Emerging medical technologies are changing our views on human nature and what it means to be alive, healthy, and leading a good life. Reproductive technologies, genetic diagnosis, organ transplantation, and psychopharmacological drugs all raise existential questions that need to be tackled by way of philosophical analysis. Yet questions regarding the meaning of life have been strangely absent from medical ethics so far. This book brings phenomenology, the main player in the continental tradition of philosophy, to bioethics, and it does so in a comprehensive and clear manner. Starting out by analysing illness as an embodied, contextualized, and narrated experience, the book addresses the role of empathy, dialogue, and interpretation in the encounter between health-care professional and patient. Medical science and emerging technologies are then brought to scrutiny as endeavours that bring enormous possibilities in relieving human suffering but also great risks in transforming our fundamental life views. How are we to understand and deal with attempts to change the predicaments of coming to life and the possibilities of becoming better than well or even, eventually, surviving death? This is the first book to bring the phenomenological tradition, including philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Jonas, and Charles Taylor, to answer such burning questions.
This book offers a unique description of how phenomenology can help professionals from medical, environmental and social fields to explore notions such as interaffectivity, empathy, epoche, reduction, and intersubjective encounter. Written by a group of top scholars, it uniquely covers the relationship between phenomenology and bioethics, and focuses not only on medical cases, but also on the environment and emerging technologies. This variety of themes, whilst including techno-ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, and medical ethics, is conducive to appreciating broadly how phenomenology can improve our quality of our life. Despite its difficult themes, the book appeals to an audience of both academics and professionals who are willing to understand how to increase the quality of care in their professional field. Chapter 8 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Many declare the debate about abortion to be hopelessly polarised, between conservatives and liberals, between forces religious and secular. In this book Mumford upends this received wisdom and challenges consensus, arguing that many dominant attitudes and argument fail to take into account the particular way human beings 'emerge' in the world.
Essays approach bioethics from postmodernist feminist theoretical perspectives, opening it to critiques that question the traditional normative framework.
This book provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy on the origin of bioethics that shows the importance of bringing emotions into bioethical discourse. Divided into two parts, the book begins by defining bioethics and explaining the importance of emotions in making us human, allowing us to consider life holistically. Ferrarello argues that emotions and bioethics are better served when they are combined, and that dismissing emotions as nothing more than a nuisance to our rationality has created a society that does not fit our human nature. Chapters explore how ethics relate to intimate life and how ethical agents determine themselves within their surrounding world, uniquely and interrogatively using ‘bioethics’ to consider not only medical dilemmas but also issues concerning environmental and individual well-being. By addressing personal, interpersonal, and societal problems as dynamically interconnected in bioethical problems she helps us to renew our sense of responsibility toward a good quality of life. This interdisciplinary book is invaluable reading for students of health science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as for those interested in the link between emotions and bioethical discourse from both a psychological and philosophical perspective.
Husserl's 20th-century phenomenological project remains the cornerstone of modern European philosophy. The place of ethics is of importance to the ongoing legacy and study of phenomenology itself. Husserl's Ethics and Practical Intentionality constitutes one of the major new interventions in this burgeoning field of Husserl scholarship, and offers an unrivaled perspective on the question of ethics in Husserl's philosophy through a focus on volumes not yet translated into English. This book offers a refreshing perspective on stagnating ethical debates that pivot around conceptions of relativism and universalism, shedding light on a phenomenological ethics beyond the common dichotomy.
This is the first monograph to deal with medicine as a form of hermeneutics, now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, including a whole new chapter on medical ethics. The book offers a comprehensive philosophical argument why good medical practice cannot be curtailed to scientific investigations of the body but is a form of clinical hermeneutics performed by health-care professionals in dialogue with their patients. Medical hermeneutics is rooted in a phenomenology of illness which acknowledges and proceeds from the ill party’s bodily feelings, everyday life-world circumstances and self-understanding in aiming to restore health. The author shows how the works of classical phenomenologists and hermeneuticians – Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur – may be employed to understand how medical diagnosis is enveloped by professional empathy and clinical judgement and developed by scientific investigations of the patient’s bodily condition. Health and illness are ultimately considered to be ways of feeling at home or not at home in the world, and such experiences are the starting point of medical hermeneutics when aiming to make best use of scientific knowledge. The book is aimed at researchers and teachers in philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, and at physicians, nurses and other health-care professionals meeting with patients in ethically complex and challenging situations. Phenomenology and hermeneutics, most often considered as methods belonging to the humanities, are shown to be of vital importance for the understanding of medical practice and ethical dilemmas of health care.
