Not the doctor’s business: Privacy, personal responsibility and data rights in medical settings

TLDR

Healthcare must respect patient privacy, as doctors are obligated to treat rather than judge, and patients should provide only information essential for care, unlike the broader privacy‑invasive investigations allowed in legal trials. The paper contends that evaluating personal responsibility for medical resource allocation is morally unjustifiable due to privacy concerns and calls for medical ethics codes to incorporate these data rights. Such assessments would constitute an inappropriate, moralizing intrusion that endangers patients’ sensitive data and exposes them to multiple privacy‑related harms.

Abstract

Abstract This paper argues that assessing personal responsibility in healthcare settings for the allocation of medical resources would be too privacy‐invasive to be morally justifiable. In addition to being an inappropriate and moralizing intrusion into the private lives of patients, it would put patients’ sensitive data at risk, making data subjects vulnerable to a variety of privacy‐related harms. Even though we allow privacy‐invasive investigations to take place in legal trials, the justice and healthcare systems are not analogous. The duty of doctors and healthcare professionals is to help patients as best they can—not to judge them. Patients should not be forced into giving up any more personal information than what is strictly necessary to receive an adequate treatment, and their medical data should only be used for appropriate purposes. Medical ethics codes should reflect these data rights. When a doctor asks personal questions that are irrelevant to diagnose or treat a patient, the appropriate response from the patient is: ‘none of your business’.