Quotes About Ethics

The professionals and institutions we turn to should...not confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

Josiah Royce

People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good. For, unlike sadness or anger or even love, it is fundamentally a moral emotion

I had to wonder if we were right to operate on him.

In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality.

In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop the natural, internal processes that do so

was willing to do what everyone else was extremely reluctant to do: to judge (or, as he prefers to say, to "assess") a fellow doctor.

The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

But now he was adamant about doing "everything." David did not dare argue with him.

pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery but not to take the time required to sort out when to do so is unwise.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once.

an average of $94,000 during the last year of life with a metastatic breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with $12,000-a-month chemotherapy, $4,000-a-day intensive care, $7,000-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and few are good at knowing when to stop.

But I said nothing of such things when I asked my patient's permission to do his line.

Ronald Dworkin

It is a reality of medicine that choosing to not do something—to not order a test, to not give an antibiotic, to not take a patient to the operating room—is far harder than choosing to do it.

1. Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can't eat on your own?

Ezekiel and Linda Emanuel

The main objection to killing people as a punishment...is that killing people is wrong

judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish: it can only add a second atrocity to the original one.

I was shocked to read that Lord Ferrers, a Home Office minister, when booked for speeding and presented with a £40 fixed penalty with three penalty points, them wrote to the Suffolk police to thank them for catching him. There is a sickness in England. If his lordship appreciates punishment so much, it was unkind just to fine him. He should have been caned, with his trousers down, by the side of the road.

The rest of us learned the simple lesson - invaluable in a bureaucratic society - that there is no moral or practical obligation to tell the truth when filling in forms.

That we were dying, that we were killing our world - that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters.