This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.

The moral expertise of clinical ethicists is not a question of mastering codelike theories and lawlike principles. Rather, ethicists are architects of moral space within the health care setting, as well as mediators in the conversations taking place within that space.

Institutions have ethical lives and characters just as their individual members do. Health care organizations must look critically at how professed institutional values can best be realized in day‐to‐day interactions within the institution and with the wider community.

In a morally fragmented society there is no good reason for ethics committees to assume any particular point of view, yet failure to do so compromises their ability to function in either a case‐review or an educational capacity. A casuist methodology might enable committees to fulfill both roles.