Encoding Bioethics addresses important ethical concerns from the perspective of each of the stakeholders who will develop, deploy, and use artificial intelligence systems to support clinical decisions. Utilizing an applied ethical model of patient-centered care, this book considers the viewpoints of programmers, health system and health insurance leaders, clinicians, and patients when AI is used in clinical decision-making. The authors build on their respective experiences as a surgeon-bioethicist and a surgeon-AI developer to give the reader an accessible account of the relevant ethical considerations raised when AI systems are introduced into the physician-patient relationship.
"This book focuses on ethical, social, cultural, and legal implications of genetics, genomics and genetic databanking as they relate to concrete cultural and historical traditions"--Provided by publisher.
This volume collects essays by the late bioethicist John D. Arras, best known for his many contributions to the methodology of bioethics. Always open-minded, Arras did not favor a single theory or view of method in bioethics, eschewing labels such as "casuist" or "pragmatist." He was conversant with the main philosophical methods that have dominated bioethics since the field's origin, including principlism, Gert's common morality, the "new casuistry", pragmatism, and others. Rather than defending any particular theory or method, though, Arras rigorously investigated those methods - and how they both expand and limit our field of vision. He sought, in the tradition of Kierkegaard, to make life "harder" for bioethics, by uncovering challenges to the field's analytical methods. His favorite mode of exploration and expression was the thoughtful essay. The essays collected here reveal him thinking through new problems and new possibilities, and they invariably yield fresh and valuable insights.
Bioethics is primarily an applied ethics of health related issues. It is considered an important guide for health care and its discourses and practices. Health related technology, such as information technology, is changing rapidly. Bioethics should arguably address such change as well as continue to address more established areas of health care and emerging areas of social concern such as climate change and its relation to health. This book illustrates the range of bioethics in the 21st century. The book is intentionally not comprehensive but rather illustrative of established, emerging and speculative bioethics, such as ethics of mental health care, ethics of nano-technology in health care, and ethics of cryogenics, respectively. Hopefully the book will motivate readers to reflect on health care as a work in progress that requires continuous ethical deliberation and guidance.
Includes the introductory talks and a summary of the general discussion of a seminar arranged by the Nordic Committee on Bioethics and held November 2001.
Bioethics: The Basics provides the reader with introduction to the foundational principles, theories and issues in the study of medical and biological ethics. Controversial but important questions facing us today are discussed including; arguments for the rights and wrongs of abortion, euthanasia and animal research; healthcare ethics including the nature of the practitioner-patient relationship; public policy ethics, ‘3 parents’, enhancement, incidental findings and nudge approaches in health care. Concise, readable and authoritative, this is the ideal primer for anyone interested in the study of bioethics.
The focus of bioethical debates on exceptional cases neglects the underlying values—like justice and community—that would lend to a broader, more well-rounded understanding of today's world. Discussions of ethical problems in health care too often concentrate on exceptional cases. Bioethical controversies triggered by experimental drugs, gene-edited babies, or life extension are understandably fascinating: they showcase the power of medical science and technology while addressing anxieties concerning health, disease, suffering, and death. However, the focus on rare individual cases in the media spotlight turns attention away from more pressing ethical issues that impact global populations, such as access to health care, safe food and water, and the prevention of emerging infectious diseases. In Bizarre Bioethics, Henk A.M.J. ten Have argues that this focus on bizarre cases leads to bizarre bioethics with a narrow agenda for ethical debate. In other words, although these extreme cases are undeniably real, they present a limited and skewed view of everyday moral reality. This focus also assumes that individuals are rational decision-makers, so that the role of feelings and emotions can be downgraded. Larger questions related to justice, solidarity, community, meaning, and ambiguity are not appreciated. Such questions used to be posed by philosophical and theological traditions, but they have been exorcised and marginalized in the development of bioethics. Science, ten Have writes, is not a value-free endeavor that provides facts and evidence: it is driven by underlying value perspectives that are often based on metaphors and world views from philosophical and theological traditions. Drawing on a rich analysis of the literature, ten Have explains how bioethical discussion can be enriched by these metaphors and develops a broader approach that critically delves into the imaginative world views that determine understanding of the world and human existence. Examining the roles of the metaphors of ghosts, monsters, pilgrims, prophets, and relics, ten Have illustrates how science and medicine are animated by imaginations that fuel the search for hope, salvation, healing, and a predictable future. Bizarre Bioethics invites students, researchers, policymakers and teachers interested in ethics and health care to think about the value perspectives on health and disease today.
This is the first book in bioethics that explains how it is that you actually go about doing good bioethics. Bioethics has made a mistake about its methods, and this has led not only to too much theorizing, but also fragmentation within bioethics. The unhelpful disputes between those who think bioethics needs to be more philosophical, more sociological, more clinical, or more empirical, continue. While each of these claims will have some point, they obscure what should be common to all instances of bioethics. Moreover, they provide another phantom that can lead newcomers to bioethics down blind alleyways stalked by bristling sociologists and philosophers. The method common to all bioethics is bringing moral reason to bear upon ethical issues, and it is more accurate and productive to clarify what this involves than to stake out a methodological patch that shows why one discipline is the most important. This book develops an account of the nature of bioethics and then explains how a number of methodological spectres have obstructed bioethics becoming what it should. In the final part, it explains how moral reason can be brought to bear upon practical issues via an 'empirical, Socratic' approach.
Daniel Callahan's life time work in bioethics has again and again returned to the root problems of health, progress, technology, and death. How we think about each of them individually and in relation to each other will shape the way we approach and deal with the most common dilemmas of modern medicine. They are at the roots of the field.
This book addresses the complexity of talking about normativity in bioethics within the context of contemporary multicultural and multi-religious society. It offers original contributions by specialists in bioethics exploring new ways of understanding normativity in bioethics. In bioethical publications and debates, the concept of normativity is often used without consideration of the difficulties surrounding it, whereas there are many competing claims for normativity within bioethics. Examples of such competing normative bioethical discourses can be perceived in variations and differences in bioethical arguments within individual religions, and the opposition between bioethical arguments from specific religions and arguments from bioethicists who do not claim religious allegiance. We also cannot merely assume that a Western understanding of normative bioethics will be unproblematic in bioethics in non-Western cultures and religions. Through an analysis of normativity in Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish bioethics, the book creates awareness of the complexity of normativity in bioethics. The book also covers normative bioethics outside an explicitly religiously committed context, and specific attention is paid to bioethics as an interdisciplinary endeavor. It reveals how normativity relates to empirical and global bioethics, which challenges it faces in bioethics in secular pluralistic society, and how to overcome these. By doing that, this book fills an important gap in bioethics literature.
