Medical Ethics Today: Its Practice and Philosophy

Abstract

BMA Ethics, Science and Information Division BMJ, £12.95, pp 374 ISBN 0-7279-0817-0 Alisdair Macyntyre in After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory has argued from a historical perspective that moral theory is in a degenerate state. The kind of synthesis achieved by Aristotle and Aquinas could not survive the Enlightenment. We are now left with a ragbag of principles and assumptions that have lost their original framework. The order of the day is emotivism, which is based on the conclusion that all attempts to produce an objective morality founded on …