March 10, 2009
Ethical divergence
Practical Ethics: Bad doctor, bad prosecutor or bad laws? - I blog about the current tragic affair about the arrested doctor at the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital. The problem is IMHO the divergence between medical practice and law, and I blame the politicians.
In a wider sense the real problem is that there are so many areas of crucial importance in our society that are closed to the outside society that they run the risk of diverging seriously from legal or public ethical norms. Some may deliberately avoid contact, like the intelligence community. Others are isolated by technical complexity or social avoidance/closedness (like both medicine and much of the software world). Some might be isolated by a generational lack of understanding or shifting norms, such as the file sharing community. Maybe a natural effect of a more complex and rapidly changing society is that we end up with wildly divergent pockets that occasionally cause surprise or a legal stink when it becomes apparent what they have been doing.