Several studies have argued that there is a correlation between short stature and negative experiences and characteristics, such as social discrimination, economic disadvantage, health problems (especially for men). The idea that short men have a disadvantage in social interactions and in partner choices is also widespread in popular culture and common knowledge. It is now possible to use recombinant human growth hormone (hGH) to treat children with idiopathic short stature (ISS), namely children who are shorter than average for unknown medical reasons. Critics argue that there is a lack of evidence of both psychological distress caused by short stature and the efficacy of the treatment in increasing children’s well-being. This controversy is reflected in international drug evaluations: while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US granted marketing authorisation for hGH for children with ISS in 2003, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) refused it in 2007. The research presented here had two aims: first, to identify and analyse the norms, values and assumptions about short stature and the use of hGH treatment for children with ISS, found within sociocultural, philosophical and regulatory discussions of these, and within narrated lived experiences of short stature. Second, to critically and reflectively discuss how these analyses contribute to bioethical debates on the use of hGH treatment for children with ISS. It employs what it calls a critical paediatric bioethics theoretical approach, which deems as important to carefully analyse different reasoning, conceptualisations and arguments around the object of study, through a self-reflective analysis that is also sceptical about other forms of problematisation, and that combines philosophical analyses while being open to social implications and drawing upon empirical methods. The first article proposes a critical understanding of medicalisation as both a concept and a phenomenon, and explores what insights such critical understanding brings to ethical discussions about hGH for ISS. It argues that three main ethical issues concern the medicalisation of short stature: the downplayed role of the qualitative dimension of short stature, the justification of the treatment (as sometimes based on uncritically assumed social beliefs and unrealistic parental expectations), and possible misconduct of stakeholders. The second article examines the arguments for and against granting marketing authorisation of hGH treatment for the indication of ISS presented in selected FDA and EMA documents. It combines argumentative analysis with an approach to policy analysis called ‘what’s the problem represented to be’ and focuses on underlying assumptions and presuppositions about short stature and hGH treatment for ISS. It then discusses these arguments through the relational, experiential and cultural understandings of disability, and argues that the choice about whether to give hGH is not merely a choice based on efficacy and safety, but requires an examination of the values that we transmit by that choice. The third article examines how and why attendance to lived experiences of height is needed in bioethical and biomedical discussions of hGH treatment for children with ISS. It first describes what it defines as the ‘problem-oriented’ approach to the debate about hGH treatment for children with ISS. It then offers a sociophenomenological analysis of whether and, if so, when and how, height matters to the interviewed people in the Netherlands who are shorter than average without any known medical reasons. The sociophenomenological analysis shows the richness of meanings of lived experiences of short stature that cannot be captured by the problem-oriented approach, and suggests complementing clinical practices with narrative approaches. This research contributes to the ethical debate about using hGH for children with ISS, setting a critical gaze onto the social perception of short stature, highlighting some ethical challenges met by stakeholders involved at different levels (such as families, medical professionals and policy makers), and providing new insights into how to address these ethical issues. It is, therefore, of interest to stakeholders, bioethicists and lay people willing to explore alternative ways to address such bioethical dilemmas, and other paediatric interventions that aim to normalise children’s bodily characteristics.
Fredrik Svenaeus' book is a delight to read. Not only does he exhibit keen understanding of a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, but he manages to bring them together in an innovative manner that convincingly demonstrates how deeply these two significant fields can be and, in the end, must be mutually enlightening. Medicine, Svenaeus suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine. Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, Vanderbilt University
This handbook aims to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics and moral philosophy by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. The contributing experts explore the thought of the major ethical thinkers in the first two generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials.
