This book offers new essays exploring concepts and applications of nonideal theory in bioethics. Nonideal theory refers to an analytic approach to moral and political philosophy (especially in relation to justice), according to which we should not assume that there will be perfect compliance with principles, that there will be favorable circumstances for just institutions and right action, or that reasoners are capable of being impartial. Nonideal theory takes the world as it actually is, in all of its imperfections. Bioethicists have called for greater attention to how nonideal theory can serve as a guide in the messy realities they face daily. Although many bioethicists implicitly assume nonideal theory in their work, there is the need for more explicit engagement with this theoretical outlook. A nonideal approach to bioethics would start by examining the sociopolitical realities of healthcare and the embeddedness of moral actors in those realities. How are bioethicists to navigate systemic injustices when completing research, giving guidance for patient care, and contributing to medical and public health policies? When there are no good options and when moral agents are enmeshed in their sociopolitical viewpoints, how should moral theorizing proceed? What do bioethical issues and principles look like from the perspective of historically marginalized persons? These are just a few of the questions that motivate nonideal theory within bioethics. This book begins in Part I with an overview of the foundational tenets of nonideal theory, what nonideal theory can offer bioethics, and why it may be preferable to ideal theory in addressing moral dilemmas in the clinic and beyond. In Part II, authors discuss applications of nonideal theory in many areas of bioethics, including reflections on environmental harms, racism and minority health, healthcare injustices during incarceration and detention, and other vulnerabilities experienced by patients from clinical and public health perspectives. The chapters within each section demonstrate the breadth in scope that nonideal theory encompasses, bringing together diverse theorists and approaches into one collection.

This book takes as its point of departure a humble cell lying on the intersection of ideas as diverse and yet interlaced as life, knowledge, commerce, governance, and ethics. It seeks to deepen the understanding of stem cell entities and the concerns, hopes, and aspirations that shape and make them viable therapeutic entities in the context of rapid globalization. Several key intersections between individual, group, and institutional relationships have become central to locating and debating the production of stem cells today. This edited collection addresses three overarching concerns: regenerating the notion of ethics, the emerging therapeutic horizons, and the position of the patient. As a whole this book seeks to explain how stem cells are accommodated, contested, and used in contemporary India and around the globe through an informed unpacking of issues underpinning contestation and promotion bestriding these technological developments. The authors offer a truly multi-disciplinary perspective, stimulating conversation between the social sciences, biological sciences and the patient. The concerns expressed and highlighted by these conversations are embedded in a vast geo-political expanse stretching from India to Euro-America and will be of great interest to academics and practitioners across fields including science technology studies, medicine and international development.

This book examines the question of what parental obligations procreators incur by bringing children into being. Prusak argues that parents, as procreators, have obligations regarding future children that constrain the liberty of would-be parents to do as they wish. Moreover, these obligations go beyond simply respecting a child's rights. He addresses in turn the ethics of adoption, child support, gamete donation, surrogacy, prenatal genetic enhancement, and public responsibility for children.

This book fills an important gap in existing health care ethics literature by describing an egalitarian conception of moral respect which applies to autonomous and non-autonomous patients alike. It reframes questions about respect, from its target to the role that respect plays in our moral lives. Taking into account various forms of objectification, it suggests that the unique role of moral respect is to recognize a person as more than a mere object; to recognize them as an equally intrinsically valuable being who possesses dignity. Further, the book argues that respect is central to health care because medicine and experiences of illness are both inherently objectifying. Objectification is sometimes morally permissible, and other times morally troubling-a context of respect can help to distinguish between these situations. Because we can reduce others to mere objects in ways other than violating or denying their autonomy, the approach presented here can also accommodate non-autonomous patients directly without considering them as marginal cases.

This book takes readers on a journey through the wide universe of bioethics, raising the following question: what is the proper attitude towards health, life, and death from the perspective of contemporary behavioral economics? Drawing on fields as diverse as economics, ethics, ecology, biology, and philosophy, this book seeks to uncover the bioethics we accomplish, not the moral principles that we advocate. This book covers life-and-death issues arranged around five themes: selves, persons, populations, species, and "Future Earth". Ultimately, the author illustrates two kinds of justice: static and dynamic. Static justice prevails whenever parties are free to bargain with each other, while dynamic justice follows from parties' interactions over time. An examination into these types of justice reveals one particularly striking phenomenon: attempts by others to tip the balance of justice have a tendency to backfire. Of primary interest to behavioral economists, this book will also appeal to scholars studying bioethics, ecology, medicine, and philosophy, as well as all people dealing with issues of health, dying, and death.

