You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
If most Americans accept the notion that the market is the most efficient means to distribute resources, why should body parts be excluded? Each year thousands of people die waiting for organ transplants. Many of these deaths could have been prevented were it not for the almost universal moral hand-wringing over the concept of selling human organs. Kidney for Sale by Owner, now with a new preface, boldly deconstructs the roadblocks that are standing in the way of restoring health to thousands of people. Author and bioethicist Mark Cherry reasserts the case that health care could be improved and lives saved by introducing a regulated transplant organs market rather than by well-meant, but misguided, prohibitions.
Extraordinary social and moral shifts have taken place in Western societies. Sex is no longer the exclusive province of husband and wife set within monogamous married family life. The world is awash in sex: advertising, books, magazines, movies, sex clubs, internet pornography, etc. Parents, traditionally responsible for guiding their children's moral and social development, have been effectively side-lined by commercial and governmental interests.This volume pursues a detailed study of how changes in social life dating from the sexual revolution of the 1960s have affected the family. Cherry shows that attempts to redefine the family away from the marital union of husband and wife come with ...
The Latin root of the English word culture ties together both worship and the tilling of the soil. In both interpretations the outcome is the same: a rightly-directed culture produces either a bountiful harvest or falls short of the mark, materially or spiritually. This volume offers a critical examination of the nature and depth of our contemporary cultural crisis, focused on its lack of traditional orientation and moral understanding.
First published in 2004. Religious Perspectives in Bioethics surveys recent bioethics discussion in thirteen religious traditions. Christian contributions include chapters on Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, the Episcopal, German Protestant, and Baptist traditions, Reformed Christianity, and the Latter Day Saints. The volume also includes chapters on Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Daoism.
At the Roots of Christian Bioethics explores Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s pursuit for the decisive ground of the meaning of human existence and knowledge of appropriate moral choice. Engelhardt has been the most influential, cogent, but critical voice within bioethics of the past several decades. The essays in this volume compass epistemological, methodological and topical contributions to bioethics, political theory, and Christian theology. Each explores Engelhardt's diagnosis of the contemporary social and cultural crisis, seeking to make sense of the decidedly post-Christian and often openly anti-Christian ethics that dominates public morality and politic policy. Each author investigates Engelhardt's personal and tireless enquiry to secure ultimate moral foundations as well as to recognize the full implications of the results of his investigations: that Christian bioethics does not originate in human reason but in the command of God.
This book provides cross-cultural ethical exploration of sex robots and their social impact. What are the implications of sex robots and related technological innovations for society and culture? How should we evaluate the significance of sexual relations with robots that look like women, men or children? Critics argue that sex robots present a clear risk to real persons and a social degradation that will increase sexual violence, objectify women, encourage pedophilia, reinforce negative body images, increase forms of sexual dysfunction, and pass on sexually transmitted disease. Proponents judge robotic sexual companionship as just another step in the exploration of human desire. They see se...
In a Tirio village deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, the shaman Nahtahlah has a place of honor in his tribe. Young Kamanya wants to learn the healing secrets of the forest plants--he hopes that he, too, will become the tribe’s shaman, so that he can cure his people. When the villagers fall sick with an illness that Nahtahlah cannot cure, many lose faith in the shaman’s wisdom--until a foreign woman helps them understand its value while giving Kamanya an opportunity to realize his dream. Lynne Cherry returns to the rain forest with ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin to tell an important story about the healing plants of the earth-and why we must protect them.
This volume addresses the proper character of patient informed consent to medical treatment and clinical research. The goal is critically to explore the current individually oriented approach to informed consent which grew out of the dominant bioethics movement that arose in the United States in the 1970s. In contrast to that individually oriented approach, this volume explores the importance of family-oriented approaches to informed consent for medical treatment and clinical research. It draws on both East Asian moral resources as well as a critical response to the ways in which the practice of informed consent has developed in the United States
Roman Catholic moral theology is the point of departure for this multifaceted exploration of the challenge of allocating scarce medical resources. The volume begins its exploration of discerning moral limits to modern high-technology medicine with a consensus statement born of the conversations among its contributors. The seventeen essays use the example of critical care, because it offers one of the few areas in medicine where there are good clinical predictive measures regarding the likelihood of survival. As a result, the health care industry can with increasing accuracy predict the probability of saving lives—and at what cost. Because critical care involves hard choices in the face of ...
In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has bec...