The Province of Morality

There is a tendency - especially when con­sidering professional ethics (and the ethics of the life-sciences as part of this) - to become very focussed and narrow. A good example is the fixation on the 4 putative principles of medical ethics that were sug­gested as central in the Aids and Bioethics Conference recently held in Adelaide:
BENEVOLENCE ; AUTONOMY ; NON-MALEFICENCE ; JUSTICE

While important as guidelines, these can seem rather bloodless and abstract when taken simply as principles to govern prac­tice, and removed from a deeper considera­tion of their connection with motivation.
This tendency to concentrate on ethical principles is typical of bioethical debate, much as a concentration on the idea of rights is typical of more public argument about the treatment of everything from neonates to dolphins.
Equally, many people who derive their moral inspiration from Christianity (or more par­ticularly from the life of Jesus) see the ideas of love, compassion and charity as central to their ethics and supplanting almost eve­rything else. Others whose moral inspira­tion is more closely tied to the Hebrew tradition look to the Mosaic Commandments as the core elements in morality: a form of divinely ordained legal and moral code.
One can go on and on here picking out features of ethical thought that some among us see as the central point around which all other things move. The image of the moral universe as fixed and immutable within us was one that Kant (1724-1804) took very seriously. He saw the starry skies above and the moral law within as similarly regular and firmly governed.
However at the end of the day there appear to be a bewildering array of different atti­tudes towards morality: some religious, some secular, and each stressing a differ­ent feature as crucial. This impression of di­versity extends into moral philosophy: that area of thought where people reflect on our ethical judgements and try to give some systematic account of their nature.