Food makes philosophers of us all. Death does the same . . . but death comes only once . . . and choices about food come many times each day. In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human history. Will genetically modified food feed the poor or destroy the environment? Is it a threat to our health? Is the assumed healthfulness of organic food a myth or a reality? The answers to these and other questions are engagingly pursued in this substantive collection, the first of its kind to address the broad range of philosophical, sociological, political, scientific, and technological issues surrounding the ethics of food.

This open access book discusses individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to vaccination from the perspective of philosophy and public health ethics. It addresses the issue of what it means for a collective to be morally responsible for the realisation of herd immunity and what the implications of collective responsibility are for individual and institutional responsibilities. The first chapter introduces some key concepts in the vaccination debate, such as 'herd immunity', 'public goods', and 'vaccine refusal'; and explains why failure to vaccinate raises certain ethical issues. The second chapter analyses, from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to the realisation of herd immunity. The third chapter is about the principle of least restrictive alternative in public health ethics and its implications for vaccination policies. Finally, the fourth chapter presents an ethical argument for unqualified compulsory vaccination, i.e. for compulsory vaccination that does not allow for any conscientious objection. The book will appeal to philosophers interested in public health ethics and the general public interested in the philosophical underpinning of different arguments about our moral obligations with regard to vaccination.

This book engages in a critical discussion on how to respect and promote patients' autonomy in difficult cases such as palliative care and end-of-life decisions. These cases pose specific epistemic, normative, and practical problems, and the book elucidates the connection between the practical implications of the theoretical debate on respecting autonomy, on the one hand, and specific questions and challenges that arise in medical practice, on the other hand. Given that the idea of personal autonomy includes the notion of authenticity as one of its core components, the book explicitly includes discussions on underlying theories of the self. In doing so, it brings together original contributions and novel insights for "applied" scenarios based on interdisciplinary collaboration between German and Serbian scholars from philosophy, sociology, and law. It is of benefit to anyone cherishing autonomy in medical ethics and medical practice.

With much of the world's population facing restricted access to adequate medical care, how to allocate scarce health-care resources is a pressing question for governments, hospitals, and individuals. How do we decide where funding for health-care programs should go? Tannsjo here approaches the subject from a philosophical perspective, balancing theoretical treatments of distributive ethics with real-world examples of how health-care is administered around the world today. Tannsjo begins by laying out several popular ethical theories-utilitarianism, which recommends maximizing the best overall outcome; egalitarianism, which recommends smoothing out the differences between people as much as possible; and the maximin/leximin theory, which urges people to give absolute priority to those who are worst off. Tannsjo shows how, in abstract thought experiments, these theories come into conflict with each other and reveal puzzling implications. He goes on to argue, however, that when we consider health-care in the real-world, these theories all agree on a central point: in a well-ordered welfare state, more resources should be directed to the care and cure of people suffering from mental illness, and less to the marginal life extension of elderly patients. Tannsjo's book thus recommends a shift in spending to increase fairness and overall utility-while also recognizing that this kind of dispassionate suggestion, with its purely economic foundation, is unlikely to take hold in policy. Tannsjo's analysis is a case study in how ethical theories can sometimes lead to rational conclusions and recommendations that we are not prepared to accept.

This study deals with an underexplored area of the emerging technologies debate: robotics in the healthcare setting. The author explores the role of care and develops a value-sensitive ethical framework for the eventual employment of care robots. Highlighting the range of positive and negative aspects associated with the initiative to design and use care robots, it draws out essential content as a guide to future design both reinforcing this study's contemporary relevance, and giving weight to its prescriptions. The book speaks to, and is meant to be read by, a range of disciplines from science and engineering to philosophers and ethicists.

First Published in 1999. When we attend a workshop or read a book, we usually encounter the end result of someone's research, theorizing, or contemplation. However, it is often true that the process of reaching that end-point is just as informative as the end-point itself. Evolving Possibilities is just such a look at the process. In a way, it offers a behind-the-scenes look at Bill O'Hanlon's approach to therapy. This book is a collection of twenty essays and articles written or co-written by Bill O'Hanlon. They span a time period from 1986 to the present. The articles are grouped into four different approaches to psychotherapy: Ericksonian/Strategic Approaches, Solution-Oriented Therapy, Possibility Therapy, and Inclusive Therapy. Moving through these four groups of essays, the reader has the unique opportunity to witness the evolution and transformation of a therapist's thoughts regarding a variety of therapeutic issues. The book offers a refreshing, open look at one therapist's attempts to make sense of psychotherapy, including views that have sparked debate within the professional community. By offering a private look into Bill O'Hanlon's public persona, Evolving Possibilities provides the reader with a thought-provoking study in professional development that is of interest to anyone engaged in the pursuit of more effective psychotherapeutic techniques and approaches.

