ABSTRACT
Medical ethics has not always been friendly territory for the social sciences; at least a few sociologists who have wandered across disciplinary borders for a tour report back on unfriendly natives. Medical ethics—or, more precisely, what might be called philosophical approaches to medical ethics—and social science approaches to medical ethics are characterized by very different purposes. Nonetheless, philosophical medical ethics is fairly explicidy a branch of applied philosophy, and even its grandest abstractions are put to the service of formulating procedures and policies useful to "problems of therapeutic practice, health care delivery, and medical and biological research." There is probably more conventional distinction between philosophical and social science approaches to medical ethics—that one is normative and the other empirical. The difference between philosophical and social science approaches to medical ethics is somewhat subtler then than a stark contrast between the normative and the empirical would suggest.
