Embodiment, Morality and Medicine deals with the relevance of `embodiment' to bioethics, considering both the historical development and contemporary perspectives on the mind--body relation. The emphasis of all authors is on the importance of the body in defining personal identity as well as on the role of social context in shaping experience of the body. Among the perspectives considered are Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and African-American. Feminist concerns are important throughout.
Collecting a wide range of contemporary and classical essays dealing with medical ethics, this huge volu me is the finest resource available for engaging the pressin g problems posed by medical advances. '
In print for more than two decades, On Moral Medicine remains the definitive anthology for Christian theological reflection on medical ethics. This third edition updates and expands the earlier awardwinning volumes, providing classrooms and individuals alike with one of the finest available resources for ethics-engaged modern medicine.
In these essays, a diverse group of ethicists draw insights from both religious and feminist scholarship in order to propose creative new approaches to the ethics of medical care. While traditional ethics emphasizes rules, justice, and fairness, the contributors to this volume embrace an "ethics of care," which regards emotional engagement in the lives of others as basic to discerning what we ought to do on their behalf. The essays reflect on the three related themes: community, narrative, and emotion. They argue for the need to understand patients and caregivers alike as moral agents who are embedded in multiple communities, who seek to attain or promote healing partly through the medium of storytelling, and who do so by cultivating good emotional habits. A thought-provoking contribution to a field that has long been dominated by an ethics of principle, Medicine and the Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of that traditional approach.
Some of the authors who have contributed to this volume are philosophers, some are engaged in other academic disciplines, and several are practicing healthcare professionals. Their essays demonstrate that because phenomenology provides extraordinary insights into many of the issues that are directly addressed within the world of medicine it can be an invaluable practical tool, not only for those who are interested in the philosophy of medicine, but for all healthcare professionals who are actively engaged in the care of the sick.
Heated debates over such issues as abortion, contraception, ordination, and Church hierarchy suggest that feminist and natural law ethics are diametrically opposed. Cristina L.H. Traina now reexamines both Roman Catholic natural law tradition and Anglo-American feminist ethics and reconciles the two positions by showing how some of their aims and assumptions complement one another. After carefully scrutinizing Aquinas’s moral theology, she analyzes trends in both contemporary feminist ethics, theological as well as secular, and twentieth-century Roman Catholic moral theology. Although feminist ethics reject many of the methods and conclusions of the scholastic and revisionist natural law schools, Traina shows that a truly Thomistic natural law ethic nonetheless provides a much-needed holistic foundation for contemporary feminist ethics. On the other hand, she offers new perspectives on the writings of Josef Fuchs, Richard McCormick, and Gustavo Gutierrez, arguing that their failure to catch the full spirit of Thomas’s moral vision is due to inadequate attention to feminist critical methods. This highly original book proposes an innovative union of two supposedly antagonistic schools of thought, a new feminist natural law that would yield more comprehensive moral analysis than either existing tradition alone. This is a provocative book not only for students of moral theology but also for feminists who may object to the very notion of natural law ethics, suggesting how each might find insight in an unlikely place.
Modern medicine has unprecedented power to heal human beings of physical and mental disease, to keep them health, and even to improve the human race. This power can be used to humanize life or to dehumanize and destroy it. It can be used justly to benefit all, or it can be used to benefit the few at the expense of the many. How to use such power is a question of values and, therefore, of individual and group decisions which are not merely technical but ethical. Two reasons have induced us to add to the already extensive literature on medical-ethical and bioethical topics. First, too much of this literature focuses on a few controversial but sometimes minor topics, while neglecting the broader and major issues affecting human health and the health care professions. Second, we want to assist Christian, and especially Catholic, health care professionals and health care facilities faced with the difficult and often puzzling responsibility of giving witness to a long tradition of humanistic health care, while working with other professionals and government agencies committed to diverse value systems. -from Introduction.
Author of such major books as Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life, Allen Verhey has become one of today's most trusted Christian voices in contemporary ethics, including the moral challenges that new medical technologies pose to Christian faith and decision-making. With this new book Verhey brings the biblical tradition to bear on contemporary bioethical concerns. Drawing on an unmatched depth of insight in these two realms, Verhey explores how the Bible can illuminate and guide medical ethics. He argues that churches are called to think and speak clearly about bioethical concerns, and he lays out here the scriptural tools for them to do so. After firmly grounding Christian ethical discourse in Scripture, Verhey shows how the Bible can be applied to such pressing questions as suffering, genetic intervention, abortion, reproductive technologies, end-of-life care, physician-assisted suicide, and more. Filled with faith-based wisdom and apt illustrations of the moral dilemmas discussed, this book is a must-read for Christians grappling with the ethical dimensions of medicine today.
Christian health care professionals in our secular and pluralistic society often face uncertainty about the place religious faith holds in today's medical practice. Through an examination of a virtue-based ethics, this book proposes a theological view of medical ethics that helps the Christian physician reconcile faith, reason, and professional duty. Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma trace the history of virtue in moral thought, and they examine current debate about a virtue ethic's place in contemporary bioethics. Their proposal balances theological ethics, based on the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, with contemporary medical ethics, based on the principles of beneficence, justice, and autonomy. The result is a theory of clinical ethics that centers on the virtue of charity and is manifest in practical moral decisions. Using Christian bioethical principles, the authors address today's divisive issues in medicine. For health care providers and all those involved in the fields of ethics and religion, this volume shows how faith and reason can combine to create the best possible healing relationship between health care professional and patient.
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.
