Everyday Ethics of Medical Practices

Abstract

This chapter focuses on ethics in the patient-provider interactions, specifically outlining “virtue ethics”—the display of personal virtuous behavior—in those interactions. Such virtues are “everyday” ethics, different from normative ethics as it is applied in medical institutions and utilitarian ethics as it is applied in epidemiology. The vignette describes a resident interacting with a “difficult” patient, while the literary text, Dr. Anton Chekhov’s “Enemies,” narrates a physician’s dilemma of treating a patient soon after his son died of diphtheria. The chapter also presents William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree.” All the texts focus on “everyday” ethics, which distinguishes itself from cost-benefit utilitarian ethics and principle-based “normative” ethics. Such everyday ethics is closely associated with narrative.