Abstract

We thank our commentators for their thoughtful responses to our paper1 covering among other issues the relationships of ethics law and professional codes, the tensions between ethical universalism and cultural relativism and the phenomenon of moral judgement required when ethical norms conflict, including the norms of patient care versus obligations to others both now and in the future. Although the comments deserve more extensive discussion, in what follows we respond briefly to specific aspects of each commentary and remind readers that professional codes of ethics are necessarily brief and that the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) explicitly refers to the World Medical Association’s (WMA) mutually concordant and far more extensive ‘body of policies’.2 Sarela raises a fundamental and, as stated in the commentary, unresolved debate: ‘should ethics shape law or is it the converse’?3 We understand the ‘global medical ethos’ represented in the WMA’s revised ICoME to be firmly embedded in the assumption that ethics should shape law and that only where laws are so shaped do people governed by them have an ethical obligation to obey them. For the medical profession, laws permitting participation in torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading practices and punishments are categorically unethical, and therefore, doctors must not facilitate or participate in them—difficult as it may be for some doctors in some regions or environments to act accordingly. Schantz and Mansoori claim that ‘if a code of ethics is an act of professional self-regulation and professional self-regulation is community-dependent, then a code of ethics cannot be …