Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
|
Buy Now
The History and Future of Bioethics - A Sociological View (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,974
Discovery Miles 19 740
You Save: R156
(7%)
|
|
The History and Future of Bioethics - A Sociological View (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
|
It seems like every day society faces a new ethical challenge
raised by a scientific innovation. Human genetic engineering, stem
cell research, face transplantation, synthetic biology - all were
science fiction only a few decades ago, but now are all reality.
How do we as a society decide whether these technologies are
ethical? For decades professional bioethicists have served as
mediators between a busy public and its decision-makers, helping
people understand their own ethical concerns, framing arguments,
discrediting illogical claims, and supporting promising ones. These
bioethicists play an instrumental role in guiding governments'
ethical policy decisions, consulting for hospitals faced with vital
decisions, and advising institutions that conduct research on
humans.
Although the bioethics profession has functioned effectively for
many years, it is now in crisis. Policy-makers are less inclined to
take the advice of bioethics professionals, with many observers
saying that bioethics debates have simply become partisan politics
with dueling democratic and republican bioethicists. While this
crisis is contained to the task of recommending ethical policy to
the government, there is risk that it will spread to the other
tasks conducted by bioethicists.
To understand how this crisis came about and to arrive at a
solution, John H. Evans closely examines the history of the
bioethics profession. Bioethics debates were originally dominated
by theologians, but came to be dominated by the emerging bioethics
profession due to the subtle and slow involvement of the government
as the primary consumer of bioethical arguments. After the 1980s,
however, the views of the government changed, making bioethical
arguments less legitimate. Exploring the sociological processes
that lead to the evolution of bioethics to where it is today, Evans
proposes a radical solution to the crisis. Bioethicists must give
up its inessential functions, change the way they make ethical
arguments, and make conscious and explicit steps toward
re-establishing the profession's legitimacy as a mediator between
the public and government decision-makers.
"John Evans provides a trenchant reconstruction of the waxing and
waning influence of theology on the bioethics canon, as well as an
original proposal for a social science-based bioethics. This book
will fascinate and instruct anyone interested in where we have been
and where we should go in our societal conversation about deep
human values."- Jonathan Moreno, University of Pennsylvania
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.