"Huge champion of organic and biodynamic wine making." -Simon Mayo Radio Show Gerard Bertrand decided he wished to relate his life journey and share his commitment to nature. Drawing on his experience as both a wine grower and a business leader, he demonstrates how the harmony of ecosystems, respect for nature and the preservation of living soils can be the pillars of a new paradigm, creating the conditions for a more balanced life and bringing hope for future generations. In this book, he also analyses how society is changing, and invites the reader to put fear aside and "dare" - in spite of the prevailing climate - to practice altruism, brotherhood, and an opening of the heart.

Animals, like humans, suffer and die from natural causes. This is particularly true of animals living in the wild, given their high exposure to, and low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. Most wild animals likely have short lives, full of suffering, usually ending in terrible deaths. This book argues that on the assumption that we have reasons to assist others in need, we should intervene in nature to prevent or reduce the harms wild animals suffer, provided that it is feasible and that the expected result is positive overall. It is of the utmost importance that academics from different disciplines as well as animal advocates begin to confront this issue. The more people are concerned with wild animal suffering, the more probable it is that safe and effective solutions to the plight of wild animals will be implemented in the future.

This book is an interdisciplinary contribution to bioethics, bringing together philosophers, sociologists and Science and Technology Studies researchers as a way of bridging the disciplinary divides that have opened up in the study of bioethics. Each discipline approaches the topic through its own lens providing either normative statements or empirical studies, and the distance between the disciplines is heightened not only by differences in approach, but also disagreements over the values, interpretations and problematics within bioethical research. In order to converse across these divides, this volume includes contributions from several disciplines. The volume examines the sociological issues faced by interdisciplinary research in bioethics, the role of expertise, moral generalisations, distributed agency, and the importance of examining what is not being talked about. Other contributions try to take an interdisciplinary look at a range of specific situations, fetal alcohol syndrome in the media, citizen science, electronic cigarettes and bioethical issues in human geography.

This Element is a survey of the field of pathographies of mental illness. It explores classic texts in the field as well as other selected contemporary memoirs. In doing so, the reader is introduced to psychiatric information about various mental illnesses through a narrative lens, emphasizing experience. Because clinical research is evidenced-based and aims to produce generalizable knowledge (i.e., trends), the reading of pathographies can complement these findings with practical experiential insights. By pairing psychiatric information with pathographies, certain personal themes become apparent that are different from the empirical trends identified by scientific and medical researchers. Based on the survey presented here, this Element identifies seven such themes, laying the foundation for future research, inquiry, practice, and policy.

Genetics and its related technologies are revolutionising the world in which we live: The media is regularly dominated by the latest genetically modified (GM) food, human gene therapy or cancer chip technology; maverick scientists are in the process of cloning humans, and the human genome sequence is available on the Internet. Fifty years ago we did not know what a gene was - today the awesome power of genetics is being released on an unsuspecting public, and with it a whole series of ethical dilemmas undreamth of even ten years ago. Does the question now become not 'can we?' but 'should we?'
By demystifying genetic engineering and exploring the basic biology underlying the living world, A Terrible Beauty is Born explains how clones and cloning technology are in many ways extensions of processes occurring constantly in nature. Used wisely these processes have the potential to bring enormous benefits; abused, they carry with them potential dangers which we ignore at our peril.

Whilst advances in reproductive medicine have enabled thousands of couples worldwide to have children, they also raise a plethora of ethical, philosophical and legal questions. This collection of essays by leading international scholars in bioethics, law, philosophy and public health, addresses many of the most difficult and intriguing issues. These include: the nature and scope of the right to reproduce, the meaning of parenthood and family, the significance of genetic connection to parenting, non-traditional families, sperm and egg donation, commercial surrogacy, prenatal genetic testing, reproductive cloning, obligations to children of reproductive technology and post mortem insemination. Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction is an important contribution to the growing literature on reproductive technology and one that will be of value to scholars, practitioners and students alike.

Can religious arguments provide a reasonable, justified basis for restrictive (coercive) public policies regarding numerous ethically and politically controversial medical interventions, such as research with human embryos, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or using artificial wombs? With Rawls, we answer negatively. Liberally reasonable policies must address these controversial technologies on the basis of public reasons accessible to all, even if not fully agreeable by all. Further, public democratic deliberation requires participants to construct these policies as citizens who are agnostic with respect to the truth of all comprehensive doctrines, whether secular or religious. The goal of these deliberations is practical, namely, to identify reasonable policy options that reflect fair terms of cooperation in a liberal, pluralistic society. Further, religious advocates may participate in formal policymaking processes as reasonable liberal citizens. Finally, public reason evolves through the deliberative process and all the novel technological challenges medicine generates for bioethics and related public policies.

