This workbook is a companion to Clinical Ethics Consultation: A Practical Guide to Changing Culture, Building Capacity and Solving Problems Case by Case. The Toolkit lays out the process for clinical ethics consultation in a series of steps within five phases: Pre-Consult, Interviews, Mid-Consult, Consult meeting(s), and Post-Consult. For each step, the Toolkit provides directions for how to complete it, tips for success, and worksheets for capturing data and analysis. The Clinical Ethics Consultation Toolkit is the playbook from which clinical ethics consultants can draw methods and strategies for effectively delivering ethics consultation.

This book provides a careful and comprehensive, step-by-step method for providing clinical ethics consultation. This Guide can be applied in almost any healthcare setting and takes the reader from establishing an intake process and developing strategies for interviewing those involved in the situation, to undertaking a consultation meeting and following up on a clinical consult. The book is an invaluable resource to any clinical ethicist, or committee or consult team member who is seeking to provide their service with rigour and quality. Written in simple language, the book explores ideas and concepts that will help the reader to understand, think through, and ultimately offer useful ethical consultation when facing ethically challenging issues.

What should a vet do when a client can't pay for their animal's treatment? Or when asked their opinion on the killing of wildlife for disease control? Or when observing an animal welfare problem whilst off duty?Ethical problems are an everyday part of life for veterinarians but it can be difficult to combine personal values with professional conduct. Veterinary Ethics presents a range of ethical scenarios that veterinarians and other allied animal health professionals may face in practice. The scenarios discussed are not only exceptional cases with potentially significant consequences, but often less dramatic everyday situations.The responses to these ethical problems are from practising veterinarians and acknowledged world experts in animal welfare and ethics. The advice given is thorough and detailed, covering different eventualities, the ethical knots and dilemmas, the personal feelings of those involved as well as objective recommendations on ethical decision making and, where relevant, guidance from veterinary governing bodies and the law. The advice is framed in the form of veterinary life in the real world, not necessarily an ideal world.As well as practical guidance the book takes a step back and explores the different philosophical arguments and standpoints and the resultant solutions and problems of each approach, examining the background and relationship between different philosophical schools of thought, ethics and veterinary care. The book strives to present decision making in response to ethical problems as transparently as possible, employing a range of ethical frameworks.The book also challenges the reader about their own decision making in given situations, what factors to consider and how they would achieve certain outcomes.

This book offers the policy-maker or decision-maker key insights and practical information regarding the features of ethics frameworks best suited to the ethical assessment of human cognitive enhancement (HCE) applications, such as pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers and noninvasive brain stimulation techniques. This book takes as its departure point the entrenched philosophical debate between opponents and proponents of HCE and the increased feasibility of some applications of HCE. Recent calls for policy-making in the area of human enhancement reflect the need to find a balance between addressing current ethical issues and issues that are more speculative in nature or are underpinned by abstract philosophical concepts. Practical ethical approaches for policy or decision-making should enable the development of an evidence base for the risks and benefits of HCE applications. Moreover, such practical approaches should also incorporate a broader range of value bases that would facilitate convergence regarding certain decisions and judgements. This book identifies and evaluate tools that help us to go beyond polarised philosophical debates in order to assist practical decision makers in concrete ethical deliberation and decision-making. The focus is on systematic methods with which to identify relevant ethical values and assess the impacts of an HCE application on those values in order to facilitate decision-making regarding the ethical acceptability or desirability of the application.

Behavioral neuroscience encompasses the disciplines of neurobiology and psychology to study mechanisms of behavior. This volume provides a contemporary overview of the current state of how ethics informs behavioral neuroscience research. There is dual emphasis on ethical challenges in experimental animal approaches and in clinical and nonclinical research involving human participants.

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.

This book moves away from the frameworks that have traditionally guided ethical decision-making in the Western clinical setting, towards an inclusive, non-coercive and, reflective dialogic approach to moral decision-making. Inspired in part by Jurgen Habermas's discourse theory of morality and principles of communicative action, the book offers a proportionist approach as a way of balancing out the wisdom in traditional frameworks, set in the actual reality of the clinical situation at hand. Putting this approach into practice requires having a conversation, a dialogue or a discourse, with collaboration amongst all the stakeholders. The aim of the dialogue is to reach consensus in the decision, via mutual understanding of the values held by the patient and others whom they see as significant. This book aims to underscore the moral philosophical foundations for having a meaningful conversation. Life and Death Decision in the Clinical Setting is especially relevant in our contemporary era, characterised medically by an ever-increasing armamentarium of life-sustaining technology, but also by increasing multiculturalism, a multiplicity of faiths, and increasing value pluralism.

