Are there absolute moral obligations towards finite goods?

a critique of "teleological ethics" and of the destruction of bioethics through consequentialism

pp. 305-348

in: Josef Seifert, The philosophical diseases of medicine and their cure I, Berlin, Springer, 2004

Abstract

Even if we recognize the crucial significance of moral values and resist any form of ethical relativism and nihilism, as well as any fideistic" secular ethical agnosticism"—as we have done in the preceding chapters—there are still many forms of ethical systems that likewise reject relativism and skepticism but otherwise take completely opposite stances when it comes to the question which medical ethics physicians and hospitals should adopt today. In the present chapter, we will deal critically with a position in medical ethics that, while not denying objective moral values of human acts, reduces them in some way to the indirect values these actions possess in virtue of bringing about consequences different from the acts themselves. This position judges the moral quality of human acts simply by a calculus of consequences and—applying the principle of proportionalism—seeks to weigh these consequences, in order to determine the morally right or wrong (good or evil) character of human acts. If adopted, this position changes traditional medical ethics radically.