ARTIFICIAL PERSONHOOD: NURSING ETHICS IN A MEDICAL WORLD

Artificial persons are those who speak and act for others. Nurses speak and act for patients as well as for physicians and institutions, or, more aptly, institutionalized medicine. Yet, acting for institutionalized medicine can be harmful to nurses, due to the psychological experience of moral distress and the loss of integrity of their practice. This paper illustrates the harm to nurses as expressed in narratives of their practice, and suggests some initial steps we might take in resisting the artificial personhood imposed by institutionalized medicine. For philosopher, Elizabeth Wolgast, ’artificial persons speak and act in the name of others (Wolgast, p. 1). ’ The term was first used by Thomas Hobbes,2 who also referred to such people as ’feigned ’ or ’fictional ’ persons. While Hobbes was concerned with the organization of society, specifically with the issue of representative government, he necessarily had to address speaking and acting for others in more everyday contexts. These included servants who speak and act for their masters, as well as ’Children, Fooles, and Mad-men ’ (Hobbes, p. 113), who cannot act for themselves in certain circumstances. Contemporary example