What Decisions Should Cosmetic Essay Research Paper

What Decisions Should Cosmetic Essay, Research Paper Physicians, including cosmetic surgeons, have many responsibilities that are inherent with their professions. Included in these are the decisions that the surgeon must make when deciding if and how to do a certain medical procedure. They must first of all make certain to ensure the health and safety of their patient while performing a procedure successfully. But should cosmetic surgeons also be handed the responsibility to decide if a certain surgery is morally suspect or an immoral request to change ones appearance? Margaret Olivia Little, author of Cosmetic Surgery, Suspect Norms, and the Ethics of Complicity, argues that cosmetic surgeons should be responsible for filtering out morally suspect cases and refusing to do

surgeries that may not be moral. She has come up with a post modernist view on this subject. I, however, agree with the more modernist mainstream model. I feel that it should not be the responsibility of the surgeon to decide what is moral and what isn t when approached by a patient who may request a surgery. The surgeon has a certain amount of responsibility when asked to perform a surgery. Their primary concern should be whether or not this surgery is going to have an adverse effect on the patient s health. Why should the surgeon be bothered with whether or not the procedure is going to have an adverse effect on society? It would disrupt the concentration of the physician if they had to spend time thinking about whether or not the surgery is morally right. When a surgeon is

preparing to do a surgery their focus should be on how they are going to do it and what precautions are necessary to ensure the safety of the patient and not is this the moral thing to do? Similarly when a surgeon is performing a surgery their attention should be focused on the task at hand and not did I make the right decision about whether or not to do this? Putting the responsibility of shaping societies morals on the surgeon is not right. The surgeons who perform these operations are not in the wrong. Little argues that the surgeons are out to turn women into Barbie dolls (Little 171, 172) and rake in the money while they are at it. First of all the surgeons are not the ones who created the demand for cosmetic surgery. Rather the demand for surgery created a demand for

surgeons. The surgeons do not trick the patients into opting for a surgery that they don t want; rather they offer it to people who are already actively looking for it. Who is to say anyway that it is immoral to want to change one s appearance? Further who is supposed to make the decisions as to which cases are considered morally suspect? Many people have many different moral beliefs. What is immoral to one person may not be to another. So the decisions made by one person that sets the guidelines for these types of morally questionable surgeries may be too strict for some or not strict enough for others. Even if there were specific guidelines set up they would be almost impossible to follow because of the vast number of different cases that come up in these types of surgeries. It

would be impossible to come up with rules that everyone would agree with. Little herself, seems to have trouble drawing the line between the morally suspect cases and the ones that are reasonable requests. She lists four different examples that would all resemble typical requests for surgeries. She uses her post-modernist models to make the decisions for these people. The first is a man who lives in a society in which a double chin is what makes one attractive. This man however does not have a double chin so he would like to have a surgical implant to give him one. The second is a child whose ears stick out from his head. Because of this he is subject to relentless taunting by other children. He is looking to surgery to tuck his ears in closer to his head. The third case is a