ABSTRACT
Why do those of us who write about bioethics often feel it is necessary to reassure our readers that the cases which are presented are "real" or "actual"? Tom Beauchamp and Laurence McCullough, in the preface to Medical Ethics: The Moral Responsibilities of Physicians, state that each of the cases they discuss "is based on actual events."1 In Cases in Bioethics, Carol Levine and Robert Veatch note in their introduction that all the cases presented "are based on real events."2 And in the acknowledgments to Mortal Choices, Ruth Macklin mentions that "all material is taken from actual cases."3 These declarations of authenticity, I suspect, merely reflect a general distrust in the bioethics discipline of the "hypothetical" or "fictional" case. If there is any strongly held article of faith within the discipline, it is that bioethicists deal with the Aristotelian messy "real world" and that academic philosophers spend their time in a Platonic domain of unclouded abstraction. Bioethicists confront actual cases; academic philosophers contemplate imagined ones.
