Edmund Pellegrino's work has been crucial to the renaissance of interest in the philosophy of medicine and the philosophical grounding of medical ethics that has framed the contemporary field of bioethics in the expectation, of the rational justification of a universal content-full morality. However, this attempt at rational justification has failed, leaving a plurality of bioethics and the inability to secure the canonical account of virtue and character which Pellegrino has sought. This failure is integral to a Western Christian error regarding the nature of virtue.