Ethics
When we are patients, few of us understand the implications and risks of the complex procedures modern medicine has developed for curing diseases and altering consciousness and human biology. Here is a book that attempts to clarify the issues raised by such complexities. The work is a primer in the language of medical ethics - a language we must understand if we are to make sense out of the private and public dilemmas modern medical progress is bringing our way. At the beginning of each chapter, three fictional cases illustrate dilemmas that can arise in one of seven areas of modern medicine: experimentation with human subjects; genetic counseling and screening-, abortion; behavior modification with drugs, surgery, and psychology; treatment of the dying and dead; allocation of scarce medical resources; and genetic engineering. These fictional cases lead into a review of a broad range of thinking about the ethics involved. From the facts given, the reader is equipped to form an opinion in each case. The book draws no conclusions
Perspectives in Ethics, Policy, and Science, offers an engaging ecological perspective on bioethical issues relevant to ethicists, policy-makers, and scientists. It offers three sections organized around human relationships to the environment, non-human animals, and biotechnologies. Each section presents clear and authoritative perspectives that develop each theme as central to bioethics. These perspectives can be used to lead discussion in classroom use either for students studying bioethics or for researchers interested in the ethical implications of specific topics. Questions for such discussion will follow each chapter that will help readers think critically about the essay and also the bioethical framework more generally.
Unlike traditional case study approaches or philosophical treatises, this book draws together a collection of the finest thinking on each respective theme while foregrounding the interconnection between those ethical, political, and scientific themes. Unlike other edited volumes, this collection of essays, originally given as public lectures, offers engaging and readable monologues on key issues by the very best scholars in their respective areas.
The editors’ introduction frames the complex history of bioethics and present an ecological consideration of the discipline as related to not only human well-being but also to the relations between humans, nonhuman animals, the environment, and biotechnologies. The first section starts from our best understanding of nonhuman animal pain and then moves to a discussion of nonhuman animal understanding. The second section sets the stage, first considering environmental ethics broadly and then narrowing to human impact on the climate and finally bringing technology and environment together concerning nanotechnology. The final section begins with discussion of a human-centered technology, moves to a biotechnology with broader potential environmental impact, and ends with the impact of biotechnologies on life itself. These three parts each tie together ethics, policy, and science as central to bioethics.
Sources of Significance confronts consumer capitalism and religious fundamentalism as symptoms of death denial and degenerated cultural heroisms. Advancing and synthesizing the ideas of Ernest Becker, Kenneth Burke, Hans Jonas, Erving Goffman, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Epictetus, this multidisciplinary work offers a sustained response and corrective. It outlines heroisms worth wanting and reveals the forms of gratitude, courage, and purpose that emerge as people come to terms with the meaning of mortality.
Corey Anton opens a contemporary dialogue spanning theism, atheism, agnosticism, and spiritualist humanism by re-examining basic topics such as language, self-esteem, ambiguity, guilt, ritual, sacrifice, and transcendence. Acknowledging the growing need for theologies that are compatible with modern science, Anton shows how today’s consumerist lifestyles distort and trivialize the need for self-worth, and he argues that each person faces the genuinely heroic tasks of contributing to the world’s beauty, harmony, and resources; of forgiving the cosmos for self-conscious finitude; and of gratefully accepting the ambiguity of life’s gifts.
Winner: 2011 Best Book Award from the Philosophy of Communication Division of the National Communication Association
The traditional equation of the death of a person with irreversible cessation of cardiorespiratory function-the absence of heartbeat, pulse, or respiration-is being replaced by modern medicine with a definition of death in terms of irreversible destruction of function-brain death. In this book, the author thoughtfully and analytically surveys and evaluates the arguments for and against equating the death of a person with brain death. The ethical issues-both theoretical and practical-are explored against a rich and comprehensive background of current medical thought and practice and the most recent legal reasoning and opinion.
Over twenty years after the 1989 UN General Assembly vote to open the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) for signature and ratification by UN member states, the United States remains one of only two UN members not to have ratified it. The other is Somalia. Child Rights: The Movement, International Law, and Opposition explores the reasons for this resistance. It details the objections that have arisen to accepting this legally binding international instrument, which presupposes indivisible universal civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, and gives children special protection due to their vulnerability. The resistance ranges from isolationist attitudes toward international law and concerns over the fiscal impact of implementation, to the value attached to education in a faith tradition and fears about the academic deterioration of public education. The contributors to the book reveal the significant positive influence that the CRC has had, despite not being ratified, on subjects such as educational research, child psychology, development ethics, normative ethics, and anthropology. The book also explores the growing homeschooling trend, which is often evangelically led in the US, but which is at loggerheads with an equally growing social science-based movement of experts and ethicists pressing for greater autonomy and freedom of expression for children. Looking beyond the US, the book also addresses some of the practical obstacles that have emerged to implementing the CRC in both developed countries (for example, Canada and the United Kingdom) and in poorer nations. This book, polemical and yet balanced, helps the reader evaluate both positive and the negative implications of this influential piece of international legislation from a variety of ethical, legal, and social science perspectives.
Human Rights Ethics makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic, rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to "natural rights" that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to the traditional problems of justification associated with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead, Butler proposes "a dialectical justification of human rights by indirect proof" that claims not to be question begging. Very much in the spirit of Hegel and Habermas, Butler proposes to vindicate a "totally rational account of human rights," but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed "right to freedom of thought in its universal modes."
Written in the context of critical dialogues about the war on terror and the global crisis in human rights violations, authors of the collected volume Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror, edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello, ask a series of questions: What definitions of humanity account for the persistence of human rights violations? How do we define terror and how do we understand the ways that terror affects the representation of those that both suffer and profit from it? Why is it that the representation of terror often depends on a distorted (for example, racist, fascist, xenophobic, essentialist, eliminationist) representation of human beings? And, most importantly, can representation, especially forms of art, rescue humanity from the forces of terror or does it run the risk of making it possible?The authors of the volume's articles discuss aspects of terror with regard to human rights events across the globe, but especially in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Their discussion and reflection demonstrate that the need to question continuously and to engage in permanent critique does not contradict the need to seek answers, to advocate social change, and to intervene critically. With contributions by scholars, activists, and artists, the articles collected here offer strategies for intervening critically in debates about the connections between terror and human rights as they are taking place across contemporary society. The work presented in the volume is intended for scholars, as well as undergraduate and graduate students in fields of the humanities and social sciences including political science, sociology, history, literary study, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology.