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.
Publisher
The Korean Society for Medical Ethics