Collectivizing rescue obligations in bioethics.

Bioethicists invoke a duty to rescue in a wide range of cases. Indeed, arguably, there exists an entire medical paradigm whereby vast numbers of medical encounters are treated as rescue cases. The intuitive power of the rescue paradigm is considerable, but much of this power stems from the problematic way that rescue cases are conceptualized-namely, as random, unanticipated, unavoidable, interpersonal events for which context is irrelevant and beneficence is the paramount value.