Abstract

The history of medical and professional ethics has largely been a history of attempts to identify, articulate, and defend principles that explain when and why certain actions, institutions, health care professionals, and particular decisions count as right or wrong, just or unjust, virtuous or vicious. Medical ethics has been dominated by principlism. However, so-called moral particularists have forcefully attacked the dominance of principle-based normative theories. The particularist critique of traditional moral theory derives from the rejection of the claim that the normative content of ethics and medical...