Ethics and the Christian lives of clinicians

Abstract

While ethics is a very important aspect of medical care, it is important to note that ethical mistakes are most liable to be made when ethics becomes a pure abstraction. Reality comes before ethics. Ethics results from the encounter between free persons and the reality around them. Illness and injury are an important part of the human reality. Medical ethics is rooted in the encounter that one free person (the clinician) has with the reality of another person (the patient), whose freedom is limited by the stark realities of illness, injury, and death. Attending to the cry of the real is the surest road to truly good medical care. In fact, the Parable of the Good Samaritan can be interpreted not so much as a story about people’s failure to obey moral rules as a story about the need to attend to the real and to respond appropriately. Good clinicians, like the Good Samaritan, begin by paying attention to reality.