Virtue and Medicine: A Physician’s Analysis

Abstract

The rediscovery of virtue as a concept worthy of consideration in medical ethics is welcome indeed. The field of medical ethics and what has come to be known as bioethics have been severely handicapped without the concept of virtue. The concept of virtue restores a lost dimension to medical ethics. In the past decade or two medical ethics has become a very impersonal enterprise, all but ignoring the moral psychology of moral agents who must make decisions (both physicians and patients). An analysis of virtues in the immediacy of the clinical setting offers a texture to moral life which neither an analysis of moral rules nor of utilities can offer.