Abstract

This paper explores the implications for medical decision-making of the communitarian view. The launching point is a sketch and clarification of the communitarian view which I characterize in terms of its fundamental commitment to the relational self. This commitment poses a challenge to much traditional work in bioethics for it asks us to start focusing not on rights and individualistic conceptions of interests and autonomy but on those values needed to sustain communities. I attempt to show that while some of the communitarian objections to conventional bioethical approaches have brought to the fore aspects of moral experience that must be taken seriously, the communitarian vision does not succeed in discrediting bioethics “patient-centeredness” rightly understood