Case Study: Healing and Autonomy Analysis Guide

This prompt hands you its own structure, which is a gift and a trap. It lists the questions to address — what is most pressing under the Christian narrative and vision, whether the physician should allow Mike to continue making decisions that appear irrational and harmful, how treatment refusal and patient autonomy and organ donation should be analysed, how the Christian should think about sickness and health, and what Mike should do about trusting God while treating James. Answering them in order is legitimate and safe. The trap is that a paper structured as five separate answers reads as five short essays, and the questions plainly interlock: your view on the fourth determines your answer to the second. Decide the connective thread first and let the required questions be the sections through which it runs. A single sentence of thesis in your introduction is enough to make the difference visible to a reader who is otherwise expecting five answers.

The hardest of the questions is the one about the physician, and it is hard because the assignment asks you to do two things that pull against each other. It describes Mike's decisions as seeming irrational and harmful, and it also asks you to analyse the case within the Christian narrative that Mike himself is reasoning from. Taking that narrative seriously means recognising that his choice is not simply an error but follows from beliefs about divine healing that are internally coherent. Judging it means asking whether those beliefs, however sincere, justify a decision that harms someone who cannot consent. Hold both. A paper that only condemns has not engaged the assignment's own frame; one that only sympathises has not answered whether the physician should allow it to continue. Holding both is uncomfortable, and saying so explicitly is better than resolving the discomfort by quietly dropping one half.

The decisive fact — and the one that resolves the autonomy question rather than complicating it — is that the patient is a child. Autonomy is the right to make decisions about one's own body, and James is not making these decisions. What Mike exercises is surrogate authority, which is bounded in a way that personal autonomy is not: a competent adult may refuse life-sustaining treatment for themselves, and a parent may not refuse it on a child's behalf without limit. Framing the question as one about parental authority and its limits, rather than about autonomy simpliciter, is the single clearest way to show you have read the case rather than the topic. The paper's title says autonomy; your analysis should say whose. Everything downstream depends on that move, because the limits on surrogate refusal are what make the physician's question answerable at all.

Use principlism, since the course clearly expects it, but apply the four principles to the case rather than defining them. Autonomy is complicated by surrogacy, as above. Beneficence and non-maleficence attach to James rather than to Mike, and delay in treatment is where the harm accrues. Justice enters through organ allocation, which is why the prompt names organ donation — a scarce organ given to a patient whose family may not adhere to the follow-up regimen raises a distributive question that the family's beliefs do not settle. Naming which principle each element of the case engages is the standard move; showing where two of them conflict irreducibly is the better one. Beneficence toward James against deference to his father's authority is the conflict this case is built to produce, and it does not dissolve under analysis.

The question about how the Christian should think about sickness and health is where the paper can be genuinely good, because it is a theological question with more than one respectable answer. A view in which healing comes through prayer alone and a view in which medicine is a means of providence are both held sincerely within the tradition, and the second has a long history. Setting out that internal disagreement, rather than treating the Christian position as singular, lets you argue that Mike's reasoning is contestable on his own terms rather than only from outside them. That is a much stronger argument to make to a Christian reader, and this assignment sits in a course with a Christian frame. An argument that meets a position on its own ground is also simply more persuasive than one delivered from outside it, whatever the reader believes.

On mechanics and sourcing: the word count is 1,200 to 1,500, which is roughly 250 words per required question if you split it evenly — so plan the allocation deliberately and give more space to the questions that carry your argument. Use the topic readings and lecture the prompt names, since it explicitly ties two of the questions to them, and add scholarly bioethics literature rather than devotional material for the principlism sections. Where you make a theological claim, cite a source rather than asserting the tradition's position, since the whole strength of your argument depends on showing that the tradition contains more than one view. Unsupported theological generalisation is the easiest thing for a marker in this course to notice, and the hardest to recover from. Attribute each position to someone who holds it, and the section becomes an account of a debate rather than a claim about what Christians think.