What is the aim of medical ethics?

• A. To replace clinical guidelines
• B. To apply ethical principles to medicine
• C. To maximize profits
• D. To enforce legal penalties

Answer: (B)

At its heart, medical ethics is about applying ethical principles to clinical practice to guide decisions and actions in patient care. This means using core ideas like autonomy (respecting patients’ right to make their own choices), beneficence (acting in the patient’s best interest), nonmaleficence (avoiding harm), justice (fairness in distributing care), and confidentiality to navigate real-world dilemmas. Ethics helps you weigh what patients want, what will benefit them, what could cause harm, and how to allocate limited resources fairly, especially when guidelines, laws, or personal values clash. It guides reasoning and justification for decisions, complementing clinical guidelines rather than replacing them. It’s not about profits or punishment—those belong to other realms—while ethics focuses on what should be done for the patient and the profession as a whole.