Hoffmaster, B.,
“The Form and Limits of Medical Ethics,” Social Science and Medicine 39, no.
9 (
1994):
1155–
1164, at 1162. Hoffmaster quickly adds, “Much of the time in practical ethics they are objectionable as well, largely because they serve to cloud responsibility.”
Id. Indeed, “vagueness may be used as a vehicle for the exercise of control or for the evasion of control.”
Schön, D. A.,
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983): At 305. “Rather than comfort…deliberate vagueness creates confusion, anxiety and unrealistic expectations.” See
Post, Blustein, Dubler, ,
supra note 18, at 55. As one medical ethicist has observed, “[I]t is important for professionals to promote their authority and establish their role as indispensable by mystifying their particular knowledge and skills, and by fostering the dependence of others on their services.”
Sherwin, S., “Certification of Health Care Ethics Consultants: Advantages and Disadvantages,” in
Baylis, F. E., ed.,
The Health Care Ethics Consultant (Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 1994): 11–24, at 18; see also, Cummins,
supra note 29, at 23–24. Depending on the circumstances, uncertainty and ambiguity, therefore, can be the ethicist's friend or the ethicist's foe, an insight that is sociologically and psychologically significant. See, for example,
Nilson, L. B., “An Application of the Occupational ‘Uncertainty Principle’ to the Professions,”
Social Problems 26, no. 5 (1979): 570–581;
Light, D., “Uncertainty and Control in Professional Training,”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 20, no. 4 (1979): 310–322;
Horowitz, M. J., “Sliding Meanings: A Defense against Threat in Narcissistic Personalities,”
International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 4 (1975): 167–180;
Maldonado, J. L., “On Ambiguity, Confusion and the Ego Ideal,”
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 74, pt. 1 (1993): 93–100;
Katz, J.,
The Silent World of Doctor and Patient (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002): 165–206;
Katz, J., “Why Physicians Don’t Disclose Uncertainty,”
Hastings Center Report 14, no. 1 (February 1984): 35–44;
Scofield, G., “Why Medical Ethicists Don’t (and Won’t) Share Uncertainty,” in
Rubin, S. Zoloth, L., eds.,
Margin of Error: The Ethics of Mistakes in the Practice of Medicine (Hagerstown, MD: University Press Group, 2000): 333–342.
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