Clinical Ethics: Biomedical Ethics at the Bedside

The articles chosen for this issue of JAMA illustrate various aspects of clinical ethics, the emergent genre of medical ethics that focuses on the process of ethical decision making in its clinical setting.

Abstract

The articles chosen for this issue ofJAMAillustrate various aspects of clinical ethics, the emergent genre of medical ethics that focuses on the process of ethical decision making in its clinical setting. Clinical ethics moves ethics from its place in the classroom and ethicist's study to its origins at the bedside of sick people, where the dilemmas the ethicist contemplates are generated and where ethical discussion ultimately must end in decision and action.1,2 These articles describe how the move to the bedside is reshaping the way medical ethical decisions are made in the hospital, the clinic, and the physician's office. In democratic, educated, and morally heterogeneous societies like ours, the intuitive and idiosyncratic way of making ethical choices is no longer tenable. Medical ethics has become a public affair. The physician's decisions must now be justified to patients and their families, one's colleagues, and the courts. As a