In JACR’s December 2011 issue, a series of articles examined medical ethics. This focus on ethics represents a highly welcome initiative for several reasons. First, the topics of ethics and professionalism, although positively vital to our field, often do not receive the attention they deserve. Second, the articles gathered together in the issue raise anumberof importantquestionsabout the relationship between the care of individual patients and physicians’ broader obligations to society, including such timely topics as insurance and rationing. Third, the perspectives on ethics reflected in some of the articles provide an opportunity to revisit the seminal perspective of one of the most important moral philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. I met Stephen Toulmin at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. Born in London in 1922, Toulmin earned his bachelor’s degree from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1942, worked for the British military during World War II, and then returned to Cambridge and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees. Subsequently, he held faculty and visiting posts at many colleges and universities in England, the United States, and elsewhere. It was while he was servingasa facultymember inChicago’s Committee on Social Thought that I first encountered him. The author of hundreds of scholarly essays and dozens of books, Toulmin was awarded the Jefferson Medal, the nation’s highest award in the humanities, in 1997. He died in Los Angeles in 2009. To understand Toulmin’s insights on ethics, we must see him in context. One of the most popular works in