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Concept
Beneficence (ethics)
Summary
Beneficence is a concept in research ethics that states that researchers should have the welfare of the research participant as a goal of any clinical trial or other research study. The antonym of this term, maleficence, describes a practice that opposes the welfare of any research participant. According to the Belmont Report, researchers are required to follow two moral requirements in line with the principle of beneficence: do not harm and maximize possible benefits for research while minimizing any potential harm on others.
The concept 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.
These four concepts often arise in discussions about beneficence:
one should not practice evil or do harm, often stated in Latin as Primum non nocere
one should prevent evil or harm
one should remove evil or harm
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.
Official source
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