ABSTRACT
Learning about ethics has been recognised as being of high priority in medical training: some of our population of doctors have sworn the Hippocratic Oath, but most have not. These are some of the moral theories that have constituted ethical thinking over the centuries, from which doctors and many health professionals take their lead. Man has always struggled with distinguishing 'right' decisions from those that are 'wrong'. The discipline of moral philosophy is founded on this struggle and its content feeds modern considerations of medical ethics. One of the difficulties with medical ethics is the attachment of the word 'medical', almost as if the observance and understanding of ethics in the practice of medicine is somehow different, separate, from the rest of human morality. The bulk of medical teaching trains doctors to work according to evidence-based clinical protocols for diagnosis and treatment. Introducing an ethical dimension into everyday medical practice requires them to look at their work from another perspective.
