Courses on ethics in the faculty of medicine: A route from descriptive ethics to moral norms

Summary

The paper discusses a topic of lecturing a philosophical discipline to medical students that are oriented towards a science in the broad context of the position of medicine as a borderline discipline between science and arts. Both traditional ethical problems regarding to conscience, liberty and dignity of human beings and new questions asked by contemporary biological medicine are reflected. To solve the latter group of the problems seems to be much more complicated especially because it is not possible to bank on the reflections of philosophers of past decades or centuries. In the final part of the paper there is a brief review of the activity of the Institute of Medical Ethics in the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University.

Key words:
medical ethics – positivism – psychosomatics – education – normative ethics