Bioethicists: Doctors Should Push Patients to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint

Mainstream bioethics is left-wing politics by another name. Practitioners therefore often seek to expand the jurisdiction of the field to push their favored political agendas — for example, to issues of war and peace.

In the latest example of this tendency, an influential journal just published a piece of advocacy for transforming general practitioners into instruments of fighting climate change. Specifically, the authors of the article urges doctors to nag their patients into reducing their carbon emissions. First, the authors acknowledge that the primary role of general practitioners currently is to focus on the medical issues of each individual patient, not to promote societal reform:

The General Practitioner (GP) is expected to operate with a wide sphere of interest, exploring the wider determinants of health and illness in their patients. They may use a biopsychosocial approach that attempts to navigate the relationship between the individual, their wider social network, and psychological experiences [1]. Axiologically, however, GPs are still expected to primarily confine their scope of concern to the patient immediately in front of them; the professional role of the GP is hitherto considered as being to care for the patient as their 'first concern' [2], and only in rare cases should they subordinate that patient's interests to wider concerns.