Principlism

This chapter compares an account of common morality with the account of morality presented by Beauchamp and Childress in their book, The Principles of Biomedical Ethics. It offers a general critique of principlism, as well as of the first three of their four principles: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. It shows the superiority of the account of morality as an informal public system over their account, which uses four freestanding principles not embedded in any system.