Virtuous acts as practical medical ethics: an empirical study

Virtuous acts as practical medical ethics: an empirical study.

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To examine the nature, scope and significance of virtues in the biographies of medical practitioners and to determine what kind of virtues are at play in their ethical behaviour and reflection. METHODS A case study involving 19 medical practitioners associated with the Sydney Medical School, using semi-structured narrative interviews. Narrative data were analyse...

Teaching medical ethics as a practical subject: observations from experience.

The author, head of a teaching hospital surgical unit, argues that the medical curriculum must ensure that all students are exposed to a minimum of ethical discussion and decision-making. In describing his own approach he emphasises the need to show students that it is 'an intensely practical subject'. Moreover, he reminds them that moral dilemmas in medicine--perhaps a better term than medical...

Symbiotic empirical ethics: a practical methodology.

Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This 'empirical turn' has provoked extensive debate over how such 'descriptive' research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by devel...

Moral intuitions , end - of - life acts and empirical ethics

‘Best interests’ in paediatric intensive care: an empirical ethics study

OBJECTIVE In English paediatric practice, English law requires that parents and clinicians agree the 'best interests' of children and, if this is not possible, that the courts decide. Court intervention is rare and the concept of best interests is ambiguous. We report qualitative research exploring how the best interests standard operates in practice, particularly with decisions related to plan...