Common morality versus specified principlism: Reply to Richardson

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25 (3):308 – 322 (2000)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In his article 'Specifying, balancing and interpreting bioethical principles' (Richardson, 2000), Henry Richardson claims that the two dominant theories in bioethics - principlism, put forward by Beauchamp and Childress in Principles of Bioethics , and common morality, put forward by Gert, Culver and Clouser in Bioethics: A Return to Fundamentals - are deficient because they employ balancing rather than specification to resolve disputes between principles or rules. We show that, contrary to Richardson's claim, the major problem with principlism, either the original version, or the specified principlism of Richardson, is that it conceives of morality as being composed of free-standing principles, rather than as common morality conceives it, as being a complete public system, composed of rules, ideals, morally relevant features, and a procedure for determining when a rule can be justifiably violated.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The method of 'principlism': A critique of the critique.B. Andrew Lustig - 1992 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 17 (5):487-510.
Specifying, balancing, and interpreting bioethical principles.Henry S. Richardson - 2000 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25 (3):285 – 307.
The Principlism Debate: A Critical Overview.Richard B. Davis - 1995 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 20 (1):85-105.
The hedgehog and the Borg: Common morality in bioethics.John D. Arras - 2009 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 30 (1):11-30.
Perseverations on a critical theme.B. Andrew Lustig - 1993 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 18 (5):491-502.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
89 (#174,844)

6 months
5 (#244,107)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references