(Aeon) – Neat ethical principles have nothing to say to doctors like me, faced with the brutal, bloody compromises of hospital life

Other than the principles of informed consent and patient confidentiality, the field has had no impact on my three-decade career, nor on the career of any other anaesthesiologist I know. Surgeons have told me something similar. We took the Hippocratic Oath upon graduating from medical school, but we already had a firm sense of right and wrong before then. My own code of ethics drew, cafeteria plan-like, from a variety of sources: a secularised version of Judeo-Christian teachings such as ‘respect human life’ and ‘be kind’, notions that undergird most civilisations; a strong belief in individual freedom and agency, courtesy of my southern California upbringing; an Aristotelian sensibility that perfect justice is an abstraction, without meaning in the real world; and the pragmatic view that ‘moderation in all things’ is a wise dictum to follow, when you can.

When my colleagues and I ran into moral dilemmas our own codes of conduct couldn’t resolve, it was often technology – not bioethics – that supplied the workaround. (Read More)