Over the last several decades, bioethicists have championed a bewildering variety of methods for understanding and resolving difficult ethical problems in medicine, including: principlism, wide reflective equilibrium, casuistry, feminism, virtue theory, narrative, and others. Much of this advocacy overlooks the limitations of the favored method, and also neglects the strengths found in alternative approaches.

Tom Tomlinson systematically uncovers and evaluates both the strengths and limits of a variety of ethical tools, and in so doing develops a comprehensive appreciation of the roles...