Experiments on Human Beings

Extract

In one way or another the theory and practice of modern medicine is confronting us with many dilemmas, chiefly, though not exclusively, of a moral character; the transplantation of organs, abortion, and euthanasia are examples, and closely associated with these are more obviously conceptual problems such as the definition of death and, for that matter, of life itself. Contemporary moral philosophers have been strangely silent on these matters, and have been content to leave the field to lawyers and churchmen and those few medical men both able and willing to reflect upon their practices. (I think it is fair to say that the attitude of the profession as a whole is exemplified by the physician who recently dismissed a journalist's question about how he decided which patients were to receive kidney dialysis and which not, with the remark ‘I'm not a moralist, I'm a doctor’.)