Meno asks Socrates a question left unanswered: “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or practice, or if by neither teaching nor practice, whether it comes to us by nature or some other way?” (Meno 70 a). Aristotle felt that virtue can be taught.
If virtue can be taught, (and it is my contention that it can and it should) particularly to students of medicine who will be dealing with the lives of people whose illness rendered them vulnerable: how can this be done and will it survive modern times?
If virtue can be taught, (and it is my contention that it can and it should) particularly to students of medicine who will be dealing with the lives of people whose illness rendered them vulnerable: how can this be done and will it survive modern times?
Picture: Triumph of Virtue over Vice Paolo Veronese about 1554-1556Oil on canvas, 295 x 165 cmVenice, Palazzo Ducale, Stanza dei Tre Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci
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Doctors and medical students must learn virtues. If they only study theories, they will forget them. If they become good, they will not forget.
ReplyDelete1) Role-modelling
ReplyDeleteUnforunately this does not survive modern times in which the number of medical doctors lacking the virtues we talk about totally exceed the number of those having them.
Solution: ethical behavior and patient interaction should be a strict criterion for recruitment of MD's into institutions, particularly large medical centers that train medical students or have residency programs.
Barriers: Very often, the ones at the top of the pyramid are the corrupt! And there is no objective authority to judge AND act upon the values of in-house physicians.
2- Medical Education:
Curricula of medical schools are responsible for giving medical ethics the weight it deserves as part of medical education, and not marginalizing it as a less important topic than the actual medical sciences and skills.
As easy as this might sound, it is one of the most difficult to achieve in medical education.
It requires large credit for medical ethics hours, emphasis on interactive methodologies, positive and negative rewards, among many other strategies.
This has better hope in surviving modern life than role-modelling.
Virtue can and must be taught. It cannot be acquired by nature. Or esle, why aren't we all good or all bad?
ReplyDeleteit's what we are taught to believe in and what we are exposed to in our daily lives; along with the way we respond to it, that makes us good people in general.
Doctors must be aware that the decisions they make will have an impact not only on the lives of their patients, but also on the lives of their beloved ones.
To teach virtue, is to expose doctors to as many contraversial cases as possible. See how they will react, in theory at first. How hard will they protect their patients, how far would they go to respect their willingness to fight
for their lives, and sometimes, their willingness to escape the torture their illness got them into.
Virtue by itself is controversial, is it about respecting others' decisions about their own lives or respect the oath the doctor has made
which might be the exact opposite of the patient's will?
Now whether virtue can survive modern times... Even the Hippocratic Oath might not be surviving it recently. With the questions of abortion, euthanasia, sex pre-selection, right to life, and so many other issues that "modern" societies
believe that humans have the right to decide about their own lives, while forgetting about their right to life itself have put doctors
in a fight between life and the right to escape it.
Most of the times, doctors act based on their own believes, on what they all think is a virtue.