ABSTRACT
Bioethics is often seen as an instance of 'quandary ethics’ of which the purpose is to provide guidelines for making difficult decisions: decisions for which there are no precedents arising from a pre-technological age. Deep caring is an engagement along both the horizontal and vertical axes of author's model. It is an engagement with the world, with the future and with others, but, given the vertical axis, it is also an engagement the innate purpose or function of which is the constitution of our integration as whole persons. A generalist holds that a moral judgement or decision takes the form of a deduction from general principles or rules, while a particularist stresses the sensitive attention that a moral agent should give to the morally salient features of the specific situation. These approaches need not be mutually exclusive, but there is an issue in descriptive moral psychology as to which takes priority.
