The third-party era can be blamed for the host of legal restrictions and terrors now visited upon the practice of medicine, and the transformation of the field from a gentle fraternity of practitioners to a network of bureaucratic organizations, employing the physicians and operating for the sake of the stockholders. This will not be a simple job. The fourth commitment is the simplest. The professional is enjoined, as part of the profession, to remember the common good, to recall the duty to the society at large. The ethicist is pre-eminently enjoined to bear that duty in mind.
Applied ethics is the discipline committed to ask that question.
We have seen that the three do not operate certainly and automatically and that their application in any given case can be a matter of agonizing conflict and indecision. The capstone commitment of the field of applied ethics is the articulation of the indecision and the resolution of the conflict, which can only occur, in each case, with full and free discussion. The field of applied ethics is the legitimate, and most appropriate, heir of that Socratic tradition and of the conversation he started. We have made a decent start, but it will take continued dedication to prove ourselves worthy of our inheritance.