What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

Philoctetes was a good man and a good soldier. When he was on his way to Troy to fight alongside the Greeks, he had a terrible misfortune. By sheer accident he trespassed in a sacred precinct on the island of Lemnos. As punishment he was bitten on the foot by the serpent who guarded the shrine. His foot began to ooze with foul-smelling pus, and the pain made him cry out curses that spoiled the other soldiers' religious observances. They therefore (...) left him alone on the island, a lame man with no resources but his bow and arrows, no friends but the animals who were also his food. Ten years later, according to Sophocles' version of the story, they come to bring him back: for they have learned that they cannot win the war without him. The leaders of the expedition think of Philoctetes as a tool of their purposes; they plan to trick him into returning, with no empathy for his plight. The Chorus of soldiers, however, has a different response. Even before they see the man, they imagine vividly what it is like to be him– and they enter a protest against the callousness of the commanders: For my part, I pity him– thinking of how, with no living soul to care for him, seeing no friendly face, wretched, always alone, he suffers with a fierce affliction, and has no resources to meet his daily needs. How in the world does the poor man survive? (shrink)

Rosalind Hursthouse has written an excellent book, in which she develops a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics that she sees as avoiding some of the major criticisms leveled against virtue ethics in general, and against Aristotle's brand of virtue ethics in particular.

‘Doing good medical ethics’ involves attending to both the biomedical and existential aspects of illness. For this, we need to bring in a phenomenological perspective to the clinical encounter, adopt a virtue-based ethic and resolve to re-evaluate the goals of medicine, in particular the alleviation of suffering and the role of compassion in everyday ethics.

This article is presented as a defence of voluntary active euthanasia from a virtue perspective and it is written with the objective of generating debate and challenging the assumption that killing is necessarily vicious in all circumstances. Practitioners are often torn between acting from virtue and acting from duty. In the case presented the physician was governed by compassion and this illustrates how good people may have the courage to sacrifice their own security in the interests of virtue. The doctor's (...) action created huge tensions for the nurse, who was governed by the code of conduct and relevant laws. Appraising active euthanasia from a virtue perspective can offer a more compassionate approach to the predicament of practitioners and clients. The tensions arising from the virtue versus rules debate generates irreconcilable difficulties for nurses. A shift towards virtue would help to resolve this problem and support the call for a change in the law. The controversial nature of this position is acknowledged. The argument is put forward on the understanding that many practitioners will not agree with the conclusions reached. (shrink)

Humility, properly understood as a sense of one's limits, is one of the goods internal to the practice of health care. Humility in Christian tradition has both a relational aspect and an epistemological aspect. Each of these is evident in the practice of medicine. In its relational aspect, humility includes reverance or awe for the grace and strength of patients and their care-givers, a sense that the care-provider is not self-sufficient but needs the care-receiver, and recognition of the worth of (...) those who are oppressed and outcast. In its epistemological aspect, humility is exhibited in respect for the meaning system of the patient and recognition of the limits of medical paradigms and their need for correction from the patient's perspective. The power wielded by the profession of medicine in contemporary society does not preclude the exercise of humility within the profession. Keywords: epistemology, humility, internal goods, practice of medicine, virtue CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Philoctetes was a good man and a good soldier. When he was on his way to Troy to fight alongside the Greeks, he had a terrible misfortune. By sheer accident he trespassed in a sacred precinct on the island of Lemnos. As punishment he was bitten on the foot by the serpent who guarded the shrine. His foot began to ooze with foul-smelling pus, and the pain made him cry out curses that spoiled the other soldiers' religious observances. They therefore (...) left him alone on the island, a lame man with no resources but his bow and arrows, no friends but the animals who were also his food. Ten years later, according to Sophocles' version of the story, they come to bring him back: for they have learned that they cannot win the war without him. The leaders of the expedition think of Philoctetes as a tool of their purposes; they plan to trick him into returning, with no empathy for his plight. The Chorus of soldiers, however, has a different response. Even before they see the man, they imagine vividly what it is like to be him– and they enter a protest against the callousness of the commanders: For my part, I pity him– thinking of how, with no living soul to care for him, seeing no friendly face, wretched, always alone, he suffers with a fierce affliction, and has no resources to meet his daily needs. How in the world does the poor man survive? (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Patient Encounters: The Experience of Disease. By James H. Buchanan. Becoming a Good Doctor. By James F. Drane.

Advocates of active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide argue that a patient’s intractable pain and suffering are a sufficient justification for his life to end if he autonomously so chooses. Others hold that the non-utilization of life-sustaining treatment, the use of pain-relieving medication that may hasten a patient’s death, and palliative sedation may be morally acceptable means of alleviating pain and suffering. How a patient should be cared for when approaching the end of life involves one’s core religious and moral values, (...) particularly concerning whether pain and suffering can have some sort of instrumental value. The author reasons why a patient who is terminally ill can find his suffering valuable for both religious and nonreligious goals. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 251–261. (shrink)

Professional medical ethics demands of health care professionals in addition to specific duties and rules of conduct that they embody a responsible and trustworthy personality. In the public discussion, different concepts are suggested to describe the desired implied attitude of physicians. In a sequel of three articles, a set of three of these concepts is presented in an interpretation that is meant to characterise the morally emotional part of this attitude: “empathy”, “compassion” and “care”. In the first article of the (...) series, “empathy” has been developed as a mainly cognitive and morally neutral capacity of understanding. In this article, the emotional and virtuous core of the desired professional attitude—compassion—is elaborated. Compassion is distinguished from sympathy, empathy and pity. Several problems of compassion as a spontaneous, warm emotion for being a professional virtue are discussed: especially questions of over-demand, of justice and of concerns because of a possible threat to the patient’s dignity and autonomy. An interpretation of compassion as processed and learned professional attitude, that founds dignity on the general idea of man as a sentient being and on solidarity, not on his independence and capacities, is developed. It is meant to rule out the possible side effects and to make compassion as a professional attitude and as professional virtue attractive, teachable and acquirable. In order to reach the adequate warmth and closeness for the particular physician-patient-relation, professional compassion has to be combined with the capacity of empathy. If appropriate, the combination of both empathy and compassion as “empathic compassion” can demand a much warmer attitude towards the patient than each of the elements alone, or the simple addition of them can provide. The concept of “care” that will be discussed in a forthcoming article of this sequel is a missing necessary part to describe the active potential of the desired moral attitude of the physician more completely. The reconstruction of the desired professional attitude in terms of “empathic compassionate care” is certainly not the only possible description, but it is a detailed proposal in order to give an impulse for the discussion about the inner tacit values and the meaning of medicine and clinical healthcare professions. (shrink)

This paper analyzes in some detail what an ethics of love would be like if interpreted rigorously as an ethics of being rather than of doing. It delineates the metaethical structure of such an ethics and suggests the characteristics of love appropriate to the structure. The author then indicates some problems that arise for such an ethical theory.