In this paper, we will consider the role of oaths and codes of ethics in undergraduate medical education. Studies of ethics syllabi suggest that ethics educators typically use well-known bioethics texts such as Beauchamp and Childress. Yet, many issues that medical students will face are addressed by codes of ethics and oaths. We will first provide a historical survey of oaths and codes and then address how these sources of ethical guidance can be effectively used in ethics education of medical (...) students. Oaths and codes can be engagingly taught using a range of techniques including visual narrative. Excerpts from television and film can be used to highlight challenging ethical dilemmas in a variety of settings, taking the learning from the theoretical to the more applied while offering context. (shrink)

How can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond the standard narrative of codification—a story that does not reach back beyond World War II—without becoming so broad as to lose all distinctiveness? This article proposes a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competencies, qualities, or dispositions. Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology, the article argues that the “revolutions” (...) these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. They tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. These ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. The project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are their scientific selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies? (shrink)

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic the use of the term “hero” has been widespread. This is especially common in the context of healthcare workers and it is now unremarkable to see large banners on hospital exteriors that say “heroes work here”. There is more to be gleaned from the rhetoric of heroism than just awareness of public appreciation, however. Calling physicians and nurses heroes for treating sick people indicates something about the concept of medicine and medical professionals. In this essay, I (...) will examine three aspects of the social role of medicine exposed by the language of heroism. One, if a hero is someone who goes above and the call of duty, then does that mean exposing oneself to risk of infection is no longer a duty of physicians? If so, does that mean the “profession” of medicine is much like any other business? Two, physicians and nurses are not the only “heroes” this go-around. Anyone deemed essential to the US “infrastructure” is designated by the US government as having “special responsibilities” to remain at their posts for the public good, which explicitly puts physicians in the same category as sewage workers and grocery store cashiers. Three, what does it mean to belong to a profession that does have self-sacrifice and risk-taking as part of its mission—especially a profession that rarely gets called upon to practice these obligations? (shrink)

Barger and Barney (2004/this issue) offered a number of reasons for the public, the news media, and journalism to develop special, mutually supportive standards of conduct. However, they imbedded these reasonable suggestions in an argument that claims far more than can be delivered. In explaining what is wrong with their argument, I place journalistic ethics within a general theory of professional ethics.

In his deftly argued, “A Defense of Unqualified Confidentiality” (Kipnis 2006), Kenneth Kipnis challenges the received view that a physician's duty of confidentiality must be balanced against a dut...

This paper explores the relationships that various applied ethics bear to each other, both in particular disciplines and more generally. The introductory section lays out the challenge of coming up with such an account and, drawing a parallel with the philosophy of science, offers that applied ethics may either be unified or disunified. The second section develops one simple account through which applied ethics are unified, vis-à-vis ethical theory. However, this is not taken to be a satisfying answer, for reasons (...) explained. In the third section, specific applied ethics are explored: biomedical ethics; business ethics; environmental ethics; and neuroethics. These are chosen not to be comprehensive, but rather for their traditions or other illustrative purposes. The final section draws together the results of the preceding analysis and defends a disunity conception of applied ethics. (shrink)

The predominant influences on health are social or upstream factors. Poverty, inadequate education, insecure and toxic environments, and inferior opportunities for jobs and positions are inequitable disadvantages that adversely affect health across the globe. Many causal pathways are yet to be understood. However, elimination of these social inequalities is a moral imperative of the first order. Some physicians by word and deed argue that medical doctors should oppose the “structural violence” of social inequalities that greatly shorten lives and wreak so (...) much suffering. (shrink)

The threat of bioterrorism, the emergence of the SARS epidemic, and a recent focus on professionalism among physicians, present a timely opportunity for a review of, and renewed commitment to, physician obligations to care for patients during epidemics. The professional obligation to care for contagious patients is part of a larger "duty to treat," which historically became accepted when 1) a risk of nosocomial infection was perceived, 2) an organized professional body existed to promote the duty, and 3) the public (...) came to rely on the duty. Physicians' responses to epidemics from the Hippocratic era to the present suggests an evolving acceptance of the professional duty to treat contagious patients, reaching a long-held peak between 1847 and the1950's. There has been some professional retrenchment against this duty to treat in the last 40 years but, we argue, conditions favoring acceptance of the duty are met today. A renewed embrace of physicians' duty to treat patients during epidemics, despite conditions of personal risk, might strengthen medicine's relationship with society, improve society's capacity to prepare for threats such as bioterrorism and new epidemics, and contribute to the development of a more robust and meaningful medical professionalism. (shrink)

Numerous grounds have been offered for the view that healthcare workers have a duty to treat, including expressed consent, implied consent, special training, reciprocity (also called the social contract view), and professional oaths and codes. Quite often, however, these grounds are simply asserted without being adequately defended or without the defenses being critically evaluated. This essay aims to help remedy that problem by providing a critical examination of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these five grounds for asserting that (...) healthcare workers have a duty to treat, especially as that duty would arise in the context of an infectious disease pandemic. Ultimately, it argues that none of the defenses is currently sufficient to ground the kind of duty that would be needed in a pandemic. It concludes by sketching some practical recommendations in that regard. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page W1-W2.

*The views in this article are the author's alone and should not be construed as policy statements of the American Medical Association.

W pierwszej części artykułu charakteryzuję trzy rodzaje profesjonalizmu lekarskiego: profesjonalizm tradycyjny, odnowiony i kompleksowy. Omawiam także czynniki kulturowe, ekonomiczne i aksjologiczne wpływające na ich kształtowanie się. Stawiam tezę, że profesjonalizm kompleksowy ze względu na jego skomplikowanie i arbitralne wyodrębnianie elementów składowych jest nieprzydatny w edukacji moralnej studentów i lekarzy. W części drugiej rekonstruuję wady i zalety profesjonalizmu tradycyjnego i odnowionego. Uzasadniam pogląd, że najważniejsza zaleta profesjonalizmu wynika z jego ambiwalencji moralnej. Nie traktuję więc tej dwuznaczności jako wyłącznie wady. Lekarz profesjonalista (...) powinien mieć świadomość jasnych i ciemnych stron profesjonalizmu oraz umiejętność właściwego ich ważenia w danych okolicznościach – poszukiwania Arystotelesowskiego złotego środka. W ostatniej części argumentuję za umiarkowanie optymistycznym przekonaniem o przydatności profesjonalizmu tradycyjnego i odnowionego w moralnym formowaniu studentów medycyny i młodych lekarzy. (shrink)

Medical Ethics has many unsung heros and heroines. Here we celebrate one of these and on telling part of her story hope to place modern medical ethics and bioethics in the UK more centrally within its historical and human contex.

Robert Baker (2005) has urged that bioethicists develop a code of ethics on several related but distinct grounds: that, based on his analysis of the history of development of other professions, the...

Against the backdrop of the political intrigue in biomedicine’s ascendancy to orthodoxy, this article examines its contemporary rapprochement with Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM), in the move toward an integrated medical regime. It also identifies and explores factors underlying the rapprochement, as well as different ethical challenges that face integrated medicine. It argues that a major approach to tackling these challenges hinges on devising just and equitable criteria for evaluating the efficacy of plural therapeutic paradigms inherent in CAM models. This is (...) attainable through a policy that encourages creating public health policy and medical personnel deliberately exposed as part of their curriculum to the philosophical and theoretical features of diverse therapeutic traditions. (shrink)