This book is the twenty-sixth in the series New Studies in Christian Ethics, and the second contribution by its distinguished General Editor, Robin Gill. The author of Health Care and Christian Ethics ably advances the twin goals he has set for the series as a whole. The book both engages the secular moral debate about health care at the highest intellectual level and demonstrates the distinctive contribution of Christian ethics to that discussion. In so doing, Professor Gill illuminates many of the changes that have taken place in medical ethics and moral theory in recent decades.

At one point, medical ethics seemed a textbook example of the synthesis between Christian tradition and secular ethics. Christian ethicists initially took a leading role in framing principles of autonomy, physician responsibility, and patient rights for public use in health care settings. Application of the principles to specific questions of medical practice could then proceed independently of religious authority, but without hostility or indifference to religious traditions.

The terms of the discussion have changed dramatically, both in medicine and in ethics. Specialists in health care ethics now find the principles that shaped the discipline in its early days too abstract to be helpful apart from a rich cultural context that shapes use of principles and forms the character of those who offer care.