The book introduces the basic concepts of nanotechnology and the various technologies to characterize nanomaterials. It also covers the nanostructural features of mammalian cells/tissues and related nanomechanical properties. In addition, the book comprehensively describes the current state-of-the-art and future perspectives of nanotechnology in biosensors. It also discusses the potential of nanotechnology for delivering the diverse cancer therapeutics and illustrates its limitation due to the potential toxicity associated with oxidative stress. It also highlights the ethical issues and translational aspects related to nanotechnology. Finally, it summarizes the applications of nanotechnology in animal biotechnology, the recent perspectives and future challenges of nanomedicines. The content of the book are beneficial for the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students as well the professionals working in the area of nanotechnology and nanomedicines.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. The sequencing of the entire human genome has opened up unprecedented possibilities for healthcare, but also ethical and social dilemmas about how these can be achieved, particularly in developing countries. UNESCO's Bioethics Programme was established to address such issues in 1993. Since then, it has adopted three declarations on human genetics and bioethics (1997, 2003 and 2005), set up numerous training programmes around the world and debated the need for an international convention on human reproductive cloning. Negotiating Bioethics presents Langlois' research on the negotiation and implementation of the three declarations and the human cloning debate, based on fieldwork carried out in Kenya, South Africa, France and the UK, among policy-makers, geneticists, ethicists, civil society representatives and industry professionals. The book examines whether the UNESCO Bioethics Programme is an effective forum for (a) decision-making on bioethics issues and (b) ensuring ethical practice. Considering two different aspects of the UNESCO Bioethics Programme - deliberation and implementation - at international and national levels, Langlois explores: how relations between developed and developing countries can be made more equal who should be involved in global level decision-making and how this should proceed how overlap between initiatives can be avoided what can be done to improve the implementation of international norms by sovereign states how far universal norms can be contextualized what impact the efficacy of national level governance has at international level

Issues concerning patients' rights are at the center of bioethics, but the political basis for these rights has rarely been examined. In "Bioethics in a Liberal Society: The Political Framework of Bioethics Decision Making," Thomas May offers a compelling analysis of how the political context of liberal constitutional democracy shapes the rights and obligations of both patients and health care professionals. May focuses on how a key feature of liberal society--namely, an individual's right to make independent decisions--has an impact on the most important relational facets of health care, such as patients' autonomy and professionals' rights of conscience.

Although a liberal political framework protects individual judgments, May asserts that this right is based on the assumption of an individual's competency to make sound decisions. May uses case studies to examine society's approach to medical decision making when, for reasons ranging from age to severe mental disorder, a person lacks sufficient competency to make independent and fully informed choices. To protect the autonomy of these vulnerable patients, May emphasizes the need for health care ethics committees and ethics consultants to help guide the decision-making process in clinical settings. "Bioethics in a Liberal Society" is essential reading for all those interested in understanding how bioethics is practiced within our society.

Bioethics developed as an academic and clinicaldiscipline during the later part of the 20th century due to a variety of factors. Crucial to this development was the increased secularization of American culture as well as the dissolution of medicine as a quasi-guild with its own professional ethics. In the context of this moral vacuum, bioethics came into existence. Its raison d'etre was opposition to the allegedpaternalism of the medical community and traditional moral frameworks, yet at the same time it set itself up as a source of moral authority with respect to biomedical decision making. Bioethics serves as biopolitics in so far as it attempts to make determinations about how individuals ought to make medical decisions and then attempts to codify that in law.Progressivism and secularism are ultimately the ideology of bioethics."

