In the face of a possible health saturation due to the pan-demic caused by the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus, the present paper wants to contribute with some guidelines in order to provide ethical orientation to prioritize patients and maximize the benefits for the majority of the population. This paper aims to generate an acceptable, consistent, and reasonable ethical framework to support the difficult work that health professionals will have in emergency rooms and intensive care units. The criteria and reflections in this paper aim to respect not only ethical-med-ical principles that focus their efforts on a particular patient, but especial-ly on a broader public health ethics based on the principle of justice. Prioritization is therefore oriented in a utilitarian framework that seeks to save the largest number of lives, of life-years and considering the life stage, without neglecting the people’s dignity. In this sense, it is not only a matter of considering epidemiological criteria, but also of establishing socially acceptable ethical criteria. This proposal is a collective effort to bring together the comparative experience of various international ethical recommendations, adapting them, if pertinent, to the Chilean reality.
Media and communication ethics have been evolving in response to historical events that are shaping communication practices. This has led to an increasing questioning of the Western-white-patriarchal-dominant canon and to the vindication of a more inclusive media and communication ethics. Yet the ethical discussions in the field have been systematically carried out from an anthropocentric-speciesist approach, that is, one which restricts ethical claims to the human species alone. Following the recent work of Clifford G. Christians, this paper claims that the pursuit of a global and inclusive media and communication eth-ics can only be successfully achieved within a non-speciesist framework. We argue that, under scrutiny, Christians’ case for a “human-centered” communication ethics, when taken consistently, sets the case for a cos-mopolitan justice between the species. In practice, this amounts to media and communication ethics listening to what comes from the horse’s mouth by going to the sources of the common good and lending credibility not only to human voices, but other animals’ as well.
