Article Text
PDF
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Rhodes seeks to defend her ‘conclusion that everyday ethics and medical ethics [are] incompatible’.1 She challenges ‘views that medical ethics is nothing more than common morality applied to clinical matters’ (Rhodes, p2).1 Beauchamp and Childress explicate the term ‘common morality’ at length.2 Nowhere do they claim that medical ethics is ‘nothing more than common morality applied to clinical matters’. Here is what they do say: “The origin of the norms of the common morality is no different in principle from the origin of the norms of a particular morality for a medical or other profession … The primary difference is that the common morality has authority in all communities, whereas particular moralities are authoritative only for specific groups” (Beauchamp and Childress, p8).2
This critique discusses the seven examples Rhodes uses to illustrate her main point: that common morality and medical ethics are radically different. I contend that common morality accounts for the purported differences she cites.
Example 1
In ordinary life, people can simply mind their own business, whereas physicians have a duty to act in their professional setting. On this view, common morality cannot explain the moral obligation people have to prevent easily avoidable harm to others. A bystander …
Footnotes
Contributors RM is the sole author of this article. No one else contributed to the research or writing of the article.
Funding The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
- Feature article
- Commentary
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Why not common morality?
- Uncommon misconceptions and common morality
- A Defence of medical ethics as uncommon morality
- Taking a moral holiday? Physicians’ practical identities at the margins of professional ethics
- A waste of time: the problem of common morality in Principles of Biomedical Ethics
- On Rhodes’s failure to appreciate the connections between common morality theory and professional biomedical ethics
- Bioethics and multiculturalism: nuancing the discussion
- Defending the four principles approach as a good basis for good medical practice and therefore for good medical ethics
- Why only common morality?
- The problem of ‘thick in status, thin in content’ in Beauchamp and Childress' principlism