This book gives an overview of the most salient themes in present-day bioethics. The book focuses on perspectives typical for the European context. This highlights not only particular bioethical themes such as social justice, choices in health care, and health policy (e.g., in post-communist countries), it also emphasizes specific approaches in ethical theory, in relation to Continental philosophies such as phenomenology and hermeneutics.
This book gives an overview of the most salient themes in present-day bioethics. The book focuses on perspectives typical for the European context. This highlights not only particular bioethical themes such as social justice, choices in health care, and health policy (e.g., in post-communist countries), it also emphasizes specific approaches in ethical theory, in relation to Continental philosophies such as phenomenology and hermeneutics.
This book critically analyses experiences with bioethics education in various countries across the world and identifies common challenges and interests. It presents ethics teaching experiences in nine different countries and the basic question of the goals of bioethics education. It addresses bioethics education in resource-poor countries, as the conditions and facilities are widely different and set limits and provide challenges to bioethics educators. Further, the question of how bioethics education can be improved is explored by the contributors. Despite the volume of journal publications agreement on bioethics education is rather limited. There are only few examples of core curricula, demonstrating consensus on the contents, goals, methods and assessment of teaching programs. We need ask: How can agreement on the best modalities of bioethics education be promoted?.
This book discusses the common principles of morality and ethics derived from divinely endowed intuitive reason through the creation of al-fitr' a (nature) and human intellect (al-‘aql). Biomedical topics are presented and ethical issues related to topics such as genetic testing, assisted reproduction and organ transplantation are discussed. Whereas these natural sources are God’s special gifts to human beings, God’s revelation as given to the prophets is the supernatural source of divine guidance through which human communities have been guided at all times through history. The second part of the book concentrates on the objectives of Islamic religious practice – the maqa' sid – which include: Preservation of Faith, Preservation of Life, Preservation of Mind (intellect and reason), Preservation of Progeny (al-nasl) and Preservation of Property. Lastly, the third part of the book discusses selected topical issues, including abortion, assisted reproduction devices, genetics, organ transplantation, brain death and end-of-life aspects. For each topic, the current medical evidence is followed by a detailed discussion of the ethical issues involved.
The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.
The panorama of bioethical problems is different today. Patients travel to Thailand for fast surgery; commercial surrogate mothers in India deliver babies to parents in rich countries; organs, body parts and tissues are trafficked from East to Western Europe; physicians and nurses migrating from Africa to the U.S; thousands of children or patients with malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS are dying each day because they cannot afford effective drugs that are too expensive. Mainstream bioethics as it has developed during the last 50 years in Western countries is evolving into a broader approach that is relevant for people across the world and is focused on new global problems. This book provides an introduction into the new field of global bioethics. Addressing these problems requires a broader vision of bioethics that not only goes beyond the current emphasis on individual autonomy, but that criticizes the social, economic and political context that is producing the problems at global level. This book argues that global bioethics is a necessity because the social, economic and environmental effects of globalization require critical responses. Global bioethics is not a finished product that can simply be applied to solve global problems, but it is the ongoing result of interaction and exchange between local practices and global discourse. It combines recognition of differences and respect for cultural diversity with convergence towards common perspectives and shared values. The book examines the nature of global problems as well as the type of responses that are needed, in order to exemplify the substance of global bioethics. It discusses the ethical frameworks that are available for global discourse and shows how these are transformed into global governance mechanisms and practices.
Bioethics has long been accepted as an interdisciplinary field. The recent 'empirical turn' in bioethics is, however, creating challenges that move beyond those of simple interdisciplinary collaboration, as researchers grapple with the methodological, empirical and meta-ethical challenges of combining the normative and the empirical, as well as navigating the difficulties that can arise from attempts to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. Empirical Bioethics: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives brings together contributions from leading experts in the field which speak to these challenges, providing insight into how they can be understood and suggestions for how they might be overcome. Combining discussions of meta-ethical challenges, examples of different methodologies for integrating empirical and normative research, and reflection on the challenges of conducting and publishing such work, this book will both introduce the novice to the field and challenge the expert.
This book reflects on the many contributions made in and to European bioethics to date, in various locations, and from various disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the book advances understanding of the academic and social status of European bioethics as it is being supported and practiced by various disciplines such as philosophy, law, medicine, and the social sciences, applied to a wide range of areas. The European focus offers a valuable counter-balance to an often prominent US understanding of bioethics. The volume is split into four parts. The first contains reflection on bioethics in the past, present and future, and also considers how comparison between countries and disciplines can enrich bioethical discourse. The second looks at bioethics in particular locations and contexts, including: policy, boardrooms and courtrooms; studios and virtual rooms; and society, while the third part explores the translation of theories and concepts of bioethics into the clinical setting. Chapter 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780415737197_oachapter10.pdf
Medical or hio- ethics has in recent years been a growth industry. Journals, Centers and Associations devoted to the subject proliferate. Medical schools seem increasingly to be filling rare positions in the humanities and social sciences with ethicists. Hardly a day passes without some media scrutiny of one or another ethical dilemma resulting from our new-found ability to transform the natural conditions of life. Although bioethics is a self-consciously interdisciplinary field, it has not attracted the collaboration of many social scientists. In fact, social scientists who specialize in the study of medicine have in many cases watched its development with a certain ambivalence. No one disputes the significance and often the painfulness of the issues and choices being addressed. But there is something about the way these issues are usually handled which seems somehow inappropri ate if not wrong-headed to one trained in a discipline like sociology or history. In their analyses of complex situations, ethicists often appear grandly oblivious to the social and cultural context in which these occur, and indeed to empirical referents of any sort. Nor do they seem very conscious of the cultural specificity of many of the values and procedures they utilize when making ethical judg ments. The unease felt by many in the social sciences was given articulate expression in a paper by Renee Fox and Judith Swazey which appeared in 1984.
