Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics ─ The Points of Conflict

Using medicine as a lens, Veatch (medical ethics, Georgetown U.) argues that professional ethics are not morally justifiable, are morally repugnant even, and that the Hippocratic Oath in particular must be abandoned by medical professionals. Professional ethics are unable to ground their legitimacy without creating a double-standard, since moral claims on conduct are still coming from outside the professional context even when an individual is acting in their capacity as a professional. He's not claiming that a professional doesn't or can't have role-specific duties, but that these can only be grounded in a wider ethical system. To that end, he considers medical ethical prescriptions from both religious and secular ethical systems. He argues that any religious/secular source for a medical ethic must come to its knowledge through natural rather than revealed means. Veatch is arguing about wider moral epistemological issues that are shuttered by professionally generated codes of ethics. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Robert M. Veatch is a professor of medical ethics at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities and a former member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He is the author or editor of over forty books, includingThe Basics of Bioethics, Transplantation Ethics, and Patient, Heal Thyself.