Dr David Hunter1
1University Of Adelaide, Bellevue Heights, Australia
Biography:
I am a political philosopher by background, originally from New Zealand I have worked as well in Northern Ireland, England and Australia. I am presently based in the School of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Adelaide.
Abstract:
In this paper I am going to suggest, gently, that the content of many medical ethics curriculums do not serve the needs of our medical students all that well. I’m going to argue that this is because we tend to get bogged down in one central important question – what should we do? This is a vital and important question for medical professionals to be able to answer – but unfortunately knowing what we should do is only part of the struggle there are two other equally important aspects of being able to practice as ethical practitioners and these tend not to be addressed directly in medical ethics teaching. These are firstly the question of how do we do what we should do? And -particularly when a case has an unhappy ending – how do we live with our role in that outcome?
I will suggest I hope somewhat provocatively that specific teaching is needed to help address these issues which is beyond the scope of what we typically teach – in particular drawing on various Asian Philosophical approaches can be useful in these spaces. Likewise teaching methods might need to be altered to help students develop these capacities.