I wish to congratulate Delany, Feldman, Kameniar and Gillam for their article ‘Critical dialogue method of ethics consultation: making clinical ethics facilitation visible and accessible’.1 The authors argue for critical dialogue as an alternative to ‘top-down’ ethics consultation processes, seeking to avoid the authoritative imposition of theory-based resolutions, and instead include the values and perspectives of clinicians, patients and relatives in the dialogue. In particular, their emphasis on the creation of ‘moral space’1 to actively involve clinicians, patients and relatives as moral agents is something that we wish to develop in our clinical ethics committee. The authors quite rightly point out that this has the potential to facilitate the moral growth of participants in the ethics consultation dialogue.1 To enhance how it assists the moral growth of participants, critical dialogue could draw resources from an ethical system focused on the development of moral character, such as virtue ethics.

Furthermore, virtue ethics could provide a moral framework for critical dialogue, which in its current form lacks explicit and …