Robert M. Veatch

Professor of Medical Ethics, Georgetown University

Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics: The Point of Conflict

In his lecture, Veatch challenges the idea that the Hippocratic Oath and professionally based ethics serve as a convincing foundation for medical ethics. Arguing that the Hippocratic Oath is so problematic that it should be ‘unacceptable to any thinking person’, he asserts that it is incompatible with both religious and secular traditions. Veatch urges the medical community to look for an alternative moral theory around which religious and secular traditions can converge.

Biography

Robert M. Veatch was born on 22 January 1939 in Utica, New York. A bioethics pioneer and the first Research Associate at The Hastings Center, he was an ethics consultant in legal matters, including the case of Karen Ann Quinlan. After his time at the Hastings Centre, he moved to the Kennedy Institute in 1979 as Senior Research Scholar and Professor or Medical Ethics. In 1981, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown, retiring in 2015, though he continued to research in his office until the COVID-19 pandemic.

Awarded honorary doctorates from Creighton and Union, he won a National Book Award for Case Studies in Medical Ethics from the National Medical Writers Association. In 1981, he served on the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical Research. Editor of Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, his important works include Case Studies in Nursing Ethics (1987), The Patient-Physician Relation (1991), Ethical Issues in Death and Dying (1995), Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Medical Ethics (1997), The Basics of Bioethics (2000), Transplantation Ethics (2000), and Patient Heal Thyself (2008).

Published/Archival Resources

These lectures have not been published and no archival information is available..