He led an advanced seminar for the CEP representatives at Warrendale and gave a lecture for hospital staff at each of the rehabilitation hospitals who are partners in the consortium. In this talk, he showed how ethical perspectives in rehabilitation care might differ from acute care and outlined what rehabilitation might contribute. Scofield noted that rehabilitation care helps providers to deal with chronic illness and disability in the way that hospice care has helped with death and dying. American medical ethics has been dominated by law and its rights-oriented perspective. For instance, one way to look at living will laws is that they are civil rights legislation for the dying.
Rights are inflexible and, in many ways, absolutist.
Meanwhile, contemporary experience of moral matters suggests that there is much gray area that cannot be dismissed by elucidating the rights of the parties involved. Postmodern ethics takes this gray area as its starting point. Because of the lack of certainty regarding the substance of decisionmaking, postmodern ethics advocates taking seriously the process of decisionmaking. Scofield compared traditional ethics to the original Star Trek show. The sense of mission, i.e., of good and evil, was clear and as a result, authoritative command structures were legitimated.