Medicine and the ethical conditions of modernity

Medical practitioners have understood the technical, or scientific, aspect of their work in conventional, positivistic terms, and in ethical debates they have tended to draw on the three classical sources of Kantian moral theory, utilitarianism and Aristotelian ethics. In the past 25 years or so, the ethical content of medicine has come to be understood in terms of the formulations arising from a cluster of theories known as ‘bioethics’ or ‘biomedical ethics’. Microethics is an important component of both clinical medicine and research. The philosophical interrogations of G. W. F. Hegel, S. Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and others raised doubts about the ethical project of modernity, although they failed to supplant it. Bioethics is also vulnerable in relation to the second criticism—that of abstract universalism. The microethical domain, despite its unavoidable presence in any ethical interaction, has been remarkably neglected in theoretical discussions about ethics.