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Chapter 5 - Reasoning from Faith or Fact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2025

Denise M. Dudzinski
Affiliation:
University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle
Kaarkuzhali Babu Krishnamurthy
Affiliation:
Boston Medical Center-Brighton
Paul J. Ford
Affiliation:
The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland
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Summary

This chapter reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.

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