This Element traces the origins and development of bioethics, the principles and values involved in the discipline, and the roles of justice among these principles and values. The main tasks given to the concept of justice have since the late 1970s been nondiscrimination in research, prioritization in medical practice, and redistribution in healthcare. The Element argues that in a world challenged by planet-wide political and environmental threats this is not sufficient. The nature and meaning of justice has to be rethought. The Element does this by dissecting current bioethical approaches in the light of theories of justice as partly clashing interpretations of equality. The overall findings are twofold. Seen against the background of global concerns, justice in bioethics has become a silent guardian of economic sustainability. Seen against the same background, we should set our aims higher. Justice can, and must, be put to better use than it presently is. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Increasing quantities of information about our health, bodies, and biological relationships are being generated by health technologies, research, and surveillance. This escalation presents challenges to us all when it comes to deciding how to manage this information and what should be disclosed to the very people it describes. This book establishes the ethical imperative to take seriously the potential impacts on our identities of encountering bioinformation about ourselves. Emily Postan argues that identity interests in accessing personal bioinformation are currently under-protected in law and often linked to problematic bio-essentialist assumptions. Drawing on a picture of identity constructed through embodied self-narratives, and examples of people's encounters with diverse kinds of information, Postan addresses these gaps. This book provides a robust account of the source, scope, and ethical significance of our identity-related interests in accessing - and not accessing - bioinformation about ourselves, and the need for disclosure practices to respond appropriately. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element examines the main ethical aspects of consciousness It argues that consciousness is not intrinsically valuable but has value or disvalue for individuals depending on its phenomenology (what it is like to be aware) and content (what one is aware of). These two components of awareness shape normative judgments about how ordered, disordered, altered, restored, diminished and suppressed conscious states can benefit or harm individuals. They also influence moral judgments about whether intentionally causing these states is permissible or impermissible and how these states can affect behavior. After describing its neurobiological basis, this Element discusses ethical and legal issues in six categories of consciousness: phenomenal and access consciousness; intraoperative awareness; prolonged disorders of consciousness, dissociative disorders, the role of consciousness in determining death; and altering and suppressing awareness near the end of life.

This book develops a new multimodal theoretical model of contagion for interdisciplinary scholars, featuring contributions from influential scholars spanning the fields of medical humanities, philosophy, political science, media studies, technoculture, literature, and bioethics. Exploring the nexus of contagion's metaphorical and material aspects, this volume contends that contagiousness in its digital, metaphorical, and biological forms is a pervasively endemic condition in our contemporary moment. The chapters explore both endemicity itself and how epidemic discourse has become endemic to processes of social construction. Designed to simultaneously prime those new to the discourse of humanistic perspectives of contagion, complicate issues of interest to seasoned scholars of science and technology studies, and add new topics for debate and inquiry in the field of bioethics, Endemic will be of wide interest for researchers and educators.

This volume brings together a unique collection of legal, religious, ethical, and political perspectives to bear on debates concerning biotechnology patents, or 'patents on life'. The ever-increasing importance of biotechnologies has generated continual questions about how intellectual property law should treat such technologies, especially those raising ethical or social-justice concerns. Even after many years and court decisions, important contested issues remain concerning ownership of and rewards from biotechnology - from human genetic material to genetically engineered plants - and regarding the scope of moral or social-justice limitations on patents or licensing practices. This book explores a range of related issues, including questions concerning morality and patentability, biotechnology and human dignity, and what constitute fair rewards from genetic resources. It features high-level international, interfaith, and cross-disciplinary contributions from experts in law, religion, and ethics, including academics and practitioners, placing religious and secular perspectives into dialogue to examine the full implications of patenting life.

Winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right 45 years ago, it still bears stigma-a proverbial scarlet A. Millions of Americans have participated in or benefited from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in the US ends in abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many from sharing their abortion experiences with friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way. In public discussion, both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the national debate polarized and contentious, and keeps our focus on the cases that occur the least. Professor Katie Watson focuses instead on the cases that happen the most, which she calls "ordinary abortion." Scarlet A gives the reflective reader a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like. It explains how our silence around private experience has distorted public opinion, and how including both ordinary abortion and abortion ethics could make our public exchanges more fruitful. In Scarlet A, Watson wisely and respectfully navigates one of the most divisive topics in contemporary life. This book explains the law of abortion, challenges the toxic politics that make it a public football and private secret, offers tools for more productive private exchanges, and leads the way to a more robust public discussion of abortion ethics. Scarlet A combines storytelling and statistics to bring the story of ordinary abortion out of the shadows, painting a rich, rarely seen picture of how patients and doctors currently think and act, and ultimately inviting readers to tell their own stories and draw their own conclusions.

