Practical Ethics for General Practice

[摘要] In 1982, Stephen Toulmin wrote an influential article entitled, ‘How medicine saved the life of ethics’.1 Moral philosophers, he suggested, were locked into complex, arcane debates of limited or zero interest to those outside the discipline. When, in the 1960s, they began to look at the ethics of medicine, they had to look at particular situations, individual cases, professional enterprises, and human relationships — the swampy lowlands of practical ethics, rather than the sunlight uplands of ethical theorising. Moral philosophy was saved from being shunted to the sidelines of academia by giving a substrate on which the discipline could work. Hence the burgeoning of bioethics and bioethicists over the past 20 years.

[学科分类] 卫生学