Return to... Development of a Good Physician

Virtue and character are neither purely subjective nor strictly ideal categories. Objective standards for both can be derived from the very nature of the doctor/patient relationship. Sometimes, however, these standards function as ideals, serving more as goals toward which human conduct points but never attains (except in instances of saintly and supererogatory acts). Although the distinction between concrete moral standards and ethical ideals is real, it is not always easy to draw the line between the two. Parents, for example, feel obligated to conduct which, outside the parental commitment, would certainly be an ideal form of love and care. The same is true of doctors who sometimes feel obliged to heroic conduct toward their patients and generally are obliged to higher virtue than a nonprofessional persons. Rather than being beyond human accomplishment, ideals are very much a part of even ordinary behavior, in that our ordinary acts are modified by that to which we aspire. Ideals impinge on life and this is especially true in medicine.

Every human being, for example, is under moral obligation to respect others, to help them, to keep promises and secrets, and to be truthful, but the doctor is obliged to go beyond normal expectations in relationships with patients. By profession, the doctor is bound to higher ideals and higher virtues because of the nature of the medical relationship. Not unlike what is expected of the priesthood, people rightly expect more of the doctor. Virtue is not disassociated from objective standards of conduct, but higher standards of professional conduct require higher virtue and greater personal effort in character formation.

Virtue considerations are justified today because many of the issues facing physicians do not lend themselves to objective analysis and discrete solutions. Many problems not only lack solutions, but draw doctors into moral situations in ways which cannot be sorted out with objective norms. Doctors have to take action in clinical situations without being able to identify all of the objective | facts, let alone the objective rules for the right thing to do. Conflicts often develop within families and between families and doctors that simply cannot be solved by following set rules anymore than the problems of aging? or lost love, or death can be handled by rules or rights. These existential situations call for responses more along the line of cultivated attitudes, and habits; that is virtue and character responses.

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H O M E ~ D O N A T I O N S ~ E M A I L

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This page was last updated on January 7th, 2002.