Codes and morals: Is there a missing link? (The Nuremberg Code revisited)

Abstract

Codes are a well known and popular but weak form of ethical regulation in medical practice. There is, however, a lack of research on the relations between moral judgments and ethical Codes, or on the possibility of morally justifying these Codes. Our analysis begins by showing, given the Nuremberg Code, how a typical reference to natural law has historically served as moral justification. We then indicate, following the analyses of H. T. Engelhardt, Jr., and A. MacIntyre, why such general moral justifications of codes must necessarily fail in a society of ‘’moral strangers’ Going beyond Engelhardt we argue, that after the genealogical suspicion in morals raised by Nietzsche, not even Engelhardt's "principle of permission" can be rationally justified in a strong sense – a problem of transcendental argumentation in morals already realized by I. Kant. Therefore, we propose to abandon the project of providing general justifications for moral judgements and to replace it with a hermeneutical analysis of ethical meanings in real-world situations, starting with the archetypal ethical situation, the encounter with the Other (E. Levinas).