Edmund Pellegrino, who is working to restore virtue as a norm of professional ethics, maintains that virtue theory should be related to other theories within a comprehensive philosophy of the health professions. Similarly, approaches based on caring and narrative do not seek to displace all that has gone before. Feminist writers Alisa Carse and Hilde Lindemann Nelson defend the ethic of care as a valuable, morally legitimate perspective, not as a complete moral theory. Rita Charon relies on principles to guide action and to adjudicate quandaries, while arguing that narrative insights contribute to the trustworthiness of particular decisions. Narrative ethics is complete within this sphere, Frank maintains, but narrative claims are not the only kind of claims that a multivocal ethic must seek to balance.
Clinical pragmatism seeks to guide clinicians in cases that pose moral problems.
Mediation is an established means of conflict resolution that relies on a neutral third party to help the parties in a dispute reach a mutually acceptable agreement. As a group, these models suggest that building ethical consensus is a process with independent, ethical value that can help resolve individual cases and, on another scale, advance the methodology debate in bioethics. The models depend on a pluralistic approach to ethical theory to illuminate different ethical options. At the same time, they look beyond pluralism to a vision of the whole that allows different ethical insights to be integrated into one solution. These themes will be developed in the sections that follow.