Agreement

On the day after our ethics committee meeting, my friend KM arranged a grand round on medical ethics - it was largely about patient consent for physical examination.

I will not join the discussion on what we should or should not do. (In general, I hold the belief that there exists very few - if any - things that man definitely should or should not do.) However, standing at the back of the lecture theatre, I was thinking of something else ...

I had a deja vu feeling of listening to the discussion, between our noble council members, on the right of taxi drivers and their customers in making private agreement on the fee.

PS. The two philosophical theories presented in the round was, I suspect deliberately, put in the reverse order. Immanuel Kant dominated the philosophical thinking in continental Europe during mid to late 1700s. Utilitarianism, although first proposed by Jeremy Bentham in late 1700s, only became popular after a book of the same name by John Stuart Mill in 1861.