Dr Hojjat Soofi1
1University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Dr Hojjat (Hoji) Soofi is a Lecturer in Bioethics at Sydney Health Ethics (School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health). He is a pharmacist by training and an early career bioethics researcher/educator. He received his PhD and MRes in bioethics from Macquarie University in October 2021 and April 2018, respectively. He is also an alumnus of Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics (KU Leuven, Radboud University Nijmegen, and the University of Padua). Before joining Sydney Health Ethics in January 2023, he was an MQCR Postdoctoral Fellow at, then, Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values, and Ethics (CAVE).
Abstract:
Residents in aged care facilities at times pose threats of harm to other residents, often in the context of what has been described in the existing literature as resident-to-resident aggression (RRA). Types of common RRA that might lead to physical harm are punching, pushing, and hurling. Caregivers respond to such incidents by attempting to de-escalate the situation through conversation, distraction, or redirection. In some cases, they may also resort to administering psychotropic medications to modify aggressive behaviour. In this talk, I examine the ethical justifiability of using psychotropics to manage RRA. I do so by zooming in on two justificatory grounds: other-defence and beneficence. I argue that the former holds when, and only when, residents’ aggressive behaviours are unprovoked and the conditions of proportionality and necessity obtains. I demonstrate, however, that there are difficulties in offering a justification grounded in other-defence in cases in which both residents exhibit unprovoked physically aggressive behaviour towards each other. In such cases, the use of psychotropics may be prima facie justifiable, not on other-defence grounds but on beneficence grounds. I conclude by noting that both types of justification, nonetheless, diverge from their conventional forms and further work is needed to develop more refined and conceptually robust justifications for the practice.