Clinical ethics is enterprises to elucidate what may or may not be done in concrete clinical settings. It differs from normative or prescriptive medical ethics, as one of sub-divisions of applied ethics, which tries to establish and underpin the supreme but abstract principles applicable to medical cases. Whereas normative medical ethics chiefly concerns principles, clinical ethics does this or that particular case, if real or fictitious. Case study is the lifeblood of clinical ethics. The simpler the case at hand is, the easier we can apply any given principle to the case. A good thick case, however, is not as simple as so-called principlists might hope. To enrich clinical ethics, and to avoid reducing clinical ethics to normative medical ethics which often deals with thin cases just as exemplification of mechanical application of authorized principles, we should inquire into the fundamental features of clinical ethics and the nature of thick cases. As long as we pay attention to the fact that describing and reading a case inevitably require imagination and interpretation, each clinical ethics case is identified with a literary text. Actually what has focused on how we can legitimate our interpretation on a text is hermeneutics. A philosopher referred to a tradition or a culture as a horizon which makes it possible to interpret and understand a cultural work. But we should recognize that what to be read in clinical ethics are individual texts embedded within certain peculiar contexts rather than monumental works in capital letters. Then this article argues that the disciplinary model of clinical ethics is not ethics in general but literature.
