Download or read book Philosophical Perspectives on Bioethics written by L. W. Sumner and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to the volume discuss various approaches to bioethical thinking and the political and institutional contexts of bioethics, addressing underlying concerns about the purposes of its practice.
Download or read book The Moral Status of Persons written by Gerhold K. Becker and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2000 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advances in molecular biology and genetics, medicine and neurosciences, in ethology and environmental studies have put the concept of the person firmly on the philosophical agenda. Whereas earlier times seemed to have a clear understanding about the moral implications of personhood and its boundaries, today there is little consensus on such matters. Whether a patient in the last stages of Alzheimer's disease is still a person, or whether a human embryo is already a person are highly contentious issues. This book tackles the issue of personhood and its moral implications head-on. The thirteen essays are representative of the major strands in the current bioethical debate and offer new insights into humanity's moral standing, its foundations, and its implications for social interaction. While most of the essays approach the issue by drawing on the rich intellectual tradition of the West, others offer a cross-cultural perspective and make available for ethical consideration the philosophical resources and the wisdom of the East. The contributors to this book are highly recognized philosophers, ethicists, theologians, and professionals in health care and medicine from East Asia (China, Japan), Europe, and North America. The first part of the book probes the foundations of personhood. Examining critically the main theories on personhood in contemporary philosophy, the authors offer alternatives that better respond to contemporary challenges and their implications for bioethics. The focus of the second part is firmly on the Confucian relational concept of the person and on the social constitution of personhood in traditional Japanese culture. While the essays challenge the individualistic features of personhood in the Western tradition, they lay the foundations for a richer concept that holds great promise for the resolution of moral dilemmas in modern medicine and health care. The third part of the book enters into a dialogue with the Christian tradition and draws on its spiritual heritage in the search for answers to the contemporary challenges to human dignity and value. Its focus is on the Catholic social thought and Lutheran theology. The fourth part addresses the moral status of persons in view of specific issues such as the effects of brain injury, gene therapy, and human cloning on personhood. It extends the scope of research beyond human beings and inquires also into the moral status of animals.
Download or read book Medical Ethics in Antiquity written by P. Carrick and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of reviewing the ethical concerns of ancient medicine with an eye as to how they might instruct us about the extremely lively disputes of our own contemporary medicine is such a natural one that it surprises us to real ize how very slow we have been to pursue it in a sustained way_ Ideologues have often seized on the very name of Hippocrates to close off debate about such matters as abortion and euthanasia - as if by appeal to a well-known and sacred authority that no informed person would care or dare to oppose_ And yet, beneath the polite fakery of such reference, we have deprived our selves of a familiarity with the genuinely 'unsimple' variety of Greek and Roman reflections on the great questions of medical ethics. The fascination of recovering those views surely depends on one stunning truism at least: humans sicken and die; they must be cared for by those who are socially endorsed to specialize in the task; and the changes in the rounds of human life are so much the same from ancient times to our own that the disputes and agreements of the past are remarkably similar to those of our own.
Download or read book Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics written by James J. Giordano and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While neuroscience has provided insights into the structure and function of nervous systems, hard questions remain about the nature of consciousness, mind, and self. Perhaps the most difficult questions involve the meaning of neuroscientific information, and how to pursue and utilize neuroscientific knowledge in ways that are consistent with some construal of social 'good'. Written for researchers and graduate students in neuroscience and bioethics, Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics explores important developments in neuroscience and neurotechnology, and addresses the philosophical, ethical, and social issues and problems that such advancements generate. It examines three core questions. First, what is the scope and direction of neuroscientific inquiry? Second, how has progress to date affected scientific and philosophical ideas, and finally, what ethical issues and problems does this progress and knowledge incur, both now and in the future?
Download or read book Philosophical Perspectives on Bioethics written by Joseph Boyle and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1996-12-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should we attempt to resolve concrete bioethical problems? How are we to understand the role of bioethics in the health care system, government, and academe? This collection of original essays raises these and other questions about the nature of bioethics as a discipline. The contributors to the volume discuss various approaches to bioethical thinking and the political and institutional contexts of bioethics, addressing underlying concerns about the purposes of its practice. Included are extended analyses of such important issues as the conduct of clinical trials, euthanasia, justice in health care, the care of children, cosmetic surgery, and reproductive technologies.
Download or read book Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology written by Sune Holm and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-06-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology provides a philosophical examination of what has been called the most powerful metaphor in biology: The machine metaphor. The chapters collected in this volume discuss the idea that living systems can be understood through the lens of engineering methods and machine metaphors from both historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives. In their contributions the authors examine questions about scientific explanation and methodology, the interrelationship between science and engineering, and the impact that the use of engineering metaphors in science may have for bioethics and science communication, such as the worry that its wide application reinforces public misconceptions of the nature of new biotechnology and biological life. The book also contains an introduction that describes the rise of the machine analogy and the many ways in which it plays a central role in fundamental debates about e.g. design, adaptation, and reductionism in the philosophy of biology. The book will be useful as a core reading for professionals as well as graduate and undergraduate students in courses of philosophy of science and for life scientists taking courses in philosophy of science and bioethics.