In this volume Allen Buchanan collects ten of his most influential essays on justice and healthcare and connects the concerns of bioethicists with those of political philosophers, focusing not just on the question of which principles of justice in healthcare ought to be implemented, but also on the question of the legitimacy of institutions through which they are implemented. With an emphasis on the institutional implementation of justice in healthcare, Buchanan pays special attention to the relationship between moral commitments and incentives.
The volume begins with an exploration of the difficulties of specifying the content of the right to healthcare and of identifying those agents and institutions that are obligated to help ensure that the right thus specified is realized, and then progresses to an examination of the problems that arise in attempts to implement the right through appropriate institutions. In the last two essays Buchanan pursues the central issues of justice in healthcare at the global level, exploring the idea of healthcare as a human right and the problem of assigning responsibilities for ameliorating global health disparities.
Taken together, the essays provide a unique and consistent position on a wide range of issues, including conflicts of interest in clinical practice and the claims of medical professionalism, the nature and justification for the right to health care, the relationship between responsibility for healthcare and the nature of the healthcare system, and the problem of global health disparities. The result is an approach to justice in healthcare that will facilitate more productive interaction between the normative analysis of philosophers and the policy work of economists, lawyers, and political scientists.

The social practice of forming, shaping, expressing, contesting, and maintaining personal identities makes human interaction, and therefore society, possible. Our identities give us our sense of how we are supposed to act and how we may or must treat others, so how we hold each other in our identities is of crucial moral importance. To hold someone in her identity is to treat her according to the stories one uses to make sense of who she is. Done well, holding allows individuals to flourish personally and in their interactions with others; done poorly, it diminishes their self-respect and restricts their participation in social life. If the identity is to represent accurately the person who bears it, the tissue of stories that constitute it must continue to change as the person grows and changes. Here, good holding is a matter of retaining the stories that still depict the person but letting go of the ones that no longer do. The book begins with a puzzling instance of personhood, where the work of holding someone in her identity is tragically one-sided. It then traces this work of holding and letting go over the human life span, paying special attention to its implications for bioethics. A pregnant woman starts to call her fetus into personhood. Children develop their moral agency as they learn to hold themselves and others in their identities. Ordinary adults hold and let go, sometimes well and sometimes badly. People bearing damaged or liminal identities leave others uncertain how to hold and what to let go. Identities are called into question at the end of life, and persist after the person has died. In all, the book offers a glimpse into a fascinating moral terrain that is ripe for philosophical exploration.

This book offers a new theory of property and distributive justice derived from Talmudic law, illustrated by a case study involving the sale of organs for transplant. Although organ donation did not exist in late antiquity, this book posits a new way, drawn from the Talmud, to conceive of this modern means of giving to others. Our common understanding of organ transfers as either a gift or sale is trapped in a dichotomy that is conceptually and philosophically limiting. Drawing on Maussian gift theory, this book suggests a different legal and cultural meaning for this property transfer. It introduces the concept of the 'divine lien', an obligation to others in need built into the definition of all property ownership. Rather than a gift or sale, organ transfer is shown to exemplify an owner's voluntary recognition and fulfilment of this latent property obligation.

This book discusses the common principles of morality and ethics derived from divinely endowed intuitive reason through the creation of al-fitr' a (nature) and human intellect (al-‘aql). Biomedical topics are presented and ethical issues related to topics such as genetic testing, assisted reproduction and organ transplantation are discussed. Whereas these natural sources are God’s special gifts to human beings, God’s revelation as given to the prophets is the supernatural source of divine guidance through which human communities have been guided at all times through history. The second part of the book concentrates on the objectives of Islamic religious practice – the maqa' sid – which include: Preservation of Faith, Preservation of Life, Preservation of Mind (intellect and reason), Preservation of Progeny (al-nasl) and Preservation of Property. Lastly, the third part of the book discusses selected topical issues, including abortion, assisted reproduction devices, genetics, organ transplantation, brain death and end-of-life aspects. For each topic, the current medical evidence is followed by a detailed discussion of the ethical issues involved.

This book addresses the debate usually tagged as being about 'markets in human body parts' which is antagonistically divided into pro-market and anti-market positions. The author provides a set of propositions about how to approach this and shows a way out of the concrete impasse of it. Assumptions about markets and bodies that characterize this debate are analyzed and described while the author argues that these assumptions are in fact constitutive for exchanges of human bodily material - but in unacknowledged ways. It is concluded that what we need is a different analytical approach to better understand the mechanisms at play when organizations exchange organs, tissues and cells for use in transplantation and fertility medicine.

