A Virtue Theory of Organizational Bioethics

Abstract: What makes a healthcare organization ethical? Is a healthcare organization something that can be ethical, independent of the people within it? As health systems become larger and care less centralized, we need a theory of bioethics that takes the organization as the subject, not only the clinician--a theory in which organizations are moral persons. Following trends in business ethics, I propose a virtue theory of organizational bioethics in which healthcare organizations, just like individuals, can and should develop virtues that will help them flourish. I start by discussing the pragmatic basis for thinking of organizations as moral persons. I then show that the organizations do indeed meet the metaphysical conditions for moral personhood, including agency, responsibility, and freedom of will. If organizations are moral persons, then they can be the subjects of ethics, though not necessarily in the same way as natural persons. Virtue ethics gives us a relatively straightforward way to ground ethics for organizations and distinguish it from ethics for individuals within them. I end by exploring what the virtues might look like for healthcare organizations and how organizations could implement them.