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<p>Contemporary medicine faces a deepening moral crisis marked by burnout, moral distress, and institutional fragmentation. Humanities initiatives have been offered as therapeutic correctives, yet these have not meaningfully addressed the underlying problem: a misunderstanding of what moral work in medicine requires. This essay proposes&#xa0;<i>ethics-as-struggle</i>&#xa0;as a reorientation of clinical ethics away from managerial conflict-resolution and toward a communal, interpretive practice through which medicine’s moral life can be rediscovered. Ethics-as-struggle understands clinical ethics as shared discernment, which reflects an ongoing effort to interpret situations, navigate competing goods, and act faithfully amid uncertainty. Drawing on virtue ethics, hermeneutics, and traditions of practical wisdom, we argue that moral clarity emerges not from procedural solutions but through sustained engagement with ambiguity, vulnerability, and the histories that shape clinical practice. Moreover, we illustrate how this approach can be embodied through “laboratories of struggle,” including interpretive case rounds, narrative re-imagination, and interdisciplinary deliberation within both educational and clinical settings. These practices form clinicians and ethicists capable of perceiving the good, enduring moral difficulty, and acting with and for others. Ethics-as-struggle thus offers not a salve for medicine’s crises but a way of inhabiting medicine as a community of discernment, where practitioners continually rediscover their moral vocation through shared striving.</p>

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Neither Salve nor Solution: Clinical Ethics and the Struggle to Discover the Moral Life of Medicine

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月14日

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  • Jordan Mason,
  • Ashley Moyse

摘要

Contemporary medicine faces a deepening moral crisis marked by burnout, moral distress, and institutional fragmentation. Humanities initiatives have been offered as therapeutic correctives, yet these have not meaningfully addressed the underlying problem: a misunderstanding of what moral work in medicine requires. This essay proposes ethics-as-struggle as a reorientation of clinical ethics away from managerial conflict-resolution and toward a communal, interpretive practice through which medicine’s moral life can be rediscovered. Ethics-as-struggle understands clinical ethics as shared discernment, which reflects an ongoing effort to interpret situations, navigate competing goods, and act faithfully amid uncertainty. Drawing on virtue ethics, hermeneutics, and traditions of practical wisdom, we argue that moral clarity emerges not from procedural solutions but through sustained engagement with ambiguity, vulnerability, and the histories that shape clinical practice. Moreover, we illustrate how this approach can be embodied through “laboratories of struggle,” including interpretive case rounds, narrative re-imagination, and interdisciplinary deliberation within both educational and clinical settings. These practices form clinicians and ethicists capable of perceiving the good, enduring moral difficulty, and acting with and for others. Ethics-as-struggle thus offers not a salve for medicine’s crises but a way of inhabiting medicine as a community of discernment, where practitioners continually rediscover their moral vocation through shared striving.