Why Pellegrino Rejects Rights-Based Medical Ethics

Pellegrino centers the theme of the article on the synergetic relationship between the two dogmas of medical ethics, rights-based and virtue ethics. The main reason Pellegrino rejects rights-based medical ethics in favor of virtuous dealings is simply because according to him, virtue ethics is the most substantial system of ensuring the patient’s rights. It contains the positive aspects of the opposing model, and adds more to it. To put this more specifically, Pellegrino believes that the duty expected of the best physicians should be personal sacrifice and resistance to self-interest. Thus by voiding these potential limitations the doctor is able to better achieve the truest and purest version of medical benevolence and compassion, as has

already previously been prescribed in the various codes of medical ethics. This is by his understanding the truest interpretation of these codes. Thereby, the tier of medical ethics prioritizes virtue actions before the basic duties are to be implemented. The raw form of this message is that ethical sensitivity, whether in the medical community or anywhere, will not be in need to follow a hand written set of rules, as their pure virtue will bring these rules to be self-fulfilling in a superior form than by consciously following the same rules. The most sufficient counter-argument that can be given to this would best be to resort to the topic of the doctor’s duties. The doctor is a part of a profession that requires a heavy load of responsibility, and therefore would not be able to afford to dedicate personal sacrifice to each patient, because that would come to the expense of the other patients. Moreover, the rights-based dogma will ensure that more people in a given society will benefit, and this dogma should be performed exclusively for the grater good of mankind. This is also the reason that there are other medical professions specifically dedicated to fulfilling the duties and virtues that Pellegrino would expect of the doctor to carry out. Pellegrino claims that self-interest is not able to be reconciled with virtuous altruism. This is a philosophical argument that has been refuted far and wide across many fields, and to be short, it can be argued that though there is an incentive structure to perform duties in the medical field, it is nonetheless not impossible to be virtuous as well, since they are not mutually exclusive.