At the onset of "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity," Leon Kass gives us a status report on where we stand today: "Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic 'enhancement,' for wholesale redesign. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come for paying attention." Trained as a medical doctor and biochemist, Dr. Kass has become one of our most provocative thinkers on bioethical issues. Now, in this brave and searching book, he also establishes himself as a prophetic voice summoning us to think deeply about the new biomedical technologies threatening to take us back to the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World." As in Huxley's dystopia, where life has been smoothed out by genetic manipulation, psychoactive drugs and high tech amusement, our own accelerating efforts to master reproduction and genetic endowment, to retard aging, and to conquer illness, imperfection, and death itself are animated by our most humane and progressive aspirations. But we are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia, Kass believes, without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new biology. In a series of meditations on cloning, embryo research, the human genome project, the sale of organs, and the assault on mortality itself, Kass evaluates the ongoing effort to break down the natural boundaries given us and to remake the human body into an instrument of our will. What does it mean to treat nascent human life as raw material to be exploited? What does it mean to blur the line between procreation and manufacture? What are the proper limits to this project for the remaking of human nature? These are the questions we should be asking to prevent runaway scientism with its utopian longings from reshaping humankind in the image of our own choosing. Kass believes that technology has done and will continue to do wonders for our health and longevity and that we have much to be thankful for. But there is more at stake in the biological revolution that saving life and avoiding death. We must also strive to protect the ideas and practices that give us dignity and keep us human. "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity" challenges us to confront the posthuman future that may await us by thinking deeply about the life and death issues we face today.

This interdisciplinary volume gathers selected, refereed contributions on various aspects of public health from several disciplines and research fields, including the philosophy of science, epidemiology, statistics and ethics. The contributions were originally presented at the 1st Barcelona conference of "Philosophy of Public Health" (5th - 7th May 2016). This book is intended for researchers interested in public health and the contemporary debates surrounding it.

Ever since its establishment by USDA regulation in the mid-1980s, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) has evolved as the premier instrument of animal welfare oversight within research institutions in the United States. As biomedical research continuously grows, the role and impact of the IACUC has increased in scope and complexity. The IACUC Handbook has become "the Bible" for individuals when the time comes for them to serve on their institution's IACUC. It provides a foundation for understanding and implementing the many and varied responsibilities of this committee. This Third Edition comprehensively addresses the significant changes in the pertinent regulatory environment and interpretation of applicable federal laws, regulations, and policies. It provides multiple references and commentary on the new edition of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, the new AVMA Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals: 2013 Edition, and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare's Frequently Asked Questions. The Third Edition also features an updated survey of IACUC practices from institutions around the United States, offering wisdom gained from their experience. In addition, it includes a chapter that provides an international perspective on how animal welfare reviews can function in other countries.

Life and nature are imperfect, uncontrollable, largely (and perhaps permanently) unknowable, that is to say: contingent. The contingency of life is a significant challenge for medicine and technology. Life sciences seem to broaden the possibilities of control to an extent that the contingency of life and nature is no longer self-evident. This very broad diagnosis raises a lot of serious questions. Is it a valid diagnosis? Are the life sciences really defying the contingency of our existence? Or we only manipulated with utopian promises? And if contingency is really being challenged, why should we worry about it? Is contingency essential for a meaningful life and way of life? This volume explores the different dimensions of how the contingency of life, and especially human life, is relevant for ethical discussions and the normative frameworks in bioethics. It explores the relevance of the notion contingency, needs and desires for moral argumentation and bioethics. The volume discusses those notions in a philosophical perspective, but pays special attention to the impact of life sciences for people with disabilities and intercultural perspectives on the bioethical debates. Additionally, the volume is a contribution to a deeper reflection on basic philosophical assumptions of bioethics.

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.

The general scope of the book is the patentability and morality of human embryonic stem cell research in US, EU and China. The book observes fraudsters operate unsafe human embryonic stem cell therapies and officialdom turns a blind eye to the immoral human embryonic stem cell research in China. The book highlights that both patent control and federal funding control are inefficient and ineffective way to monitoring human embryonic stem cell research. The book finally proposed an approach for china to regulating human embryonic stem cell research-regulating research itself at the reconciled international regime. The potential reader includes academics and practitioners dealing with intellectual property, patent law and stem cell inventions. The topic discussed will also be interesting to a broad readership, including experts, regulators, policy makers and medical researchers in both ethical and legal disciplines in the field of embryonic stem cell research.

