The Bioethical–Deontological, Professional and Moral Integrity of Medical Practice

Abstract

Once marked as a noble scientific discipline, contemporary biomedicine has been accused of neglecting moral–bioethical issues. The practice of biomedicine has suffered apparently due to progressive technological exhibitionism: it has been eroded by the depersonalization and routinization of the humanistic approach and infected by the metastases of utilitarian ethics. Due to the confusion caused by bioethical pluralism, moral relativism and the anomie of legal normativism, a certain deviation from normative mandatory principles is evident in the field of medicine, and these are compromising the professional and ethical integrity of the medical profession. Because of the vagueness of deontological norms, medical progress — which has been enormous — has seen the gradual trivialization of legislative guidelines — which are inconsistent — and a decadence of the fundamental principles of the humanistic approach in health care today. This opens the space for susceptibility to un/ethical actions which is made possible through modern medical achievements and allows for the inequality of social access as well as the stigmatization of patients according to their social class, thus discarding the basic principles of general ethical universalism and denying accessibility of health service subsidiarism on a wider social plane. In order that the in/sensitive, un/professional and un/ethical discreditation and the morally destructive challenges posed to medical practice may be overcome, one must reevaluate the fundamental character of medical professionalism and the foundedness of virtue ethics in conscientiousness, such that the field of medicine may be infused with the spirituality of an unbribable Christian identity which would safeguard the bio–ethical, deontological, professional and moral integrity of healthcare givers.