Defense Date

4-10-2025

Graduation Date

Spring 5-8-2025

Availability

One-year Embargo

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

Health Care Ethics

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Gerard Magill

Committee Member

Joris Gielen

Committee Member

Peter Ikechukwu

Committee Member

Kristine Blair

Keywords

Moral Community, Catholic Healthcare, Virtue Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, Theological Stewardship

Abstract

Catholic healthcare is one of the largest nonprofit organizations and providers in the United States, offering medical care to many diverse communities. The fundamental mission of Catholic healthcare is to bring about Christ’s healing ministry and live out the fundamental principle of caring for the vulnerable in pursuit of the common good. However, there have been many missteps, not only due to a more polarized and secular community but also to scandals and conflict due to previous hierarchical and rules-based anthropology that often misses the person's lived experience. Therefore, this dissertation will argue that for Catholic healthcare to survive the ever-growing religious pluralism, economic challenges, and moral polarization, it must adopt the relational and holistic anthropology instituted by Pope Francis that focuses on reviving virtue ethics and Catholic social teaching.

Furthermore, the most common ethical framework used in healthcare is principlism, or the balancing of absolute, normative principles. However, principlism does not hold up against the messiness of human life, where principles often come into conflict with each other. Furthermore, outside the Hippocratic oath, there is no professional code to guide the development of a physician’s character or decision-making to withstand moral dilemmas that require discernment, courage, veracity, or relationality. Therefore, this dissertation will propose a hybrid of principles alongside the revival of virtue ethics, initially argued by Edmund Pellegrino, within medicine and the need for the habitual development of one’s character to live out Christ’s healing ministry within the moral community of medicine to pursue the common good within our shared home. These two proposals will be the foundation of this dissertation with the following topical chapters on professional integrity, end-of-life communication, organ donation, the tension of mission vs. margin, and the implementation of AI to merge the theory component to the applied, clinical setting of the 21st century.

Language

English

Additional Citations

Altobell, Amanda. “The Ethical Imperative for Sustainable Organ Donation Facilitated by Stewardship and Data Algorithms.” Chapter Ten, pp. 141-164, In Strands of Stability, Edited by Gerard Magill and James Benedict. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

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