Of the 121,000 people on donor lists in the U.S., over 100,000 need kidney transplants and thousands die each year while waiting. Bioprinting aspires to build healthy kidney tissue from a patient's own cells and transplant this to boost failing kidneys without fear of rejection... As the 21st century dawned, a handful of inspired scientists tried to use 3D printing to create living human tissue. Their vision was to restore the health of people with intractable injuries, such as worn out cartilage, severed nerves, ailing kidneys, failing hearts-the gamut of human frailties. Their modest success energized others to join the quest. Now, after two decades of ingenious effort and hard work, they have carved out a vibrant new discipline: bioprinting. In Bioprinting: To Make Ourselves Anew, physicist Kenneth Douglas casts an eye over the achievements and future of bioprinting. He explains the science with rigor but with a minimum of technical baggage. This is the first book on the subject written expressly for the lay audience: accessible and even entertaining. Douglas interviewed two dozen bioprinting researchers from around the world, and he enriches the narrative by sharing stories from the scientists behind the science. These contemporary vignettes are complemented by historical accounts of the women and men whose prescient contributions were foundational to the development of bioprinting. The book describes the challenges and accomplishments in the bioprinting of blood vessels, cartilage, skin, bone, skeletal muscle, neuromuscular junctions, liver, heart, lung, kidney, and so-called organs-on-a-chip, as well as the challenges of providing a blood supply and nerves to bioprinted tissues. This is a compelling tale of a work in progress: to imitate nature and help heal people with debilitating afflictions.

Bioethics asks fundamental questions. 'Who lives? Who dies? Who decides?' These questions are relevant to us all. Too often, the general public's sole encounter with these weighty questions is through sound bites fed to us by the media-where complex, difficult matters are typically presented in superficial and inaccurate terms. Here, renowned bioethicist Albert R. Jonsen equips readers with the tools and background to navigate the fascinating and complex landscape of bioethics. Bioethics Beyond the Headlines is a primer. You will not find convoluted philosophical arguments in this volume. Rather, you will find an engaging sampling of the key questions in bioethics, including euthanasia, assisted reproduction, cloning and stem cells, neuroscience, access to healthcare, and even research on animals and questions of environmental ethics-areas typically overlooked in general introductions to bioethics. But a 'primer' is not merely a first book-it should also 'prime' the interest of the reader, to prepare the mind for a more expansive venture into these issues. Bioethics Beyond the Headlines intends to do just that.

Womb transplant babies 'within three years.''If implantable wombs become a reality in humans, they need not be confined to women. Some men might also be keen.' Guardian, July 2003Having exhausted the possibilities for geographic colonial expansion, as well as reaching the fiscal limitations of virtual space, capital is now concentrated on exploiting a new frontier -- organic molecular space. Critical Art Ensemble began mapping this development in Flesh Machine (Autonomedia, 1998) by examining the use of reproductive technologies and their promise for achieving an intensified degree of control over worker and citizen. The Molecular Invasion acts as a companion to this first book by mapping the politics of transgenics, and offering a model for the creation of a contestational biology, as well as providing direct interventionist tactics for the disruption of this new assault on the organic realm. The Molecular Invasion is an indispensable user's guide for anyone interested in the critical thinking and practice of biotech as a social, scientific, and political phenomenon.

This book delves deeply into modern surrogacy arrangements, responding to both practical and ethical critiques by offering a radically new model for surrogate motherhood. Current practice distinguishes between two models of surrogacy - the altruistic (unpaid) model and the commercial (paid) model, both of which present social, ethical, and conceptual challenges. This book proposes a novel arrangement for surrogate motherhood - the professional model. Inspired by professions, such as nursing, teaching, and social work, the professional model acknowledges the caring motives that surrogate mothers have while at the same time compensating them for their work. Walker and Van Zyl adopt an evidence-based approach to explain that the professional model enables trust between intended parents and surrogates, provides professional support at every stage of the relationship, affords legal protections against exploitation and commodification, and recognizes the rights and interests of all parties, including the intended baby. The model applies to both transnational and domestic surrogacy and will be of great interest to policy makers, social researchers, bioethicists, legal scholars, fertility professionals, clinicians, and graduate students in psychology, philosophy, medicine and ethics.

This is the first volume in which an account of personal autonomy is developed that both captures the contours of this concept as it is used in social philosophy and bioethics, and is theoretically grounded in, and a part of, contemporary autonomy theory. James Stacey Taylor's account is unique as it is explicitly a political one, recognizing that the attribution of autonomy to agents is dependent in part on their relationships with others and not merely upon their own mental states. The volume is distinctive in its examples, which touch on the ethics of using inducements to encourage persons to participate in medical research, the ethical issues associated with the use of antibiotics, and the ethical basis for both patient confidentiality and informed consent.

