title: Ethics in Medicine: Virtue, Vice and Medicine
author: Jennifer Jackson
description: "This book concerns much good sense. Indeed, good sense is as much a methodological concern of the book as it is a way of characterizing its findings."<br /><i><b>Philosophical Quarterly</b></i>
zlib_text: INVERSIONS
  IAIN M. BANKS
  PROLOGUE
  The only sin is selfishness. So said the good Doctor. When she first expressed this
  opinion I was young enough initially to be puzzled and then to be impressed at what I
  took to be her profundity.
  It was only later, in my middle-age, when she was long gone from us, that I began to
  suspect that the opposite is just as true. Arguably there is a sense in which selfishness is
  the only true virtue, and therefore that — as opposites are given to cancelling each other
  out — selfishness is finally neutral, indeed valueless, outside a supporting moral context.
  In later years still — my maturity, if you will, or my old age, if you wish — I have with
  some reluctance again come to respect the Doctor's point of view, and to agree with her,
  tentatively at least, that selfishness is the root of most evil, if not all.
  Of course I always knew what she meant. That it is when we put our own interests before
  those of others that we are most likely to do wrong, and that th