Editorial: To confront ethical issues in medicine.

Abstract

When I was a graduate student in philosophy, at Harvard in the late 1950's, medical ethics was a subject of no interest whatever. Our regular fare was Russell and Frege on the logical foundations of mathematics, or Wittgenstein on the uses of language. Normative ethical questions, whether about medicine, war and peace, or welfare policy, were considered out of bounds for the prevailing analytic philosophy. Nor was the medical profession clamoring for the participation of philosophers and others in grappling with medical ethics.When some newly found colleagues and I conceived the idea of the Institute of Society, Ethics and . . .