INTRODUCTION
For varied and complex reasons the HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to insinuate itself into the fabric of contemporary life not only in this nation but across the world. So pervasive is the epidemic that it appears that the great chain of being is held together by a virus. But because human lives and futures are amenable to choice, we are not mere onlookers to an ineluctable advance of the epidemic. Moral philosophy began when human beings found themselves free from the predestination of biological imperative and discovered the necessity of confronting their fates as in part a matter of their own choosing. Ethics is an amalgam of different kinds of analyses and inquiries whose goal is the identification and pursuit of the goals that ennoble human life and spare it from degradation and whose value is that of wisdom. Ethics is both the rapture and burden of human choice.
Ethical disputes about the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and its causal agents, the family of Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV), are conducted in the brusque discourse of everyday life, in the headlines of the tabloids, and in the more forbidding argot of medical researchers and academic scholars. A cascade of disputes has dogged the epidemic from the beginning. Certain questions appear to have come and gone: Is some kind of general quarantine necessary to protect the public health? Do indeterminacies of HIV testing undermine the morality of its use? Should gay men refrain from donating blood? Should bathhouses be seen as epicenters of infection and closed outright