The goals of medical ethics education comprise several dimensions: legal duties to secure informed consent, tell the truth and protect confidentiality; objective competencies that include an understanding of DNR regulations and surrogate decision-making procedures; discursive moral skills such as moral sensitivity, reciprocity and moral development that combine into the capacity for moral dialo...

Recent years have witnessed a rapid increase in initiatives to expand ethics instruction in higher education. Numerous empirical studies have examined the possible effects on students of discipline-based ethics instruction, such business ethics and medical ethics. Nevertheless, the largest share of college ethics instruction has traditionally fallen to philosophy departments, and there is a pau...

I argue here that good medical ethics requires an empirically-informed moral psychology of medical virtue along with sound action-guiding prescriptions for virtuous medical practice. After distinguishing between three levels of justification, I indicate how medical virtue ethics can draw constructively on relevant empirical research in developing feasible and realistic aspirational standards fo...