Morality, ethics, and deontics

pp. 555-565

in: Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh, Handbook of analytic philosophy of medicine, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

The subject of our discussion in what follows is not medical ethics or bioethics. Rather, we shall look a bit further than usual into medical values. By so doing, to the long-standing debate over whether medicine is a science or an art, we shall add a third option. Specifically, we shall endeavor to show that medicine is a deontic discipline and therefore requires a field of inquiry which will be referred to as medical deontics .