Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver Transplantation

Abstract

The dominant model for bioethical inquiry taught in medical schools is that of principlism. The heritage of this methodology can be traced to the Enlightenment project of generating a universalizable justification for normative morality arising from within the individual, rational agent. This project has been criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre who suggests that its failure has resulted in a fragmented and incoherent contemporary ethical framework characterized by fundamental intractability in moral debate. This incoherence implicates principlist conceptions of bioethics. Medical ethics as practiced, though, is partially in keeping with teleological alternatives to principlism. Nonetheless, the hegemony of principlism threatens to harm the practice of good medicine whenever it is used to provide justification for the sanction or prohibition of practices, despite not being equipped to grant moral authority to such justifications. An example of this failure and its resulting harm is expressed in the growing obsolescence of living donor liver transplantation.

Keywords: MacIntyre; bioethics; living donor liver transplantation; medical education; principlism.