https://doi.org/10.21852/sem.2019.2.03
Nowadays medical ethics develops under the influence of various philosophical trends. Among the most important elaborations of this ethics the following three propositions are usually given special attention: (1) ethics of the good of the patient related to the virtue ethics proposed by American physician Edmund D. Pellegrino, (2) the ethics of the four principles of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, called principlism, and (3) the contractualism of Robert M. Veatch that appeals to the idea of a social contract. What unites those propositions is the fact that they were all developed by doctors, philosophers and scientists of the same bioethical center in the USA, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington. What makes them different are the philosophical assumptions, consciously and unconsciously accepted by their creators at the moment of laying the groundwork of these ethical systems.
The paper is not just about recalling the strengths and weaknesses of the three proposals of medical ethics and about revealing which of them is close to the ethics of Hippocrates, but the goal is also to answer the question whether the ethics of Hippocrates is still valid? Moreover, the goal of the analysis is to find an answer to the second question, i.e. to judge whether medical ethics can be developed without taking into account the philosophy of man and the metaphysics together with the philosophy of God? The paper suggests to give a positive answer to the first question, indicating what should be changed and what should be developed in the ethics of Hippocrates. On the other hand, the paper provides arguments justifying a negative answer to the second question by claiming that building medical ethics without metaphysical and anthropological foundations does not meet the criteria of ethics justified on the grounds of philosophy.
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