If health care ethics is to have widespread relevance today in the public forum of a Western, pluralistic society, it manifestly cannot be based solely upon Christian faith. The globalised nature of modern medicine and the multi-cultural composition of health care professionals in Western countries clearly preclude this. For a while the four-principles approach, pioneered successfully in Tom Beauchamp and James Childress' Principles of Biomedical Ethics, seemed to offer a ‘faith-free’ approach to health care ethics that could be relevant and adequate in the public forum. Yet it has been seen that this approach, although still useful, is now widely regarded as too ‘thin’. Increasingly it is recognised that virtues are needed alongside principles in an adequate account of health care ethics. And, once this is acknowledged, it becomes more questionable whether health care ethics should remain fastidiously ‘faith free’. It is, after all, faith communities around the world that have traditionally played a major role in fostering and embedding virtues. It is even arguable that, despite a number of purely secular attempts, it is faith communities (despite their many frailties) that still have the more enduring record of fostering and embedding virtues.

Be that as it may, if health care ethics is to take adequate account of virtues as well as principles, it may need to pay more attention to those virtues that can be found in a number of faith traditions.