JellyBean 049 with Julian Savulescu FOAMethics

I have a dilemma. It is this; almost all of my ethics are a bunch of poorly thought out lies and assumptions. What am I going to do about it? Perhaps I should ask the Uehiro Chair of Practical Ethics from Oxford, Professor Julian Savulescu My ethics are crap. Your ethics are probably crap too. If you think your ethics are definitely not crap then the aforementioned probability just shot up to somewhere very near 1. If you think Ethics in Medicine are very simple, or even dull, you haven’t thought about them enough. The more you think about them the harder they get. When I was taught ethics as a student it wasn’t too inspiring. As I butted up against ethical issues as a clinician it was inspiring. How can I not care about a right to life or a right to death, a right to choose or the lack thereof?Lets think about how we learn medicine.Traditionally we learn medicine from great big textbooks, lectures by established experts and by an apprenticeship model as a clinical student and continuing as a junior doctor/nurse/paramedic. That means that if you didn’t love ethics as a student you would have learned most of it on the job as an apprentice. The person who taught you may well have learned it the same way. My favourite teacher from my early days as a doctor was my boss, Professor Robert Cohen.Prof Cohen was a hero of mine. He was a calm and diplomatic genius. I certainly learned ethics and more from him. He would have learned from his teachers. He was a junior doctor in Lon...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: JellyBean Medical Ethics #FOAMethics ad hominem Julian Savulescu Professor Robert Cohen Source Type: blogs