Beneficence is a foundational ethical principle in medicine. To provide benefit to a patient is to promote and protect the patient's wellbeing, to promote the patient's interests. But there are different conceptions of wellbeing, emphasizing different values. These conceptions of wellbeing are contrary to one another and give rise to dissimilar ideas of what it means to benefit a patient. This makes the concept of beneficence ambiguous: is a benefit related to the patient's goals and wishes, or is it a matter of objective criteria that constitute wellbeing? This paper suggests a unified conception of wellbeing for use in medicine to determine what counts as a benefit. Two components of wellbeing are identified: (1) objective functioning/health and (2) the patient's view of her own good. The paper explores how to apply, balance, and weigh these components in clinical situations to determine what counts as a benefit to a patient.

中文翻译：

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医学的利益，兴趣和福祉：为患者带来利益的意义。

受益是医学的基本伦理原则。为患者提供利益就是促进和保护患者的福祉，促进患者的利益。但是，人们有不同的幸福感，强调不同的价值观。这些幸福概念彼此相反，并且就使患者受益的含义产生了不同的观念。这使慈善的概念变得模棱两可：好处是否与患者的目标和愿望有关，还是构成健康的客观标准？本文提出了一种用于医学的统一幸福感概念，以确定哪些才是有益的。确定了幸福感的两个组成部分：（1）目标机能/健康状况；（2）患者对自身利益的看法。本文探讨了如何应用，平衡，