This book presents the discourse in Jewish law and rabbinic literature on bioethical issues, highlighting practical problems in their socio-historical contexts. Yechiel Michael Barilan discusses end-of-life care, abortion, infertility treatments, the brain death debate, and the organ market. Barilan also presents the theology and spirituality of Jewish medical law, the communal responsibility for healthcare, and the charitable sick-care societies that flourished in the Jewish communities until the beginning of the twentieth century.

This book is a comprehensive, empirically-grounded exploration of the relationship between bioethics, culture, and the perspective of being affected. It provides a new outlook on how complex "bioethical" issues become questions of everyday life. The authors focus on two contexts, genetic testing and end-of-life care, to locate and demonstrate emerging themes of responsibility, such as self-responsibility, responsibility for kin, and the responsibility of society. Within these themes, the duty to know versus the right not to know one's genetic fate (in the context of genetic testing), or the sanctity of life versus self-determination (in the context of end of life care) are identified as culturally embedded dilemmas that are very much relevant for lay persons. Furthermore, cultural factors such as religion, history, utopian and dystopian views of biomedical technologies, outlooks on the body and on health/illness, and citizenship are examined. Health issues are increasingly becoming a question of assessing risk and responsibility: How can we better prepare ourselves for the future? We all make such assessments in a way that combines personal inclinations, professional recommendations, and cultural framings. There is still much to be learned about the interplay between these three dimensions.

This volume maps the areas of ethical concern in the debate regarding the governance of genetic information, and suggests alternative ethical frameworks and models of regulation in order to inform its restructuring. Genetic governance is at the heart of medical and scientific developments, and is connected to global exploitation, issues of commodification, commercialisation and ownership, the concepts of property and intellectual property and concerns about individual and communal identity. Thus the decisions that are made in the next few years about appropriate models of genetic governance will have knock-on effects for other areas of governance. In short the final answer to 'Who Decides?' in the context of genetic governance will fundamentally shape the ethical constructs of individuals and their networks and relationships in the public sphere.

The central question of this book is whether or not particular cell entities of human origin ought to be considered human beings. The answer is crucial for making moral decisions for or against research and experimentation. Experts in the field discuss the production of embryonic-like pluripotent stem cells by altered nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis and reprogramming of adult somatic cells. They thoroughly analyse the biological and moral status of different cell entities, such as human stem cells, embryos and human-animal hybrid embryos, and make a decisive step towards establishing final criteria for what constitutes a human being. The topic is challenging in nature and of broad interest to all those concerned with current bioethical thought on embryonic human life and its implications for society.

This volume focuses on the ethical and philosophical issues that arise in an aging society, and the implications of these issues for healthcare and social policy. After a brief overview of biomedicine's changing approach of ageing and longevity and of the new expectations that these changes generate, various ethical, social, and policy issues that surround aging and longevity are discussed. First, the images and social meanings of aging and old age in our society are explored, including their normative dimensions and implications for policy. Next, ethical issues in the care for frail elderly are discussed, as well as notion of good care and end-of-life decisions. Finally, the ethical and social implications of emerging possibilities for anti-aging and lifespan extension are considered. The book concludes with an overview of the relevance of the issues discussed for policy making on professional, national and international levels.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive yet concise overview of the challenges and opportunities presented by the use of big data in healthcare. The respective chapters address a range of aspects: from health management to patient safety; from the human factor perspective to ethical and economic considerations, and many more. By providing a historical background on the use of big data, and critically analyzing current approaches together with issues and challenges related to their applications, the book not only sheds light on the problems entailed by big data, but also paves the way for possible solutions and future research directions. Accordingly, it offers an insightful reference guide for health information technology professionals, healthcare managers, healthcare practitioners, and patients alike, aiding them in their decision-making processes; and for students and researchers whose work involves data science-related research issues in healthcare.

Synthetic biology is becoming one of the most dynamic new fields of biology, with the potential to revolutionize the way we do biotechnology today. By applying the toolbox of engineering disciplines to biology, a whole set of potential applications become possible ranging very widely across scientific and engineering disciplines. Some of the potential benefits of synthetic biology, such as the development of low-cost drugs or the production of chemicals and energy by engineered bacteria are enormous. There are, however, also potential and perceived risks due to deliberate or accidental damage. Also, ethical issues of synthetic biology just start being explored, with hardly any ethicists specifically focusing on the area of synthetic biology. This book will be the first of its kind focusing particularly on the safety, security and ethical concerns and other relevant societal aspects of this new emerging field. The foreseen impact of this book will be to stimulate a debate on these societal issues at an early stage. Past experiences, especially in the field of GM-crops and stem cells, have shown the importance of an early societal debate. The community and informed stakeholders recognize this need, but up to now discussions are fragmentary. This book will be the first comprehensive overview on relevant societal issues of synthetic biology, setting the scene for further important discussions within the scientific community and with civil society.

