[The significance of quality of life--an ethical approach].

Quality of life is highly appreciated as an evaluation criterion and a goal of interventions in medicine, but it is insufficiently applied. There is no unanimous definition of "quality of life". From a philosophical point of view, subjectivistic concepts can be differentiated from objectivistic ones. In medicine there are the three concepts of general, health-related and disease-specific quality of life. In this paper it is argued that a general and subjectivistic account of quality of life is of prevailing ethical significance, due to patient orientation and patient autonomy reasons. The normative function of quality of life should be given much more consideration by the responsible players in clinical research, healthcare and allocation decisions within the healthcare system.