At the core of H. Tristram Engelhardt"s bioethical vision is a paradox, which I will call the minimalist paradox. The individual elements of this paradox serve to justify and explain many of the positions most closely associated with his Foundations of Bioethics.1 However, Engelhardt does not acknowledge the significance of paradox or antinomy within his ethics. Engelhardt has no references to either topic in the first or the second edition and therefore it is fair to say that the paradoxical character of our moral lives is left untreated within his most important work. This absence is especially curious given the influence that Kant"s ethical theory has had on Engelhardt. For Kant not only admits the importance of paradoxes within our intellectual architecture but also conceives of the antinomies as sine qua non for appreciating the meaning of the moral life. For example, according to Kant, if we fail to understand the conflict between being free and at the same time being subject to a moral law, then the nature of our moral life will remain largely unintelligible.2 In this paper I will first identify the elements of this minimalist paradox within The Foundations and describe how these elements play a vital role within Engelhardt"s minimalist approach to secular or public bioethics. Secondly, while I am sympathetic to minimalism as an ethical methodology within a pluralistic society, my primary concern is to display how this minimalist methodology has evolved within Engelhardt"s work from a conceptually based method to a historically conditioned method.