Download or read book Handbook of Bioethics written by G. Khushf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In general, the history of virtue theory is well-documented (Sherman, 1997; O’Neill, 1996). Its relationship to medicine is also recorded in our work and in that of others (Pellegrino and Thomasma, 1993b; 1996; Drane, 1994; Ellos, 1990). General publications stress the importance of training the young in virtuous practices. Still, the popularity of education in virtue is widely viewed as part of a conservative backlash to modern liberal society. Given the authorship of some of these works by professional conservatives like William Bennett (1993; 1995), this concern is authentic. One might correspondingly fear that greater adoption of virtue theory in medicine will be accompanied by a corresponding backward-looking social agenda. Worse yet, does reaffirmation of virtue theory lacquer over the many challenges of the postmodern world view as if these were not serious concerns? After all, recreating the past is the “retro” temptation of our times. Searching for greater certitude than we can now obtain preoccupies most thinkers today. One wishes for the old clarity and certitudes (Engelhardt, 1991). On the other hand, the same thinkers who yearn for the past, like Engelhardt sometimes seems to do, might stress the unyielding gulf between past and present that creates the postmodern reaction to all systems of Enlightenment thought (1996).
Download or read book Bioethics and the Human Goods written by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bioethics and the Human Goods offers students and general readers a brief introduction to bioethics from a “natural law” philosophical perspective. This perspective, which traces its origins to classical antiquity, has profoundly shaped Western ethics and law and is enjoying an exciting renaissance. While compatible with much in the ethical thought of the great religions, it is grounded in reason, not religion. In contrast to the currently dominant bioethical theories of utilitarianism and principlism, the natural law approach offers an understanding of human flourishing grounded in basic human goods, including life, health, friendship, and knowledge, and in the wrongness of intentionally turning against, or neglecting, these goods. The book is divided into two sections: Foundations and Issues. Foundations sketches a natural law understanding of the important ethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice and explores different understandings of “personhood” and whether human embryos are persons. Issues applies a natural law perspective to some of the most controversial debates in contemporary bioethics at the beginning and end of life: research on human embryos, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the withdrawal of tube-feeding from patients in a “persistent vegetative state,” and the definition of death. The text is completed by appendices featuring personal statements by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and on the definition and determination of death.
Download or read book Death Posthumous Harm and Bioethics written by James Stacey Taylor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death, Posthumous Harm, and Bioethics offers a highly distinctive and original approach to the metaphysics of death and applies this approach to contemporary debates in bioethics that address end-of-life and post-mortem issues. Taylor defends the controversial Epicurean view that death is not a harm to the person who dies and the neo-Epicurean thesis that persons cannot be affected by events that occur after their deaths, and hence that posthumous harms (and benefits) are impossible. He then extends this argument by asserting that the dead cannot be wronged, finally presenting a defence of revisionary views concerning posthumous organ procurement.
Download or read book A Theory of Bioethics written by David DeGrazia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a compelling theory of bioethics, covering medical assistance-in-dying, the right to health care, abortion, animal research, and the definition of death.
Download or read book Bioethics Latin American Perspectives written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a unique view of the current state of development of bioethics in Latin America. Twelve Latin American thinkers who share a primary interest in bioethics address a vast range of questions, including autonomy, rights, justice, and the role of culture and religion in bioethics. These studies contribute to an understanding of Latin American thought, and they make possible a transcultural dialogue on bioethical issues.
Download or read book Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics written by Onora O'Neill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues against the conceptions of individual autonomy which are widely relied on in bioethics.
Download or read book Practical Ethics written by Peter Singer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.
Download or read book The Anticipatory Corpse written by Jeffrey P. Bishop and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Ethical Challenges of Human Research written by Franklin G. Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains 22 essays on the ethics of research involving human subjects written over a 15-year period. Topics addressed include the ethics of clinical trials, controversial study designs, and informed consent.
Download or read book Empirical Bioethics written by Jonathan Ives and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Autonomy Rationality and Contemporary Bioethics written by Jonathan Pugh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary Western bioethics, and the claim that there is an important relationship between autonomy and rationality is often treated as an uncontroversial claim in this sphere. Yet, there is also considerable disagreement about how we should cash out the relationship between rationality and autonomy. In particular, it is unclear whether a rationalist view of autonomy can be compatible with legal judgments that enshrine a patient's right to refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether ". . . the reasons for making the choice are rational, irrational, unknown or even non-existent". In this book, I bring recent philosophical work on the nature of rationality to bear on the question of how we should understand autonomy in contemporary bioethics. In doing so, I develop a new framework for thinking about the concept, one that is grounded in an understanding of the different roles that rational beliefs and rational desires have to play in personal autonomy. Furthermore, the account outlined here allows for a deeper understanding of different form of controlling influence, and the relationship between our freedom to act, and our capacity to decide autonomously. I contrast my rationalist with other prominent accounts of autonomy in bioethics, and outline the revisionary implications it has for various practical questions in bioethics in which autonomy is a salient concern, including questions about the nature of informed consent and decision-making capacity.
