ABSTRACT

One cannot easily imagine Aristotle or the great humanistic therapeutic philosophers of Greece being very impressed by health care ethics today. Their questions about life and practice were developed out of a total view of human existence and its possibilities. It is difficult to think of their being content to deliver or take a module in procedural health care ethics, however well they might be paid, however grandly titled their chairs and however exalted their place in the academy. For such thinkers, the particular and the problematic had to be situated within a much larger picture about potential and meaning that covered all of life and the entirety of social and institutional arrangements. This breadth of vision seems to be singularly, if inadvertently, lacking in established health care ethics today.1