Ethical Problems and Genetics Practice provides a rich, case-based account of the ethical issues arising in the genetics clinic and laboratory. By analysing a wide range of evocative and often arresting cases from practice, Michael Parker provides a compelling insight into the complex moral world of the contemporary genetics professional and the challenges they face in the care of patients and their families. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the ethical issues arising in everyday genetics practice. Ethical Problems and Genetics Practice is also a sustained engagement with the relationships between bioethics and social science. In proposing and exemplifying a new approach to bioethics, it makes a significant contribution to debates on methods and interdisciplinarity and will therefore also appeal to all those concerned with theoretical and methodological approaches to bioethics and social science.

Bioethics is the study of ethical issues arising out of advances in the life sciences and medicine. Historically, bioethics has been associated with issues in research ethics and clinical ethics as a result of research scandals such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and public debates about the definition of death, medical paternalism, health care rationing, and abortion. As biomedical technologies have advanced, challenging new questions have arisen for bioethics and new sub-disciplines such as neuroethics and public health ethics have entered the scene. This volume features ten original essays on five cutting-edge controversies in bioethics written by leading philosophers. I. Research Ethics: How Should We Justify Ancillary Care Duties? II. Clinical Ethics: Are Psychopaths Morally Accountable? III. Reproductive Ethics: Is There A Solution to the Non-Identity Problem? IV. Neuroethics: What is Addiction and Does It Excuse? V. Public Health Ethics: Is Luck Egalitarianism Implausibly Harsh? S. Matthew Liao and Collin O'Neil's concise introduction to the essays in the volume, the annotated bibliographies and study questions for each controversy, and the supplemental guide to additional current controversies in bioethics give the reader a broad grasp of the different kinds of challenges in bioethics.

Assessing synthetic biology from a societal and ethical perspective is not only a matter of determining possible harms and benefits of synthetic biology applications. Synthetic biology also incorporates a specific technoscientific understanding of its research agenda and its research objects that has philosophical and ethical implications. This edited volume sets out to explore and evaluate these synthetic biology worldviews and it proposes appropriate governance measures. In addition, legal challenges are discussed.

How many citizens take part in moral and political decisions concerning the results obtained by the contemporary life sciences? Should they blindly follow skilled demagogues or false and deceptive leaders? Should they adhere to the voice of the majority, or should they take a different decisional path? Deliberative democracy answers these questions, but what is deliberative democracy? Can we really deliberate if we are completely ignorant of the relevant issue? What about ethical or political expertise, is it strictly necessary? Finally, and most significantly, can a deliberative process take place if we ignore the techniques governing it; that is, the techniques required to be minimally skilled in rational argumentation? Giovanni Boniolo goes back to the historical and theoretical foundations of deliberation showing us, with some irony, that deliberation is a matter of competence, and not just a matter of a right to decide. His conclusion might not delight everyone: "anyone who is not sufficiently acquainted with the subject matter or lacks the sufficient deliberative competence ought not be admitted to deliberative discussions. This restriction makes both good deliberation and a proper deliberative democracy possible, otherwise debate degenerates into demagogy and hypocrisy".

It is often said that bioethics emerged from theology in the 1960s, and that since then it has grown into a secular enterprise, yielding to other disciplines and professions such as philosophy and law. During the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of secularism in biomedicine and related areas was encouraged by the need for a neutral language that could provide common ground for guiding clinical practice and research protocols. Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, in their pivotal The Principles of Biomedical Ethics, achieved this neutrality through an approach that came to be known as "principlist bioethics." In Pastoral Aesthetics, Nathan Carlin critically engages Beauchamp and Childress by revisiting the role of religion in bioethics and argues that pastoral theologians can enrich moral imagination in bioethics by cultivating an aesthetic sensibility that is theologically-informed, psychologically-sophisticated, therapeutically-oriented, and experientially-grounded. To achieve these ends, Carlin employs Paul Tillich's method of correlation by positioning four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care, drawing on a range of sources, including painting, fiction, memoir, poetry, journalism, cultural studies, clinical journals, classic cases in bioethics, and original pastoral care conversations. What emerges is a form of interdisciplinary inquiry that will be of special interest to bioethicists, theologians, and chaplains.