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Anchor and Course for the Modern Ship of Casuistry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Malcolm Macpherson-Smith
Malcolm Macpherson-Smith
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where he Is qualified as a principal in General Practice, and Is currently an assistant professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School
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Extract

So much philosophical theory is irrelevant for the practice of ethics! How many wasted volumes of tortuous arguments and counterarguments have been written in search of an elusive theory of ethics that could be applied deductively, without modification, to produce “correct” answers under all circumstances to any ethical problem? The practice of ethics is much closer to the common sense casuistry approach outlined by Jonsen and Toulmin, in which we work from. intuitively grasped, paradigm, cases by way of analogy to provide presumptive answers to more complex problems. Alasdair Maclntyre argued however that we cannot trust such individualistic intuitive judgements. Thus we should start by looking at his critique of modern ethics.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , Summer 1994 , pp. 391 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

Notes

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