Introduction

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary collection of essays on ethics and medical error using as its starting point the 2003 case of a teenaged girl who died because of a transplant mistake. After providing some background on the patient safety movement and explaining the foundational ethical principles for biomedical ethics, this chapter considers the difficulty of assigning moral responsibility for medical error, given that error is latent in all complex systems. It goes on to articulate other challenging issues for ethical assessment of medical error and its aftermath using the opening case study for illustration. The chapter closes with an overview of the book’s organization and scope and briefly summarizes each chapter in the collection.