Diagnosing true virtue? Remote scenarios, warranted virtue attributions, and virtuous medical practice

• Published in: Theoretical medicine and bioethics Vol. 37; no. 1; pp. 85 - 96
• Main Author: Oakley, Justin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.02.2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Education; Ethical Theory; Ethics; Ethics, Medical; General Surgery; History of Medicine; Humans; Philosophy; Philosophy of Medicine; Physicians - ethics; Practice Patterns, Physicians' - ethics; Social Perception; Social Values; Theory of Medicine/Bioethics; Virtues; Milgram experiments; Situationism; Moral luck; Friendship; Medical virtues; Virtue ethics; Virtue attribution; Kant

Immanuel Kant argues in the Foundations that remote scenarios are diagnostic of genuine virtue. When agents commonly thought to have a particular virtue fail to exhibit that virtue in an extreme situation, he argues, they do not truly have the virtue at all, and our propensities to fail in such ways...