Professional Medical Ethics

The paper aims to analyse the role of codes of medical ethics (CME) in the plurality of pluralisms affecting the medical profession, patient healthcare and medical liability. CMEs are nowadays gaining growing attention, due to their ability to regulate important aspects of professional conduct, thus complementing the legal framework for various medical issues. The role of CMEs therefore offers a specific perspective from which to study the relationships between individual and collective values, law and medical-scientific evidence, state and professional regulatory systems. After having analysed the legal value of CMEs from a comparative perspective, the present essay sketches some of the most significant and multifaceted interactions between the law and the CME, stressing how professional ethics is at the same time an element of axiological and legal pluralism (“inside” and “outside” the profession) and a tool that (potentially) accommodates pluralism.