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Applied Ethics · Chapter 10

The Accountability Machine

Codes supply the language; licensure boards supply the consequences. In Mode 1, drop one dilemma into three codes and watch them disagree about whose harm counts most. In Mode 2, set the facts of a nursing case and walk the board’s discipline ladder rung by rung.
Choose a dilemma
Codes are not neutral
Percival wrote the 1803 ancestor of the modern medical code to settle a turf war among physicians, surgeons and apothecaries at the Manchester Infirmary. The AMA borrowed from him in 1847. A code is a moral document and a political one at the same time.

The dilemma