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The increasing rejection of paternalistic approaches to medical care and the growing stress on patient autonomy are among factors creating many new legal obligations for physicians. Among these obligations are the requirements that cluster around the concept of “informed consent.” More and more, physicians are being required to allow their patients the opportunity to accept or reject pro-offered procedures and also, in many cases, being required to give their patients information about the procedures.

Whenever there is the possibility of interaction among persons, there are questions about how those persons ought to act.1 The study of ethics may be described as the study of how persons ought to act. Since health care consists of interactions among persons, the practice of health care is inextricable from ethical issues.

The recent convergence of technological, medical, and social factors has lent a new interest and urgency to philosophical problems about the ascription of rights, particularly the right to life. Our technology now enables us to keep persons’ bodies functioning even after they apparently have irreversibly lost consciousness or have been reduced to states that seemingly no longer include cognitive abilities. Until recently, irreversible cardiac arrest was the sufficient and necessary legal criterion for the determination of death; but now the point at which it could be properly said that a person has died has become unclear.