Abstract
The American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH) issued its Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation just as it is becoming ever clearer that secular ethics is intractably plural and without foundations in any reality that is not a social–historical construction (ASBH Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation, 2nd edn. American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Glenview, IL, 2011). Core Competencies fails to recognize that the ethics of health care ethics consultants is not ethics in the usual sense of a morally canonical ethics. Its ethics is the ethics established at law and in enforceable health care public policy in a particular jurisdiction. Its normativity is a legal normativity, so that the wrongness of violating this ethics is simply the legal penalties involved and the likelihood of their being imposed. That the ethics of ethics consultation is that ethics legally established accounts for the circumstance that the major role of hospital ethics consultants is as quasi-lawyers giving legal advice, aiding in risk management, and engaging in mediation. It also indicates why this collage of roles has succeeded so well. This article shows how moral philosophy as it was reborn in the 13th century West led to the ethics of modernity and then finally to the ethics of hospital ethics consultation. It provides a brief history of the emergence of an ethics that is after morality. Against this background, the significance of Core Competencies must be critically reconsidered.
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Notes
David Knowles in a popular volume concerning medieval thought opines, “the world of 1210 [i.e., the year of the publication of Aristotle and the condemnation of Aristotelianism at Paris] was a very different one from that of 1155 both in its institutional forms and in its interior spirit. The monastic centuries had ended and the age of the universities, the scholastic age, had taken their place” (Knowles 1962, pp. 223–24).
Kant appreciated the necessity of engaging the idea of God, even though he was likely an atheist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it, “Kant did not really believe in God” (Kuehn 2001, pp. 391–392).
The author sides with and is a member of the Church of the early first millennium that is alive and well in Orthodox Christianity. See Engelhardt (2000).
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Engelhardt, H.T. Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultants: In Search of Professional Status in a Post-Modern World. HEC Forum 23, 129–145 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-011-9167-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-011-9167-4