The Foundations of Bioethics

Book Description:

This new, thoroughly recast second edition has been acclaimed as "not just another revision" but "the most important book that has been written since the beginning of that strange project called bioethics" (Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University). Its philosophical explorations of the foundations of secular bioethics have been substantially and provocatively expanded in this edition. The book Challenges the foundations of much of contemporary Bioethics and health care policy by confronting their failure to secure the moral norms they seek to apply. The nature of health and disease, the definition of death, the morality of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, germline genetic engineering, and triage decisions as well as distributive justice in health care are all readdressed within an integrated reconsideration of bioethics as a whole. New material has been added regarding social justice, health care reform and environmental ethics. The whole of bioethics is re-examined by taking seriously the difficulties of all applied ethics in the face of persistent controversies regarding the content of morality and the justification of any particular ethic. The very possibility and meaning of a secular bioethics are re-explored.