Bioethics: A Systematic Approach
Bernard Gert, Charles M. Culver, K. Danner Clouser
Language: English
Pages: 372
ISBN: B01K0TB75M
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book is the result of over 30 years of collaboration among its authors. It uses the systematic account of our common morality developed by one of its authors to provide a useful foundation for dealing with the moral problems and disputes that occur in the practice of medicine. The analyses of impartiality, rationality, and of morality as a public system not only explain why some bioethical questions, such as the moral acceptability of abortion, cannot be resolved, but also provide a method for determining the correct answer for those occasions when a bioethical question has a unique correct answer. This new edition includes an entire chapter that has been added to address the controversial issue of abortion within the authors' distinct framework.
This book presents the latest revisions of the authors' original analyses of the concepts of death and disease, analyses that have had a significant impact on the field of bioethics. It also includes an added chapter on mental disorders, where the authors' definition influenced what psychiatry classifies as a mental disorder, and so has had an impact that reveals beyond the field of bioethics.
In this edition, the authors also offer a new, more developed perspective on the concept of valid or informed consent by considering what information physicians should be required to know before proposing screening, diagnostic testing, prescribing medications, or performing surgery. The book also integrates some of the important insights of the field of clinical epidemiology into its discussion of valid consent. Its account of paternalism and its justification, perhaps the most ubiquitous moral problem in medical ethics, has had considerable influence. Its discussion of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide challenges the standard views that have been put forward by both proponents and opponents of physician assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia.
Phenomenology Wide Open: After the French Debate (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
The Duck That Won the Lottery: 100 New Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher
Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati
Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge Critical Thinkers)
sufficient for the diagnosis of a paraphilia or whether significant distress on the patient’s part was a necessary criterion for the diagnosis. Two or three of the texts (which we quote below) explicitly or fairly explicitly addressed this issue and presented it in a way consistent with the DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR definition of mental disorder, and with the DSM-IV criteria, but contrary to DSM-IV-TR criteria. However, some of the books made comments inconsistent with the DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR definition
studies and are the source of information from non-patient transvestites. These samples raise the possibility that there are some transvestites who are not paraphiliac because they sense no occupational, relationship, or other impairment. Such studies point to the fact that the gratifying aspects of networking and displaying the self as a female represents a good adaptation to this proclivity. It contrasts to those socially isolated men who cross-dress in private and who remain mortified at the
should assist the suicides of terminally ill patients is an example of such a dispute. People disagree about whether publicly allowing physician-assisted suicide will result in more bad consequences (e.g., significantly more people dying sooner than they really want to) than good consequences (e.g., many more people being relieved of pain and suffering). However, it is quite likely that most ideological differences also involve differences in the rankings of different kinds of harms, for example,
that although values remain at the core of the concept of malady, the specific values are objective and universal. Our account of malady includes mental as well as physical maladies. The harms that are included in our definition of malady encompass all the harms that are referred to by any of the particular malady terms, such as ‘‘disease,’’ ‘‘illness,’’ and ‘‘injury.’’ All of the other essential features that these terms share are also included in our definition. To summarize: (1) We believe that
becomes anxious, but if someone becomes anxious in circumstances where most others do not, she has a condition that is causing the problem. The cause is not in the environment, but in her. Thus, ‘‘abnormality’’ is important here too in deciding whether someone has a malady, for it determines whether an experienced harm does or does not have a distinct sustaining cause. Society’s Reaction The question about what counts as a distinct sustaining cause is a particularly difficult problem when it is
