Most bioethics cases take place in a generalized clinical setting, which has the paradoxical effect of narrowing the reader's philosophical and theological orientations. Accordingly, they lack sufficient particularity of location for issues of social justice to be meaningful. A lack of particularity extends to character as well. Characters tend to be so poorly developed that they are not characters at all, but mere roles. They signify only those particular communities where those names are ordinary.
Chambers also points out how ethics cases unintentionally privilege a male world view.
With the historical predominance of men in both medicine and bioethics, the style of medical presentation and male literary modes mark ethics cases with a male voice. Thus, as opposed to the plotless, nonlinear, contextual, character oriented style of female literary modes, ethics cases marked with a male voice have linear plots that climax and lack attention to experience and character. Chambers identifies a need to understand how other aspects of social injustice related to race, class and other social factors also influence the framing of ethics cases. The shortcomings of Chambers' analysis lie mainly in what it does not do. I found myself wanting his literary analysis to give way to ethical analysis.