Ethics and aging: Callahan and beyond

Abstract

In a positive review of Daniel Callahan’s Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society,1Time magazine called the author “arguably the nation’s leading medical ethicist” In 1990 Callahan published a second book on allocation of health care, What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress.2 Because of the importance of these books, the first half of this paper, particularly, is devoted to a critical assessment of Callahan’s basic argument I then turn to my development of a constructive proposal.