I take issue with Frank Leavitt's sketch of a pragmatic criterion for the relevance of metaphysics to medical ethics. I argue that appeal to the potential for confusion generated by metaphysical subtlety establishes a need for better communication rather than shows philosophical insight beside the point. I demonstrate that the proposed Criterion of Relevance has absurd consequences, and I claim...

Despite the numerous policies, regulations and laws aimed at promoting and ensuring ethical practice in healthcare, ethical misconduct remains rampant. Perhaps something more is needed to encourage a genuine and sustained moral attitude and behaviour. To a casual reader, the regulations on ethics read merely as a list of do's and don'ts and their philosophical foundation is not clear. In actual...

The Research Excellence Framework of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is taking place in 2013, its three key elements being outputs (65% of the profile), impact (20%), and “quality of the research environment” (15%). Impact will be assessed using case studies that “may include any social, economic or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia that has taken place during the asse...

SETTING Medical ethics education has become common, and the integrated ethics curriculum has been recommended in Western countries. It should be questioned whether there is one, universal method of teaching ethics applicable worldwide to medical schools, especially those in non-Western developing countries. OBJECTIVE To characterise the medical ethics curricula at Asian medical schools. DES...

Medical school curricula and postgraduate education programmes expend considerable resources teaching medical ethics. Simultaneously, whistleblowers’ agitation continues, at great personal cost, to prompt major intrainstitutional and public inquiries that reveal problems with the application of medical ethics at particular clinical ‘‘coalfaces’’. Virtue ethics, emphasising techniques promoting ...

patients and methods subjects of this study include teaching hospitals in mashhad, affiliated with mashhad university of medical sciences and the tool used in gathering the data was a questionnaire, completed based on the information provided by the proceedings of the meetings held by the ethics committees. also, for the purpose of gathering the suggestions, specifically on the improvement of t...

This article-the Romanell Report-offers an analysis of the current state of medical ethics education in the United States, focusing in particular on its essential role in cultivating professionalism among medical learners. Education in ethics has become an integral part of medical education and training over the past three decades and has received particular attention in recent years because of...

J. M. CHALMERS-HUNT (compiler), Natural history auctions 1700-1972. A register of sales in the British Isles, London, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1976, fo., pp. xii, 189, £12.50. For those interested in natural history, this is an important book. The collecting of natural history specimens has been popular for centuries and for a variety of reasons. The disposal of the resulting collections by auctio...