The Ethical Basis of Medicine

Extract

Ethico-Medical controversy, as exemplified in the recent furore created by the Holy Father’s pronouncement on the natural right to life of the unborn child, is no new thing. More often than not the controversy revolves around problems that are sentimental in essence (the word is not used in any pejorative sense), and which are based upon false antitheses. As the eminent physician and neurologist, Dr F. M. R. Walshe, has acutely observed, ‘all these antitheses arise from the unguarded use of abstraction, and from a false simplification of the welter of things and processes we encounter when we seek to build a philosophy of medicine. If we are to achieve a philosophy we must escape from the fragmentation of ideas that comes of thinking too exclusively in the static terms of classifications.’ Dr Walshe is not concerned in this oration to consider the particular false antithesis of ethics and medicine; he is dealing with medicine in terms of ‘art in science’; but his terms of reference are most significant. ‘The truth is surely that every successive layer of thought in the analysis of nature . . . stops at a halfway house when tracing its ideas back to their basic elements, and is content with ideas of a generality sufficient for its immediate purpose. Yet each remains a field of discourse in its own right; one of the many layers in the palimpsest of natural knowledge, each of which has its own distinguishable intellectual content. Medicine is no exception to this rule. For philosophy alone there is no halfway house, for its ideas aim at a supreme generality. ... Yet we must surely aim at the highest degree of understanding of the foundations of our thoughts and actions. ...’