Bioethics of Nonexistence


Book Description

The greatest violence and violation of human life is legalization of its disposability and annihilation based on its condition. Such killing, whether of self or another, depicts absolute contradiction and betrayal of the very hypothesis of humanity. It manifests absolute failure to provide due care, and that is inhuman. Human life is who we are. It is the basis of any argument for human rights. There cannot be a right to terminate the existence of the rights bearer. Such a right contradicts the possibility of its own existence. There cannot be dignity in terminating the one in whom dignity resides. There can only be indignity in killing a person. The paradox of legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide represents humanity turned on itself. It is endorsement of existential nihilism and objectification of human life. It is the beginning of the end of humanhood. This book is a critical ethical exploration of mind-sets around euthanasia and assisted suicide to provide clarity, sobriety, and objectivity. The book is really about ontology of human life. Dr. Leonard Tumaini Chuwa is a Catholic priest and scholar working for Ascension as director of spiritual care for the state of Florida. Dr. Chuwa is certified by the National Association of Catholic Chaplains (NACC). Chuwa has bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and theology; master of arts degree in theology and religious studies from John Carroll Jesuit University in Cleveland, Ohio; and a doctor of philosophy degree in bioethics and health-care ethics from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chuwa is a distinguished public speaker on different bioethical issues. His first book, titled African Indigenous Ethics in Global Bioethics: Interpretation of Ubuntu, was published by Springer Academic Publishing as the first book in a new global bioethics series. Father Chuwa also authored Bioethical False Truths: Egotistic and Relativistic Autonomy vs. Christian and Ubuntu Relational Autonomy.




Rethinking Health Care Ethics


Book Description

​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.




For-Profit Enterprise in Health Care


Book Description

"[This book is] the most authoritative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of recent trends toward the commercialization of health care," says Robert Pear of The New York Times. This major study by the Institute of Medicine examines virtually all aspects of for-profit health care in the United States, including the quality and availability of health care, the cost of medical care, access to financial capital, implications for education and research, and the fiduciary role of the physician. In addition to the report, the book contains 15 papers by experts in the field of for-profit health care covering a broad range of topicsâ€"from trends in the growth of major investor-owned hospital companies to the ethical issues in for-profit health care. "The report makes a lasting contribution to the health policy literature." â€"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.







The Risk of a Lifetime


Book Description

This original, comprehensive theory of procreative ethics explains what kind of act procreation is and when we may permissibly engage in it. In order to ascertain when the procreative risk is permissible to impose, Weinberg proposes contractualist principles to fairly attend to the interests prospective parents have in procreating and the interests future people have in a life of human flourishing. The book presents a solution to the non-identity problem as well as dilemmas regarding our liberal principles of autonomy, consent, and equality, which may seem to be in tension with our procreative practices.




Saving People from the Harm of Death


Book Description

"In this volume, leading philosophers discuss the evaluation of death and its relevance for health policy. The authors challenge the current practice of assessing newborn deaths as the worst ones. It also discusses whether stillbirths should be included in our evaluation of deaths, and whether the deaths of young children are worse than that of newborns"--




The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Psychological Ethics


Book Description

The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Psychological Ethics is a valuable resource for psychologists and graduate students hoping to further develop their ethical decision making beyond more introductory ethics texts. The book offers real-world ethical vignettes and considerations. Chapters cover a wide range of practice settings, populations, and topics, and are written by scholars in these settings. Chapters focus on the application of ethics to the ethical dilemmas in which mental health and other psychology professionals sometimes find themselves. Each chapter introduces a setting and gives readers a brief understanding of some of the potential ethical issues at hand, before delving deeper into the multiple ethical issues that must be addressed and the ethical principles and standards involved. No other book on the market captures the breadth of ethical issues found in daily practice and focuses entirely on applied ethics in psychology.




On Being Human


Book Description

À première vue, l'humanisme occidental, le bouddhisme japonais et la science moderne ont si peu en commun que l'idée même de rechercher un terrain d'entente par le dialogue semble trop idéaliste. Seul un homme du calibre de daisaku ikeda pourrait mener à bien un tel projet. Faisant fi du cliché et des réponses faciles, il aborde les grandes questions auxquelles la société d'aujourd'hui est confrontée: cancer, sida, mort dignement, fécondation in vitro, éthique biomédicale... Les réponses apportées par René Simard, biologiste moléculaire et généticien, et Guy Bourgeault, bioéthicien , sont perspicaces et convaincantes. Leurs discussions ont franchi les barrières linguistiques et culturelles pour présenter une vision du potentiel - et des défis inhérents - à l'être humain.




Bioethical False Truths


Book Description

Autonomy is either relational or it does not exist at all. All life is irreducibly relational and human personhood is helplessly engaging and being engaged by all life. Significant as individual personal consciousness is, consciousness of others as fellow selves is a higher form of consciousness. It is the other selves that define and affirm the autonomous individual. Relationality is the basis of autonomy. This work claims that autonomy should not undermine relationality and that individual good is based on common good. Overemphasizing autonomy may lead to moral relativism, hence ethical anarchism. Veracity ought to be the proto-principle of bioethics.




The Non-identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People


Book Description

David Boonin presents a new account of the non-identity problem: a puzzle about our obligations to people who do not yet exist. Our actions sometimes have an effect not only on the quality of life that people will enjoy in the future, but on which particular people will exist in the future to enjoy it. In cases where this is so, the combination of certain assumptions that most people seem to accept can yield conclusions that most people seem to reject. The non-identity problem has important implications both for ethical theory and for a number of topics in applied ethics, including controversial issues in bioethics, environmental ethics and disability ethics. It has been the subject of a great deal of discussion for nearly four decades, but this is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to its examination. Boonin begins by explaining what the problem is, why the problem matters, and what criteria a solution to the problem must satisfy in order to count as a successful one. He then provides a critical survey of the solutions to the problem that have thus far been proposed in the sizeable literature that the problem has generated and concludes by developing and defending an unorthodox alternative solution, one that differs fundamentally from virtually every other available approach.