1. A perfect example of this is found in Beauchamp and Walters’ Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, CA, 1989. In the “Ethical Theory and Bio-ethics” chapter readers are led to believe that there are only two types of “classical” ethical theories: utilitarian and deontological. The only moral philosophers mentioned in this section are Bentham, Mill, Kant, W. D. Ross, and Rawls. There is similarly no mention of virtue ethics in Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, John Arras and Nancy Rhoden, eds., Mayfield Publisher, Mountain View, CA, 1989, or Biomedical Ethics, Thomas A. Mappes and Jane S. Zembaty, eds., McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991.
2. This is not the first time virtue ethics has been employed in the service of bioethics. See Rosalind Hursthouse’s excellent article “Virtue Theory and Abortion” Philosophy and Public Affairs
20 3 (Summer, 1991): 223–246; Leon Kass’s “Regarding the End of Medicine and the Pursuit of Health” The Public Interest
40 (1975); Stephen Toulmin’s “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics”; and Edmund Pelligrino’s “The Virtuous Physician and Ethics of Medicine.” Toul min and Pelligrino are collected in Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, CA, 1989. One cannot help but wonder who students reading the Beauchamp and Walters anthology think Aristotle is, or if his work is important, since he is not mentioned as a classical ethical theorist in their introduction on moral theory. See note one above.
3. Nccomachean Ethics, henceforth EN, 1094b20–22. All citations are from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Translated by Terence Irwin), Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN, 1985.
4. See Martha Nussbaum’s helpful discussion in “Saving Aristotle’s Appearances,” chapter eight of The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.
5. EN,1145b1–8.