Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice is a philosophical and professional memoir of the education, training and development of becoming a clinical ethics consultant.

Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice: Sharing Stories with Strangers is a philosophical and professional memoir of the education, training, and professional development of becoming a clinical ethics consultant. Utilizing a phenomenological and narrative lens, this book offers a fresh and energizing window into the field of healthcare ethics by pairing compelling clinical narratives of what it is like to do clinical ethics consultation with clear reflections and accessible introductions to key philosophical, professional, and humanistic roots for responsible practice. Each chapter contains a firsthand account of a clinical ethics encounter – with vivid detail, verbatim dialogue, and internal monologues that reveal the consultant’s reflections throughout the consultation. Following or at times woven into the clinical story, each chapter explores elements of practice by highlighting philosophical, professional, and humanistic resources that connect to and shape meaning in everyday clinical ethics work, drawing from phenomenologically and narratively oriented ethicists (Richard Zaner, Andrea Frolic, Mark Bliton, and Stuart Finder), influential thinkers in adjacent fields (Alfred Schutz, Kurt Wolff, and Pierre Bourdieu), and creative writers and artists (Barry Lopez, Joe Henry, Audre Lorde, Robert M. Pirsig, and Dar Williams). The innovative structure signposts and illustrates distinct elements of clinical ethics experience and practice, inviting the reader to move through the book in different ways, according to their own learning goals, as graduate students, advanced trainees, practicing clinical ethicists, or ethics educators. By focusing on themes identified in the unique instances or experiences of first-hand accounts, or by tracing the philosophical reflections on grounding and orienting texts from the field, readers can access different elements of clinical ethics practice while the book as a whole models a process for considering and interrogating these elements. Elements of Moral Experience in Clinical Ethics Training and Practice: Sharing Stories With Strangers invites readers to articulate, reflect on, share, and ultimately learn from their own experiences in clinical ethics consultation.

Increasingly, medical students are required to face up to ethical issues in their training and practice. At the same time, there is growing interest in philosophy courses in the ethical issues raised by medical practice. This textbook, designed primarily for students of medicine, develops the issues to a philosophical level complex enough to be satisfying to students of philosophy as well as MA students on applied ethics courses. The author advocates an approach to medical ethics which breaks out of the straitjacket of the narrow choice between utilitarian or deontological theory, and contains a valuable discussion of practical wisdom. It maintains a balance between case studies and philosophical arguments - which are developed in a historical context, and will be of interest at all levels of the medical profession.

There is the world of ideas and the world of practice; the French are often for sup pressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. -Matthew Arnold The Function of Criticism at the Present Time From its inception, bioethics has confronted the need to reconcile theory and practice. At first the confrontation was purely intellectual, as writers on ethical theory (within phi losophy, theology, or other humanistic disciplines) turned their attention to topics from the world of medical practice. Recently the confrontation has grown more intense. The ap pointment of clinical ethicists in hospitals and other health care settings is an accelerating trend in North America. Concomitantly, those institutions involved in training peo ple in clinical ethics have added organized exposure to the world of practice , in the form of placement requirements, to the normal academic course load. In common with other dis ciplines, bioethics has begun to see clinical training as a con dition of didactic theory and apprenticeship.

This unique text uses hands-on examples and learning exercises to help you apply critical ethical principles to specific nursing challenges while addressing a range of patient populations and settings.

This open access book about the Zadeh Project demonstrates and explores a core question in clinical ethics: how can ethics consultants be accountable in the face of a robust plurality of ethical standpoints, especially those that underwrite practices and methods for doing ethics consultation as well as those viewpoints and values encountered in daily clinical ethics practice? Underscoring this question is the recognition that the field of clinical ethics consultation has arrived at a crucial point in its maturation. Many efforts are underway to more formally “professionalize” the field, with most aimed toward stabilizing a specific set of institutional considerations. Stretched between these institutional and practical initiatives resides a crucial set of of ethical considerations, chief among them the meaning and scope of responsibility for clinical ethics consultants. Developed around a long-form case scenario, the Zadeh Project provides a multi-layered series of “peer-reviews”: critique of the actions of the case scenario’s ethics consultant; reflection on clinical ethics method; examination of the many ways that commitments to method and practice can, and do, intersect, overlap, and alter one another. The design and format of this book thus models a key element for clinical ethics practice: the need and ability to provide careful and thoughtful explanation of core moral considerations that emerge among diverse standpoints. Specifically designed for those studying to become and those who are ethics consultants, this book, with its innovative and multi-layered approach, allows readers to share a peer-review-like experience that shows accountability to be what it is, an ethical, not merely procedural or administrative, undertaking.

This collection addresses whether ethicists, like authorities in other fields, can speak as experts in their subject matter. Though ethics consultation is a growing practice in medical contexts, there remain difficult questions about the role of ethicists in professional decision-making. Contributors examine the nature and plausibility of moral expertise, the relationship between character and expertise, the nature and limits of moral authority, how one might become a moral expert, and the trustworthiness of moral testimony. This volume engages with the growing literature in these debates and offers new perspectives from both academics and practitioners. The readings will be of particular interest to bioethicists, clinicians, ethics committees, and students of social epistemology. These new essays promise to advance discussions in the professionalization and accreditation of ethics consultation.