The shared, lived experience of individuals within a professional community generates the local moral processes that shape and maintain the community, its values, and its commitments. This chapter explores three different conceptions of communities in which shared processes shape the lives and values of community members: interpretive communities (at the intersection of literary theory and sociology), ways of life (from moral philosophy), and moral modes of experience (from anthropology). The chapter also explores the distinction between formal and informal ethical discourse and the two modes of doing ethics—the formal, theoretical (top-down) mode commonly used in academia and the informal (bottom-up) mode embedded in the social and institutional environments in which health professionals work.