Éthique et démocratie

If medical ethics does not want to be reduced to an intellectual play, she has to answer to the question “How to act better?” However, ethics seems ineffective today because of the relativism of the egalitarian opinions. According to this principle, all opinions are equals, then how to choose one without questioning this equality? The main problem lies in the fact that ethics is a choice between several possible actions and that commits the subject who chooses and acts accordingly. It thus exists a difficulty between the essential subjectivity of ethics and the visible reject of this subjectivity. This reject expresses a way of thinking particular to what Tocqueville calls “the social democratic condition”. Beyond the political system, democracy proposes a mode of relationship which is not marked by aristocratic hierarchy any more but characterized by equality. One of the consequences of this evolution is that the authority of an opinion does not result from the quality of the one who expresses it but of the number of people who defends it, what leads in search of a universal ethics. Nevertheless, ethics remains a subjective matter: the choice by a subject of a set of value or of a particular action. This necessary subjectivity has to bring us to rethink an ethics of choice, and thus an ethics of identity beyond the good or the evil.