This volume offers a carefully argued, compelling theory of bioethics while eliciting practical implications for a wide array of issues including medical assistance-in-dying, the right to health care, abortion, animal research, and the definition of death. The authors' dual-value theory features mid-level principles, a distinctive model of moral status, a subjective account of well-being, and a cosmopolitan view of global justice. In addition to ethical theory, the book investigates the nature of harm and autonomous action, personal identity theory, and the 'non-identity problem' associated with many procreative decisions. Readers new to particular topics will benefit from helpful introductions, specialists will appreciate in-depth theoretical explorations and a novel take on various practical issues, and all readers will benefit from the book's original synoptic vision of bioethics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This volume offers a carefully argued, compelling theory of bioethics while eliciting practical implications for a wide array of issues including medical assistance-in-dying, the right to health care, abortion, animal research, and the definition of death. The authors' dual-value theory features mid-level principles, a distinctive model of moral status, a subjective account of well-being, and a cosmopolitan view of global justice. In addition to ethical theory, the book investigates the nature of harm and autonomous action, personal identity theory, and the 'non-identity problem' associated with many procreative decisions. Readers new to particular topics will benefit from helpful introductions, specialists will appreciate in-depth theoretical explorations and a novel take on various practical issues, and all readers will benefit from the book's original synoptic vision of bioethics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Few writers have covered the intellectual terrain traversed by Michael Novak, who has written on theology, philosophy, political economy, and business theory. This book brings together many of Novak's crucial essays on "moral ecology": the ethos that must be cultivated and preserved if liberal democratic societies are to survive. Novak argues in defense of the free and virtuous society by examining the family, welfare reform, free markets, self-government, and the American founding. A series of remarkable intellectual studies on figures such as Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray, along with an autobiographical essay by Novak and an introduction by Brian C. Anderson, complete On Cultivating Liberty, an indispensable book for anyone concerned about the future of the democratic project as we enter the third millennium.

This book supports the emerging field of vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) for face and upper-limb transplants by providing a revised, ethically appropriate consent model which takes into account what is actually required of facial and upper extremity transplant recipients. In place of consent as permission-giving, waiver, or autonomous authorization (the standard approaches), this book imagines consent as an ongoing mutual commitment, i.e. as covenant consent. The covenant consent model highlights the need for a durable personal relationship between the patient/subject and the care provider/researcher. Such a relationship is crucial given the recovery period of 5 years or more for VCA recipients. The case for covenant consent is made by first examining the field of vascularized composite allotransplantation, the history and present understandings of consent in health care, and the history and use of the covenant concept from its origins through its applications to health care ethics today. This book explains how standard approaches to consent are inadequate in light of the particular features of facial and upper limb transplantation. In contrast, use of the covenant concept creates a consent model that is more appropriate ethically for these very complex surgeries and long-term recoveries.

Over the past decades, public trust in medical professionals has steadily declined. This decline of trust and its replacement by ever tighter regulations is increasingly frustrating physicians. However, most discussions of trust are either abstract philosophical discussions or social science investigations not easily accessible to clinicians. The authors, one a surgeon-turned-philosopher, the other an analytical philosopher working in medical ethics, joined their expertise to write a book which straddles the gap between the practical and theoretical. Using an approach grounded in the methods of conceptual analysis found in analytical philosophy which also draws from approaches to medical diagnosis, the authors have conceived an internally coherent and comprehensive definition of trust to help elucidate the concept and explain its decline in the medical context. This book should appeal to all interested in the ongoing debate about the decline of trust - be it as medical professionals, medical ethicists, medical lawyers, or philosophers.

Respect for autonomy has become a fundamental principle in human research ethics. Nonetheless, this principle and the associated process of obtaining informed consent do have limitations. This can lead to some groups, many of them vulnerable, being left understudied. This book considers these limitations and contributes through legal and philosophical analyses to the search for viable approaches to human research ethics. It explores the limitations of respect for autonomy and informed consent both in law and through the examination of cases where autonomy is lacking (infants), diminished (addicts), and compromised (low socio-economic status). It examines alternative and complementary concepts to overcome the limits of respect for autonomy, including beneficence, dignity, virtue, solidarity, non-exploitation, vulnerability and self-ownership. It takes seriously the importance of human relationality and community in qualifying, tempering and complementing autonomy to achieve the ultimate end of human research - the good of humankind.