This comprehensive book covers the research, theory, policy and practice context of unusual reproduction using third parties. Olga Van den Akker details the psychological adaptation required to continuing changes in public opinion, advances in technologies and new legislations in surrogate motherhood and discusses their impact at an individual, societal and global level. She describes the competing interests and interactions between legal, organisational, personal, social, psychological and cultural issues in relation to biological and genetic surrogate and commissioning parenthood. This book is intended for professionals, practitioners, academics and students interested in the complexities of unusual reproduction using multidisciplinary perspectives.

This book explores the promissory discourses and practices associated with the bioeconomy, focusing especially on the transformation of institutions; the creation, appropriation, and distribution of value; the struggle over resources, power, and meaning; and the role of altruism, kinship, and care practices. Governments and science enthusiasts worldwide are embracing the bioeconomy, championing it as the key to health, wealth, and sustainability, while citing it as justification to transform research and regulatory institutions, health and agricultural practices, ethics of privacy and ownership, and conceptions of self and kin. Drawing together studies from Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Europe, this volume encompasses subjects as diverse as regenerative medicine, population health research, agricultural finance, biobanking, assisted reproduction, immigration, breastfeeding, self-help groups, GM fish, and mining sewage.

This book offers a reflection on the central role that the ethics of informed consent plays in Rapid Tissue Donation (RTD). RTD is an advanced oncology procedure that involves the procurement, for research purposes, of "fresh" tissues within two to six hours of a cancer patient's death. Since RTD involves the retrieval of tissues after death, and since the collected tissues are of great importance for medical research, the need for any form of informed consent to regulate this procedure has been questioned. This book argues for the necessity of informed consent to govern RTD, and it provides the reader with a bespoke informed consent process applicable to cancer patients. The analysis unfolds at the intersection between applied ethics, public health ethics, and clinical ethics, and it is informed by philosophical theories of informed consent and by the social implications of individual choices. By viewing medical issues relating to informed consent in oncology from an ethical perspective, the book combines philosophical analysis with discussion of concrete cancer-related issues. As a result, the book is suitable for readers interested in ethical reasoning as well as for those with a medical background. It contributes to contemporary research by offering an original analysis that relies on a rigorous philosophical approach to address innovative issues at the cutting edge of medical research and policy making.

The questions and dilemmas of bioethics touch everyone. Should people who refuse to be vaccinated be treated for COVID-19, even if that displaces vaccinated patients with other serious conditions? What restrictions on abortion should there be, if any? Should women be paid to donate eggs? Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) discusses these and other similar questions facing the public today-as well as providing a way for thinking deeply about them. Steinbock and Menzel first examine major moral theories and how they can be used to analyze bioethical issues. They then provide historical background to the birth of bioethics and explain how it shifted from a paternalistic doctor knows best approach to respect for autonomy, a fundamental value in contemporary bioethics. Subsequent chapters cover advance directives, experimentation on human subjects, the definition of death, physician-assisted dying, abortion, disability, just healthcare systems, the allocation of scarce resources, pharmaceutical drug pricing, assisted reproductive technology, egg donation, surrogate motherhood, sex selection, and the genetic modification of humans. Race and gender are considered throughout, as are the ethical issues raised by pandemics. Steinbock and Menzel consider the controversial questions that surface in the public sphere, explaining the facts, and then evaluating different approaches to resolving them.

B. Andrew Lustig, Baruch A. Brody, and Gerald P. McKenny In this second volume of the "Altering Nature" project, we situate specific religious and policy discussions of four broad areas of biotechnology within the context of our interdisciplinary research on concepts of nature and the natural in the first volume (Altering Nature, Concepts of Nature and the Natural in Biotechnology Debates). In the first volume, we invited five groups of scholars to explore the diverse conc- tions of nature and the natural that shape moral judgments about human alterations of nature, as especially exemplified by recent developments in biotechnology. A careful reading of such developments reveals that assessments of them-whether positive or negative-are often informed by different conceptual interpretations of nature and the natural, with differing implications for judgments about the app- priateness of particular alterations of nature. These varying interpretations of nature and the natural often result from the distinctive perspectives that characterize va- ous scholarly disciplines. Therefore, in an effort to explore the variety of meanings that attend discussions of the concepts of nature and the natural, the contributors to the first volume of Altering Nature addressed those concepts from five different disciplinary vantages. A first group of scholars analyzed a range of religious and spiritual perspectives on concepts of nature and the natural. Their research highlighted the thematic, h- torical, and methodological touchstones in those traditions that shape their persp- tives on nature.