Hospital ethics, familiar enough in practice but surprisingly neglected in the literature, deals with the ethical problems that arise distinctively or typically in hospitals and similar healthcare institutions. More precisely, it consists of the ethical principles that should govern the conduct of healthcare professionals and other staff in their capacities as members of the hospital as an institution, and the conduct of the hospital itself as an institution. It is a species of institutional ethics, which focuses on the ethical problems created or significantly shaped by the institutional setting in which they occur.

It is surprising that hospital ethics – and institutional ethics more generally – has been so neglected. After all, we live most of our lives with institutions – working for them or dealing with them one way or another. But ethics (both as an academic discipline and as concrete practice) has tended to focus on either relations among individuals or on the structures of society as a whole, not on that middle range of intermediary associations of which institutions are the most durable and influential.

In medical ethics, this dichotomy is reflected in the common distinction between microethics, which deals with such issues as doctor patient relations, and macroethics, which is concerned with questions such as the just distribution of healthcare. Hospital ethics falls between micro- and macroethics; it examines the problems that arise at the point where they intersect.

Because institutional ethics has been neglected, there is a tendency in our institutional life to apply moral principles with which we are familiar from our personal life.