The ethical issues we face in health care, justice, and human rights extend beyond national boundaries—they are global and cross-cultural in scope. Editors Wanda Teays and Alison Dundes Renteln have assembled the works of a diverse interdisciplinary and international team of bioethics experts into a comprehensive, innovative, and accessible resource. Following a consideration of theoretical frameworks that inform a global bioethics, units on human rights, life and death, and public health form an in-depth look at contemporary issues in the field. Each unit includes cutting edge analyses and thought-provoking case studies, as well as discussion prompts. Topics range from torture and lethal injection to euthanasia, abortion, medical tourism, vulnerable human subjects, to health equity, vaccination programs, mental health, the ethics of surrogacy, and more. The second edition includes new essays on • bioethics and environmental ethics • medical tourism • torture and solitary confinement • institutional review boards • pediatric genomics • the abortion debate • the ethics of surrogacy • issues in global health ethics • revirgination surgery • global mental health • feminist perspectives on global aging • ethical considerations for vaccination programs

Contains a collection of essays exploring human dignity and bioethics, a concept crucial to today's discourse in law and ethics in general and in bioethics in particular.

The third edition of The Basics of Bioethics continues to provide a balanced and systematic ethical framework to help students analyze a wide range of controversial topics in medicine, and consider ethical systems from various religious and secular traditions. The Basics of Bioethics covers the “Principalist” approach and identifies principles that are believed to make behavior morally right or wrong. It showcases alternative ethical approaches to health care decision making by presenting Hippocratic ethics as only one among many alternative ethical approaches to health care decision-making. The Basics of Bioethics offers case studies, diagrams, and other learning aids for an accessible presentation. Plus, it contains an all-encompassing ethics chart that shows the major questions in ethics and all of the major answers to these questions.

​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.

Medicine and health care generate many bioethical problems and dilemmas that are of great academic, professional and public interest. This comprehensive resource is designed as a succinct yet authoritative text and reference for clinicians, bioethicists, and advanced students seeking a better understanding of ethics problems in the clinical setting. Each chapter illustrates an ethical problem that might be encountered in everyday practice; defines the concepts at issue; examines their implications from the perspectives of ethics, law and policy; and then provides a practical resolution. There are 10 key sections presenting the most vital topics and clinically relevant areas of modern bioethics. International, interdisciplinary authorship and cross-cultural orientation ensure suitability for a worldwide audience. This book will assist all clinicians in making well-reasoned and defensible decisions by developing their awareness of ethical considerations and teaching the analytical skills to deal with them effectively.

Argues that applied bioethics should embrace utilitarian decision analysis, thus avoiding recommendations expected to do more harm than good.

Observing Bioethics examines the history of bioethics as a discipline related not only to modern biology, medicine, and biotechnology, but also to the core values and beliefs of American society and its courts, legislatures, and media. The book is written from the perspective of two social scientists--a sociologist of medicine(Renee C. Fox) and a historian of medicine (Judith P. Swazey)--who have participated in bioethics since the emergence of this multidisciplinary field more than 30 years ago. Fox and Swazey draw on first-hand observations and experiences in a variety of American bioethical settings; face-to-face interviews with first- and second-generation figures in the genesis and early unfolding of bioethics; a detailed examination of the theatrical media coverage of what was considered to be a banner event in the annals of bioethics (the creation and birth of the cloned sheep, Dolly); case studies of how bioethics has internationally developed; and a large corpus of primary documents and secondary source materials. While recognizing the intellectual, moral, and sociological importance of American bioethics, Fox and Swazey are critical of its characteristics. Foremost among these are what they identify as the problems of thinking socially, culturally, and internationally in American bioethics; the 'tenuous interdisciplinarity' of the field; and the troubling extent to which the 'culture wars' have penetrated bioethics. This book will appeal to a wide range of doctors, scientists, and academics who are involved in the history and sociology of bioethics.