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In recent years, virtue theories have enjoyed a renaissance of interest among general and medical ethicists. This book offers a virtue-based ethic for medicine, the health professions, and health care. Beginning with a historical account of the concept of virtue, the authors construct a theory of the place of the virtues in medical practice. Their theory is grounded in the nature and ends of medicine as a special kind of human activity. The concepts of virtue, the virtues, and the virtuous physician are examined along with the place of the virtues of trust, compassion, prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and effacement of self-interest in medicine. The authors discuss the relationship between and among principles, rules, virtues, and the philosophy of medicine. They also address the difference virtue-based ethics makes in confronting such practical problems as care of the poor, research with human subjects, and the conduct of the healing relationship. This book with the author's previous volumes, A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice and For the Patient's Good, are part of their continuing project of developing a coherent moral philosophy of medicine.
Moral capacity is an important feature of what it means to be human. In this volume, the contributors have taken on the daunting task of trying to distinguish between legal and moral capacity. This distinction is difficult at times for clinicians, philosophers and legal scholars alike. Part of the challenge of defining moral capacity lies in the difficulty of adequately categorizing it. For this reason, the editors have chosen to divide the book into three parts. The first looks at the concepts involved in the discussion of moral capacity; the second considers the role of moral capacity in the lives of professionals; and the final part reflects on case studies of moral capacity or incapacity illustrating the challenge that moral capacity presents - its definition lying between two seemingly incommensurable models, those of the threshold and continuum. This volume takes a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, and ties the disciplines of medicine, philosophy and law into the health context. It will be of interest to medical health professionals as well as researchers working in the areas of philosophy and law.
PERSONHOOD AND HEALTH CARE This book arose as a result of a pre-conference devoted to the topic held June 28, 1999 in Paris, France. The pre-conference preceded the Annual Congress of the International Academy ofLaw and Mental Health. Other chapters were solicited after the conference in order to more completely explore the relation of personhood to health care. The pre conference was held in honor of Yves Pelicier who led so many of our French colleagues in medicine, philosophy, and ethics as Christian Herve notes in his Tribute. As health care is aimed at healing persons, it is important to realize how difficult it is to construct a theory of personhood for health care, and thus, a theory ...
Christian health care professionals in our secular and pluralistic society often face uncertainty about the place religious faith holds in today's medical practice. Through an examination of a virtue-based ethics, this book proposes a theological view of medical ethics that helps the Christian physician reconcile faith, reason, and professional duty. Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma trace the history of virtue in moral thought, and they examine current debate about a virtue ethic's place in contemporary bioethics. Their proposal balances theological ethics, based on the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, with contemporary medical ethics, based on the principles of beneficence, justice, and autonomy. The result is a theory of clinical ethics that centers on the virtue of charity and is manifest in practical moral decisions. Using Christian bioethical principles, the authors address today's divisive issues in medicine. For health care providers and all those involved in the fields of ethics and religion, this volume shows how faith and reason can combine to create the best possible healing relationship between health care professional and patient.
claim was that he had faced a conflict of duties pitting his legal duty not to kill against his duty as a physician to relieve his patient’s unbearable suffering. He was acquitted on the important grounds of conflict of duty. These grounds are based on a concept in Dutch law called "force majeure" 4 which recognizes extenuating circumstances such as conflicts of duty. The acquittal was upheld by the Lower Court of Alkmaar, but revoked by an Amsterdam court of appeal. The case went on to the Supreme Court, but before the Supreme Court's decision was issued, the Royal Dutch Medical Association (RDMA) attempted to clarify the criteria for euthanasia that many within the profession already acc...
In this companion volume to their 1981 work, A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice, Pellegrino and Thomasma examine the principle of beneficence and its role in the practice of medicine. Their analysis, which is grounded in a thorough-going philosophy of medicine, addresses a wide array of practical and ethical concerns that are a part of health care decision-making today. Among these issues are the withdrawing and withholding of nutrition and hydration, competency assessment, the requirements for valid surrogate decision-making, quality-of-life determinations, the allocation of scarce health care resources, medical gatekeeping, and for-profit medicine. The authors argue for the restorat...
The explosive growth of science and medicine in recent times has raised a host of ethical issues. This book reviews major advances in biology and medicine and explores their ethical implications. Organized by stage of human life--from birth to death--it guides the reader through the critical issues that face our technologically advanced society. Each section contains a sketch of the scientific research in a particular field and then discusses the issues that challenge our ethical and moral principles, social frameworks, and public policies. A world-class group of contributors from biology, medicine, technology, and ethics probe controversial topics such as genetic research, transplantation, ...
A theory of Clinical Bioethics based on the integration of the moral logic of health care practice ("internal morality") and the larger social concerns and processes ("external morality") Clinical Bioethics. A Search for the Foundations compares major theoretical models in the foundation of clinical bioethics and explains medicine as a normative practice. The goals of medicine are discussed with particular reference to the subjectivisation of health and the rationalisation of health care institutions. This volume provides a consistent reconstruction of bioethical judgment both at the level of epistemological statute and institutional context, i.e. clinical ethics committees and clinical ethics consultation.
This book grounds ethics in the capacity for suffering shared by all sentient beings, and sees the avoidance and amelioration of suffering as the prima facie condition of moral interaction. Loewy sees social contract as originating in the original nurturing of individuals, and selfhood and autonomy as emerging in the embrace of beneficence. Communities thus have an implicit obligation to their members, which necessitates a just distribution of resources.