioethics, bruce jennings, civic engagement, ethics, governance, philosophy, public policy, publication

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 3:16 pm and is filed under bioethics, bruce jennings, civic engagement, ethics, governance, philosophy, public policy, publication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Newsroom

Follow our work, see updates on our projects, and read news and insight from our staff and colleagues.

Minding Nature

May 2012

In this Issue

Honoring Landscape in Decision Making

by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic

Download the current issue

Sign up to Receive
Center News & Publications

Individual Topics

Expand List

Center for Humans and Nature

Expanding Our Natural and Civic Imagination