Evaluating a virtue ethics approach to moral responsibility and blameworthiness in professional role failures
Justin Oakley1, Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University Monash University 1Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
One way of developing a distinctively virtue ethical account of moral responsibility and agent blameworthiness is by explicating the key concepts of avoidability and foreseeability in terms of what a virtuous agent would be able to avoid and foresee, where this can differ from what ‘reasonably avoidable’ and ‘reasonably foreseeable’ are usually understood to involve.
In the context of medical roles, this account explicates the relevant normative standards for determining moral responsibility and blameworthiness in terms of what a virtuous doctor would have been able to avoid, and what a virtuous doctor would foresee.
A key advantage of appealing to the standard of a virtuous doctor here is that this can provide a more enduring normative standard for moral blameworthiness and moral negligence, than does appealing only to what a reasonable doctor would avoid and foresee.
In this presentation I argue that explicating the normative standard for blameworthiness and moral negligence in medicine in terms of what a virtuous doctor would avoid and foresee provides a more robust normative standard, which has the resources to help practitioners gain a better grasp both of their overarching goal of serving patients’ best interests, and of how any given code of medical ethics may need to change so as to better serve that goal. I also bring out how this approach usefully connects moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and negligence to discussions about the attainability of virtues, and I briefly defend the approach from an important objection.
Biography
Justin Oakley BA, PhD (Philosophy) is Professor and Deputy Director of Monash Bioethics Centre at Monash University. He is Director of the Monash Master of Bioethics course, and author of Morality and the Emotions (Routledge, 1993, 2020), and Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (with Dean Cocking) (Cambridge University Press, 2001).