Medical Ethics

Abstract

Medical ethics is a subspeciality branch of normative ethics, which itself is a branch of the speciality subject moral philosophy in the general field of philosophy. The other major subspeciality in the field of moral philosophy is generally called metaethics, which is a subject dealing with, for instance, the nature of the good, the nature of the right, the nature of obligations, and the nature of evil. Normative ethics (including medical ethics) deals not so much with abstract concepts of the right, the good, the virtuous, and so on but rather with what in practical situations it might be right to do or wrong to do. An old joke suggests that if you invite a group of moral philosophers to a dinner party at your house, you should be careful to count the silver before and after the end of the party.