Ethical Issues In Dr. Feinstein's Chapter Summary

There are many ethical problems and issues raised by this novel. First of all, the novel put to light Dr. Mathis’s fraud when he realized that he was being framed. How could one view this action? Is it ethically correct to do this? Dr. Mathis was quite certain in having no remorse for doing such a thing, for he believed it did not raise any direct ethical or moral issues. He even believed this did not cause a violation to the Hippocratic Oath. For him, the principle of non-maleficence applied because he could no longer hurt the patient, Mr. Swensen since he was already dead. By doing the fraud, he only corrected an injustice done to him since he was being framed. But, can this be considered enough? By following Kantian ethics and the principles of deontology,
He is committing an inexcusable error. Moreover, Although Mathis did not apparently hurt anyone by falsifying the autopsy reports, he committed a grave injustice for he consciously did not tell the truth. According to the scholarly article written by Dr. Feinstein, “the search for truth” is both “a professional and a moral objective” in science, and any act against truth is particularly “repugnant”. The only acceptable error is the non-deliberate one (Feinstein, 475). This is not the case with what Dr. Mathis did. He also did not follow the principal of non-maleficence because he hurt Mr. Swensen’s family, including his daughter Connie, by not showing the true cause of their loved ones. He also went against the principle of autonomy by not allowing Dr. Swensen’s family to have access to the truth, but also by desecrating the bodies of both Walter Maughn from whom he retrieved the cancerous prostate he used to cover the misdiagnosis of Mr. Swensen, but he also retrieved serum from the eyes of Howard’s dead body to prove his theory that he died from an insulin shock. He did both actions without consulting the deceased’s