This is a practically useful and important book. It takes on the intricate and confusing problem created by bioethics when applied not in policy but in clinical practice. There, as the authors delineate, bioethical principles and methods are frequently found by clinicians to be irrelevant and unhelpful.

The authors effectively review the large social science literature that seeks to explain this failure. What makes the book important is that it sets out in a compelling and nicely illustrated way an alternative clinical framing. That framing enables the authors to develop an entire pedagogy for clinical bioethics