Particularizing an Internal Morality of Physical Therapy

Abstract

Abstract While the American Physical Therapy Association has upheld a code of ethics since 1935, the philosophical underpinnings of physical therapist practice have yet to be robustly explicated. Theoretical work in the field of philosophy of medicine can be engaged to study physical therapist practice. Modifying the phenomenological and teleological framework of Edmund Pellegrino, a physician and prominent bioethicist, the purpose of this theoretical paper is to particularize Pellegrino’s philosophy of medicine to construct an internal morality of physical therapy. Acknowledging that the internal morality of health care professions is founded in the relationship between a patient and a health care professional, this paper analyzes the nature and telos, or end, of physical therapy through 3 phenomena of physical therapy—the fact of disability, the act of profession, and the act of physical therapy. This paper claims that, rather than medicine’s clinical truth of a good treatment decision, physical therapy’s clinical truth is a good process that capacitates patients. This relational approach to an internal morality robustly underpins a philosophy and ethics of physical therapy.