What is medical ethics, and why does medicine need an ethics of its own?

Medical ethics is an applied ethics (Bereichsethik) that asks what is morally required, permitted and acceptable in dealing with human illness and health, both in medicine as the art of healing and as a science. It is needed because patients are vulnerable, dependent on others, want to decide for themselves, and know less than their doctors.

Medical ethics is a domain ethics (Bereichsethik, also "applied ethics"), like business ethics, animal ethics or corporate ethics. Bettina Schöne-Seifert defines it as the part of ethics concerned with "what is morally required, permitted and acceptable, specifically in dealing with human illness and health". Its object is medicine both as the art of healing and as a science.

Why medicine needs it:

• people are vulnerable or ill,
• they need support from others,
• they still want to decide for themselves,
• knowledge is unequally distributed between doctor and patient,
• care is intercultural, interdisciplinary and interprofessional,
• research pushes into delicate areas such as genetics.

Typical questions: must patients be told about all surgical risks, only the frequent ones, or only the serious ones? May patients demand therapies with no proven benefit? Should risk surcharges on insurance premiums encourage healthy behaviour? When may people with dementia be included in a study? Should lawmakers regulate physician-assisted suicide or leave it to the profession?

Go deeper:

• Wikipedia: Medical ethics — history, values and typical conflicts.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Philosophy of Medicine — the concepts of health and disease that medical ethics builds on.