Abstract
The essays in this volume provide many lists of virtues in different cultures and different times. Those lists include the ‘virtues’ of cunning, hatred of enemies, condescension, skill, obedience to husbands, whimsicality, and filial piety as well as gentleness, meekness, compassion, and humaneness. That in itself should suggest that there are serious problems to be solved in developing a full and sound theory of virtue in medical ethics. Ferngren and Amundsen, in the first essay in this volume, make clear the dramatic contrast between the classical Homeric virtues in Greek thought and the major gentle virtues of the Christian tradition. The Homeric hero possessed the character of cunning, courage, self-reliance, loyalty, love of friends, hatred of enemies (as well as courtesy, generosity, and hospitality) while the Pauline virtues included much gentler fare: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. It might, in fact, be argued that all that is wrong with the ethics of medicine is that health care professionals have adopted the Homeric list while patients have been expected to adopt the Pauline character.1 The very term patient conveys the notion of meekness and long-suffering passivity. Developing a theory of virtue for an ethic of medicine will be much more difficult and controversial than is often realized.
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Veatch, R.M. (1985). Against Virtue: A Deontological Critique of Virtue Theory in Medical Ethics. In: Shelp, E.E. (eds) Virtue and Medicine. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5229-4_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5229-4_17
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