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The so-called principlism of Beauchamp and Childress refers, on the one hand, to a common morality, and, on the other hand to a coherentist strategy of justifying moral judgements. However, when it comes to scenarios of concrete moral relevance in medical contexts, the lack of clarity of principlism has been significantly criticized. This paper discusses the problem of inference as the underlying reason for this lack of clarity. For this purpose, we, first, sketch out various modes of inference (i. e. induction, deduction, and abduction). Second, we investigate the importance of abductive reasoning for coherentist accounts of justification in ethics. The added value of the study for the medical-ethical discourse consists in a better understanding of the conceptual interrelations underlying issues of applying ethical principles in medicine.