Bioetický valčík

• Authors: Fabio Bacchini

Title variants

EN

A bioethical waltz

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

In Milan Kundera’s novel Farewell Waltz we come across a doctor who is immoral: indifferent, negligent of privacy, manipulative. He is only loyal and available towards his male friends; since his patients are all women (he works in a centre for the treatment of female infertility), we can presume that this is a case of misogyny. However, the truth is deeper. The doctor slides into immorality when he indul­ges in generalisation, which makes him pay no attention to single individuals but to an abstraction called “humanity”. Only when, thanks to friendship, he regains a particularising outlook, he becomes morally unexceptionable again. Kundera warns us against generalising medicine and describes the apparent paradox of a doctor who does not respect his patients when treating them and making them happy, and instead respects them when he exposes them to the risk of death or asks unreasonable, unconventional favours of them.

Keywords

EN

Milan Kundera; ethics

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS
• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Filosofický časopis (Philosophical Journal)
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 57
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 111-123
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Fabio Bacchini

• Filosofický časopis, redakce, Filosofický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i., Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic