The Good of Patients and the Good of Society: Striking a Moral Balance

The relationship between the good of individual patients and the special good is examined when they are in conflict. The proposition is advanced that the ethical resolution of such conflicts requires an ethic of social medicine comparable to the existing ethic of clinical medicine. Comparing and contrasting the obligations clinicians incur under both aspects of the ethics of medicine is propadeutic to any ordering of priorities between them. The suggested partition of obligations between patient good and the common good is applicable beyond medicine to the other health professions.