ABSTRACT
In his book Ethics in an Epidemic: AIDS, Morality and Culture (1994), Timothy Murphy relates a surprising experience he had when teaching a course on ‘AIDS and Ethics’ at Beijing Medical University in the early 1990s. During a classroom activity in which his Chinese students role-played a committee of hospital administrators formulating a policy for healthcare workers diagnosed with HIV, Murphy found that the opinions they put forth sounded remarkably familiar. ‘As I listened to the Chinese students,’ he marvels, ‘I was struck time and time again by their raising of many of the issues that surfaced as concerns during [our own] committee meetings; many of the same recommendations were advanced and many of the same criticisms of those proposals emerged’ (p.120).
