Vikki Entwistle and I are about to start a 5 year project – “But why is that better?” – on the potential contribution of bioethics/applied philosophy to health care quality improvement. The project will involve our own theoretical and empirical research but will also seek to draw others into this area including by developing a network that brings together bioethics and QI colleagues. In this seminar I hope to begin to stimulate some interest in this work by outlining the background to, and some of the hopes for, the project. As well as explaining the origins of the project in our previous work, and exploring some other related literatures, I will sketch out a few themes and topics that we have identified as starting points for an investigation of conceptual and ethical dimensions of QI research and practice.