page_title: Principlism
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Principlism / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: georgetown campus picture used for NAIMUN 中文（简体）‎: 乔治城大学
context_page_description: Principlism is an applied ethics approach to the examination of moral dilemmas that is based upon the application of certain ethical principles. This approach to ethical decision-making has been adopted enthusiastically in many different professional fields, largely because it sidesteps complex debates in moral philosophy at the theoretical level.
  Rather than engaging in abstract debate about the best or most appropriate approach at the normative level, principlism is purported to offer a practical method of dealing with real-world ethical dilemmas.
context_section_description: The origins of principlism, as we know it today, are to be found in two influential publications from the late 1970s in the United States.
  The approach was first advocated by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in a document called the "Belmont Report". The Commission came into existence on July 12, 1974 when the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law. After four years of monthly deliberations, the Commission met in February 1976 for four days at the Smithsonian Institution's Belmont Conference Center which resulted in a statement of three basic ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence, and justice, for biomedical and behavioural research.
  The approach was introduced for the second time by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in their book Principles of Biomedical Ethics (1979), in which they state that the following four prima facie principles lie at the core of moral reasoning in health care: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. In the opinion of Beauchamp and Childress, these four principles are part of a "common morality;" an approach that "takes its basic premises directly from the morality shared by the members of society—that is, unphilosophical common sense and tradition." 
  The four principles are sometimes referred to as the Georgetown principles or the Georgetown mantra, so-called because both Beauchamp and Childress were based at Georgetown University when the first edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics was published.
  The principlist approach is derived from normative ethical thought, but it is not aligned to any one single theory. Whilst Beauchamp and Childress claim that these principles are commonly understood and accepted within society—and thus have a broad degree of support—they also assert that they are drawn from two normative ethical traditions: the duty-based moral philosophy (deontological approach) of Immanuel Kant; and the outcome-based (consequentialist) ethics of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
caption: Georgetown University campus
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