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Justification in Ethics

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Part of the book series: Philosophy and Medicine ((PHME,volume 32))

Abstract

Normative ethics is believed by some to be on shaky ground, mainly because two aspects of ethical justification have seemed resistant to solution. One problem concerns how to reason validly from conflicting ethical principles to case resolution. It has been claimed that contemporary normative ethics offers no satisfactory basis for weighing such principles[17]. The other problem involves identifying the ultimate grounds of moral judgments. It has been asserted that the various time-honored theories of normative ethics are uniformly without foundation and that, consequently, we appear unable to arrive at a systematic knowledge of good and evil [21]. In this paper I hope to show that normative ethics — specifically, medical ethics — is indeed viable, that it has substance. I shall attempt to do this by suggesting a method of justification that seems to handle these two problems adequately.

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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Strong, C. (1988). Justification in Ethics. In: Brody, B.A. (eds) Moral Theory and Moral Judgments in Medical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2715-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2715-5_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7723-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-009-2715-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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