A recent proposal that speaks to the family's role in medical decisionmaking has been advanced by John Hardwig. In his provocative essay," What about the Family?"'he contemplates far-reaching changes in medical practice based on a critique of our prevailing patient-centered ethos. My discussion of his proposal is chiefly designed to pave the way for what I call a communitarian account of the role of the family in acute care decisionmaking. This account-which, I hasten to add, I do not en-dorse-has not to my knowledge been taken seriously as a theoretical possibility in the bioethics literature. Since the label" communitarian" is liable to be misunderstood, I should note at the outset that I am not inter-ested in communitarianism as a political theory. Rather, I want to focus on the family as communitarian political writers sometimes think of it, namely, as a model for their conception of the larger society, and on the basis of this understanding of the family, to mount a challenge to the dominant patient-centered ethos that parallels the communitarian cri-tique of liberal political philosophy. This communitarian position re-sembles Hardwig's proposal in that it does not regard the competent patient as the ultimate decision-maker, but takes it as morally signifi-cant for the attribution of decisional authority that his or her life is intimately intertwined with the lives of close others. However, as we will see, the communitarian account is philo-sophically more radical than Hard-wig's challenge to the dominant patient-centered medical ethos. My own position is that the locus of decisional authority should remain the individual patient, but I also argue that family members, by virtue of their closeness to and intimate knowledge of the patient are often uniquely well qualified to shore up the patient's vulnerable autonomy and assist him or her in the exercise of autonomous decisionmaking. Families, in other words, can be an important resource for patients in helping them to make better deci-sions about their care. Recognition of this fact leads to a broader under-standing of the duty to respect patient autonomy than currently pre-vails in acute care medicine.