Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney School of Dentistry, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia.
Sydney Dental Hospital, Sydney Local Health District, Surry Hills, NSW, Australia.
Bioethics. 2021 Sep;35(7):646-651. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12915. Epub 2021 Jun 29.
How should the dental profession of the 21st century frame its interactions with the society it is tasked to care for? What has this relationship looked like in the past, and what does it look like today? In this article, we examine these and other issues through the framework of the social contract, with a focus on exploring how social justice fits within the transaction of duties between the dental profession and society. We begin by describing the social contract and how this is uniquely defined within the context of dentistry; specifically, how the context of dentistry as, in part, an aesthetically driven discipline, impacts the social contract. We then consider how the nature of the profession's relationship with society, and the orientation by which it provides its services (which is sometimes critically unclear in its definitional terms), impacts the profession's contribution to ensuring social justice in oral health and oral healthcare. Through examining the nature of how the social contract has shifted (for example, by the attenuation of professional monopolies), we also ask whether this is evidence of a loss of confidence in the dental profession as an altruistic institution. We end by suggesting that the dental profession must engage with the tenets of social justice within the social contract. Failure to do so is likely to lead to erosion of dentistry as a high-status profession and societal willingness to seek solutions to oral health needs from other professional and non-professional sources.
21 世纪的牙科行业应如何构建其与所服务社会的互动关系？过去这种关系是什么样的，现在又是什么样的？本文通过社会契约的框架来探讨这些问题和其他问题，重点研究社会正义如何在牙科行业和社会之间的职责交易中体现。我们首先描述社会契约，以及它在牙科领域中是如何被独特定义的；具体来说，牙科作为一个部分受到美学驱动的学科，如何影响社会契约。然后，我们考虑专业与社会的关系性质，以及其服务的定位（在定义术语上有时并不明确），如何影响该专业在确保口腔健康和口腔医疗保健方面的社会正义方面的贡献。通过研究社会契约如何变化的性质（例如，通过削弱专业垄断），我们还询问这是否是对牙科行业作为一个利他机构失去信心的证据。最后，我们建议牙科行业必须在社会契约中遵守社会正义的原则。否则，牙科作为一个高地位的专业，以及社会愿意从其他专业和非专业来源寻求解决口腔健康需求的解决方案，都可能会受到侵蚀。
