A Proposal for a Virtue-based Medical Ethics Education Model for Health Professionalism

Abstract

This commentary argues that although the author of the target article correctly characterizes the contemporary understanding of medical professionalism as guideline-driven, he errs in classifying negative guidelines as ‘normative ethics’ and proposing ‘positive ethics’ as an alternative. The problem with what the author calls ‘guideline-driven’ medical professionalism is that it understands ethics only in terms of its ‘institutional tier,’ which is one of three recognized tiers in ethics terminology. To respond to this problem, it is necessary to complement the ‘individual tier” of ethics, which internalizes the normativity of the first-person perspective and motivates ethical practice, with other elements. To this end, this commentary proposes to construct a virtue-based medical ethics education model, one that is analogous to the scientific virtue model. The construction of this virtue-based medical ethics education model involves three steps: (a) developing a list of medical virtues, (b) exploring how medical virtues can be taught, and (c) holding medical virtue education workshops. Just as the scientific virtue model has proven its practical effectiveness through three steps, it is expected that the virtue-based medical ethics education model proposed in this article will play an important role in overcoming the crisis in Korean healthcare.