Clinical Ethics

Clinical ethics, namely, the attention to the actual problems of ethics and values which arise in the direct care of patients and in the organization and processes of the institutions and settings where health care is delivered, provides a foundation for the entire field of bioethics. In the context of patient care as well as medical and health professionals’ education, clinical ethics is the core content area which provides the foundation and anchor point for a multitude of humanistic approaches to medicine and health care such as history, sociology, law, and literature. This view is developed in terms of the following considerations: First, by critically addressing the meaning of health and well-being in the context of health care, clinical ethics helps to ground the discourse of bioethics and sustain its essential concern for the actual implications of medical technologies and the biomedical sciences for human flourishing. Second, clinical ethics helps to unify the many disciplinary concerns and interests that make up the field of bioethics within the practical import. Third, clinical ethics helps to orchestrate the divergent and sometimes narrowly focused interests of the multiplicity of voices that make up the field of bioethics into a converging conversation.