Beauchamp vs. Singer
Part of my frustration with the current state of biomedical ethics education is an emphasis on Beauchamp's principlism (beneficience, non-maleficience, autonomy, justice). But such an approach is oftentimes too arbitrary. Beauchamp himself does not give a way to distinguish between which values take priority in which situation -- he only mentions that we ought to specify from principle to application, and then balance the four pillars. In this manner, he does not commit himself to any one theory of normative ethics. He admits that his framework is not a comprehensive theory -- which adds to why we ought not to learn about ethics through principlism first. I view him as spineless, and this attitude of compromise and can be seen in "Principlism and Its Alleged Competitors", where he explains that these approaches are really just saying the same thing as he is -- which is erroneous and seems to place himself above all the other theories (as his went on to become the preemin...