Practicing Medicine and Ethics
Integrating Wisdom, Conscience, and Goals of Care

This book explores medicine, ethics and the challenge of moral diversity in health care.

Lauris Christopher Kaldjian (Author)

9781107012165, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 May 2014

296 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.53 kg

'Lauris Kaldjian offers a rich exploration of the roles that conscience, integrity, and moral reasoning can play in promoting health care that is both medically and ethically sound. As physicians face ever-increasing challenges and pressures, Kaldjian provides an astute synthesis of the 'practical wisdom' that doctors need to navigate those challenges and pressures.' David Orentlicher, Indiana University Schools of Law and Medicine

To practice medicine and ethics, physicians need wisdom and integrity to integrate scientific knowledge, patient preferences, their own moral commitments, and society's expectations. This work of integration requires a physician to pursue certain goals of care, determine moral priorities, and understand that conscience or integrity require harmony among a person's beliefs, values, reasoning, actions, and identity. But the moral and religious pluralism of contemporary society makes this integration challenging and uncertain. How physicians treat patients will depend on the particular beliefs and values they and other health professionals bring to each instance of shared decision making. This book offers a framework for practical wisdom in medicine that addresses the need for integrity in the life of each health professional. In doing so, it acknowledges the challenge of moral pluralism and the need for moral dialogue and humility as professionals fulfil their obligations to patients, themselves, and society.

1. Medicine as a goal-directed, moral practice
2. Virtue ethics
3. Practical wisdom in medicine
4. Conscience and its relation to practical wisdom
5. The authority, fallibility, and normative reach of conscience
6. Conscience as integrity
7. The challenge and inescapability of religious pluralism
8. Implications of moral pluralism for public dialogue and professional practice
9. Conscientious objection and conscientious practice
10. An integrity-centered framework for practical wisdom in medicine.

Subject Areas: Doctor/patient relationship [MBDP], Medical ethics & professional conduct [MBDC], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]