ABSTRACT
While I have a deal of sympathy with Brewin’s grouse about this teaching on the matter of truthfulness, I (being myself an ‘academic ethicist’) do not think so well of his solution – of banishing the ethicists. Rather, I think, his complaint points up the need for a more thorough, probing, study of truthfulness, what it involves and the implications for medical and nursing practice: the very purpose of our present enquiry! If the teaching that (some) academic ethicists advocate yields absurd guidance (as becomes apparent to those who see what happens when their colleagues try to ‘apply’ it), there must be something amiss with the teaching or with how it is being interpreted.
