Many of the bioethical and medical issues challenging society today have been anticipated and addressed in literature ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Albert Camus's The Plague, to Margaret Edson's Wit. The ten works of fiction explored in this book stimulate lively dialogue on topics like bioterrorism, cloning, organ transplants, obesity and heart disease, sexually transmitted diseases, and civil and human rights. This interdisciplinary and multicultural approach introducing literature across the curricula helps students master medical and bioethical concepts brought about by advances in science and technology, bringing philosophy into the world of science.
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.
In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.
The main strength of this book is that it examines the challenges facing the field of Bioethics today from medical, ethical and legal perspectives. A critical exchange of ideas from professionals in interdisciplinary fields allows everyone to learn and benefit from the insights gained through others' experiences. Examining, analyzing and understanding these complex medical-ethical-legal issues and cases and how they are resolved will serve as a paradigm for all professionals who will be confronted with these complex bioethical issues now and in the future. The more we face these challenges directly, examine them critically and debate them enthusiastically the more knowledge will be gained and hopefully, we will gain more practical wisdom.
This is the first book that explains how you actually go about doing good bioethics. John McMillan develops an account of the nature of bioethics; he reveals how a number of methodological spectres have obstructed bioethics; and then he shows how moral reason can be brought to bear upon practical issues via an 'empirical, Socratic' approach.
Bioethics: Legal and Clinical Case Studies is a case-based introduction to ethical issues in health care. Through seventy-eight compelling scenarios, the authors demonstrate the practical importance of ethics, showing how the concerns at issue bear on the lives of patients, health-care providers, and others. Many central topics are covered, including informed consent, medical futility, reproductive ethics, privacy, cultural competence, and clinical trials. Each chapter includes a selection of important legal cases as well as clinical case studies for critical analysis. The case studies are often presented as moral dilemmas and are conducive to rich discussion. A companion website offers a curated collection of relevant legal precedents along with additional case studies and other resources.
An examination of ethical challenges that technology presents to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human and a proposal for a new ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of alterity. Bioethical dilemmas—including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion—have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, among the public, and in professional and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media, Joanna Zylinska argues, is the transformation of the very notion of life. In this provocative book, Zylinska examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, she goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose a new “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. After a detailed discussion of the classical theoretical perspectives on bioethics, Zylinska describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac's infamous fluorescent green bunny. Zylinska addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, Zylinska makes the case for a new nonsystemic, nonhierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.
A focus on leading social issues of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Each title contains approximately 175 full or excerpted documents--speeches, legislation, magazine and newspaper articles, essays, memoirs, letters, interviews, novels, songs, and works of art--as well as overview information that places each document in context.
Vaughn offers a hybrid of text, readings, and cases to fill a need left for a current, accessible introduction to the philosophical, medical, scientific, social, and legal aspects of key bioethics issues. It offers a balance between basic ethical theories and current controversies. Itscase-driven approach and a very robust set of pedagogical features introduce issues in a way that engages students in decision making. Hot topics include paternalism and patient autonomy, truth telling, informed consent, abortion, in vitro fertilization, cloning, impaired infants, embryonicstem-cell dilemmas, genetic engineering, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, human and animal research, inequities in access to medical treatment, HIV/AIDS in Africa, and health-care costs.
