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This book reflects on the many contributions made in and to European bioethics to date, in various locations, and from various disciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the book advances understanding of the academic and social status of European bioethics as it is being supported and practiced by various disciplines such as philosophy, law, medicine, and the social sciences, applied to a wide range of areas. The European focus offers a valuable counter-balance to an often prominent US understanding of bioethics. The volume is split into four parts. The first contains reflection on bioethics in the past, present and future, and also considers how comparison between countries and disciplines ca...
Genetic information plays an increasingly important role in ourlives. As a result of the Human Genome Project, knowledge ofthe genetic basis of various diseases is growing, withimportant consequences for the role of genetics in clinicalpractice, health care systems and for society at large. In theclinical setting genetic testing may result in a better insightinto susceptibility for inheritable diseases, not only before orafter birth, but also at later stages in life. Besides prenataltesting and pre-conceptional testing, predictive testing hasresulted in new possibilities for the early detection, treatmentand prevention of inheritable diseases. However, not all inheritable diseases that can b...
This book examines the relevance of modern medicine and healthcare in shaping the lives of elderly persons and the practices and institutions of ageing societies. Combining individual and social dimensions, Planning Later Life discusses the ethical, social, and political consequences of increasing life expectancies and demographic change in the context of biomedicine and public health. By focusing on the field of biomedicine and healthcare, the authors engage readers in a dialogue on the ethical and social implications of recent trends in dementia research and care, advance healthcare planning, or the rise of anti-ageing medicine and prevention. Bringing together the largely separated debate...
This book, edited by a team of leading European bioethicists, is in all respects an innovative publication. As part of the core materials project of the European Ethics Network, this book collects European perspectives on health care ethics reflecting both the rich philosophical tradition and the broad interdisciplinary network in the field of European health care ethics. In the first part of the book on the physician-patient relationship, the authors present different views on the integration of patient autonomy in the relational structure of the medical profession. Here, the focus is on the reception of patient autonomy in the European context and on European alternatives for the radical u...
Evidence-based Practice in Medicine and Health Care: A Discussion of the Ethical Issues By Ruud ter Meulen
Bioethical issues are rarely out of view in Western societies. New developments in areas such as human embryology continually raise new ethical questions, while more familiar issues frequently reappear in public debate. These are issues of central concern for Christians and for a wider public, because they raise questions about the value of life, the meaning of suffering and death and humanity’s place in the natural world.
This book advocates a substantive common ground in global bioethics. It starts from an Orthodox Christian anthropology to highlight the relationship between hospitality, dignity, and vulnerability as the meeting point between strangers, regardless of their value system. The universal experience of suffering and death is the unifying starting point of that anthropology. Therefore, in medicine, where physicians and patients meet as utter strangers, not only as moral strangers, hospitality highlights the human dignity and vulnerability of both parties and establishes gratitude, compassion, and solidarity as the constructive building blocks of a healing practice of medicine and a humane medical system, locally and globally.
International uproar followed the recent announcement of the birth of twin girls whose genomes had been edited with a breakthrough DNA editing-technology. This technology, called clustered regularly interspaced short palindrome repeats or CRISPR-Cas9, can alter any DNA, including DNA in embryos, meaning that changes can be passed to the offspring of the person that embryo becomes. Should we use gene editing technologies to change ourselves, our children, and future generations to come? The potential uses of CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene editing technologies are unprecedented in human history. By using these technologies, we eradicate certain dreadful diseases. Altering human DNA, however, raise...
OF 'SOLIDARITY' IN UK SOCIAL WELFARE Here then, perhaps, is a British version of solidarity in social welfare, but early there are strong tensions between the powerfully liberal individualistic strands of the British understanding of the functions of the state and the socialistic or communitarian tendency of a commitment to universal welfare provision. In the search for the roots of this understanding of welfare we shall survey, fitst, the historical background to these tensions in some early British political philosophers, starting with Hobbes and ending with Mill. We then consider the philosophical and social influences on the Beveridge Report itself, and we will trace the emergence of the...
This volume gives an overview on the currently debated ethical issues regarding advance directives from an international perspective. It focuses on a wider understanding of the known and widely accepted concept of patient self-determination for future situations. Although advance directives have been widely discussed since the 1980s, the ethical bases of advance directives still remain a matter of heated debates. The book aims to contribute to these controversial debates by integrating fundamental ethical issues on advance directives with practical matters of their implementation. Cultural, national and professional differences in how advance directives are understood by health care professions and by patients, as well as in laws and regulations, are pinpointed.