Case Study:
“Ethical Systems, Education, and Building a Better Health Care Provider”
Subject: In his famous reflection on ethics and the formation of good character Aristotle writes, “The virtues we acquire by having put them into action, and the same is true of the arts.For the things which we have to learn before we can do them we learn by doing: men [sic] become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp.” With this philosophy in mind,
medical education has been engaged in embedding ethics in the practice of health care via education in the “core competency” of professionalism. This has been viewed as a compromise between incorporating blatantly religious practice into health care and also providing a moral framework for health care providers in the context of practice in a global, industrialized, business-oriented world.
With this in mind, do you find that the approach of virtue ethics to be a helpful philosophical structure for thinking about the formation of good health care professionals? Why or why not?
And, on a related note, of the many religious and philosophical frameworks we’ve examined in this class (“care”, professionalism, a calling, reverence for life, virtue ethics), which do you think is the most important for creating change?
What do you think is the most important and useful for you?