Edited by:
H. Tristram
Engelhardt, Jr., Department of Philosophy, Rice University, Houston,
Texas
Audience:
The intended audience is first and foremost bioethicists, healthcare professionals, and philosophers dealing with contemporary ethical and moral issues. Philosophers more generally, as well as those interested in contemporary ethical and moral issues, will find this volume to offer a fresh perspective on the culture wars.
Description:
Global Bioethics:
The Collapse of Consensus explores
the persistent failure to produce a universal
set of standards for bioethics. The
predicament of contemporary morality, the post-modern condition, is
such that we find ourselves in the position of numerous competing moralities that not only reach conflicting judgments about particular issues, but also reflect radically divergent world-views. Consensus, therefore, is impossible to achieve.
These essays analyze and diagnose
the causes and results of the diversity of moral world-views in both philosophy and everyday life. Some of the essays in this volume argue that the post-modern condition
is actually the direct result of the philosophical-theological
synthesis of the Western Christian Middle Ages.
The essays in this volume explore the difficulties, both procedural and contentful, that have arisen from the failure of various attempts to arrive at a global secular bioethics by means of rational-discursive reflection.
Reviews:
"This is a coherent volume and the range of views represented in the volume marks this text as a unique contribution to the literature on global bioethics and a must-read for bioethics scholars." The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
"For more than a millennium, the best minds of the West, religious and secular, have been in search of a cosmopolitan ethics. Just when we enter a new era of globalization this project seems to be in profound disarray. The problem is not so simple as a merely subjective moral relativism, the remedy of which would be moral realism and earnestness. It is precisely among those who take ethics seriously that the moral diversity has proved most persistent and resistant to consensus, either theoretical or practical. The editor notes that these essays constitute a 'disturbing study of the contemporary moral predicament.' He understates the impact of these essays."
Russell Hittinger, William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research, Professor of Law, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma
"Readers will find here a provocative volume that brings into question the hope for global consensus on issues in bioethics, such as that proclaimed by the 'Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights'. The volume brings together contributors from around the world who are largely in agreement about the range of disagreement on matters of both content and method. Whether
or not one is fully persuaded by the essays, they provide an importnat
contribution to contemporary debates on bioethics and on our assessments
of the culture wars."
B. Andrew Lustig, Holmes
Rolston III Professor of Religion and Science, Davidson College, Davidson,
North Carolina
About
the Editor:
H.
Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., holds
degrees in both medicine and philosophy.
He is professor in the Department of Philosophy
at Rice University, professor emeritus
in the Department of Medicine, Baylor College
of Medicine. In
addition to having authored over 300 articles
and chapters of books, as well as having
co-edited more than 30 volumes, his books
include ‘The Foundations of Bioethics’ (2nd
ed., 1996), which has appeared in Chinese,
Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, ‘Bioethics
and Secular Humanism: The Search for a
Common Morality’, which has also
appeared in Chinese, and ‘The Foundations
of Christian Bioethics’, which has
appeared in Portuguese and Romanian. He
is the editor of The
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and
two book series, Philosophy and Medicine,
and Philosophical Studies in Contemporary
Culture. He is also the founding and senior editor of Christian
Bioethics.
Table
of Contents:
Stephen Erickson: Foreword
Tristram
Engelhardt, Jr.: Introduction (Download
a PDF of this chapter)
Tristram
Engelhardt, Jr.: The Search for a Global
Morality: Bioethics, the Culture Wars, and
Moral Diversity
Corinna
Delkeskamp-Hayes: Implementing Health
Care Rights versus Imposing Health Care Cultures:
Tolerance Limits, Kant’s Rationality,
and the Moral Pitfalls of International Bioethics
Standardization
Mark
Cherry: Preserving the Possibility for
Liberty in Health Care
Nicholas
Capaldi: Manifesto. Moral Diversity
in Health Care Ethics
Julia
TAO Lai Po-wah: A Confucian Approach
to a "Shared Family-Decision Model" in
Health Care: Reflections on Moral Pluralism
Kurt
Schmidt: Lost in Translation – Bridging
Gaps through Procedural Norms. Comments on
the Papers of Capaldi and Tao
Kurt
Bayertz: Struggling for Consensus and
Living Without It. The Construction of a Common
European Bioethics
Angelo
Maria Petroni: Perspectives for Freedom
of Choice in Bioethics and Health Care
in Europe
Ruping
Fan: Bioethics: Globalization, Communitization,
or Localization?
Joseph
Boyle: The Bioethics Of Global Biomedicine:
A Natural Law Reflection
David
Solomon: Domestic Disarray and Imperial
Ambition: Contemporary Applied Ethics and the
Prospects for Global Bioethics
Kevin
Wm. Wildes, S.J.: Global and Particular
Bioethics
Index
Contributors:
H. Tristram
Engelhardt, Jr., is a professor in
the department of philosophy at Rice University,
a professor emeritus in the department of medicine
at the Baylor College of Medicine.
He is also the editor of The Journal of Medicine
and Philosophy and the founding and senior editor of Christian
Bioethics.
Stephen
Erickson is the E. Wilson
Lyon Professor of the Humanities and professor
of philosophy
at
Pomona College.
Corinna
Delkeskamp-Hayes is the
director of International Studies in Philosophy
and Medicine European Programs
and is co-editor of Christian Bioethics and
sits on the editorial board of The Journal of Medicine
and Philosophy.
Ruiping
Fan is assistant professor
in the department of public and social administration
at City
University of Hong Kong.
David
Solomon is
the W.P. and H.B. White Director of the Notre
Dame Center for Ethics
and Culture
and is associate professor in the department
of philosophy at the University of Notre
Dame.
Kevin
Wildes, S.J., is the president
of Loyola University, New Orleans and he was
a member
of the department of philosophy and a
Senior Research
Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics
at Georgetown University where he also
held a secondary
appointment
in the department of medicine at the
Georgetown University School of Medicine.
Angelo
Petroni is the director of Advanced School of
Public Administration of the
Prime Minister's
Office in Italy. He is a professor
of logic and philosophy of science and the
epistemology
of
the human sciences at the University
of Bologna.
Mark
Cherry is the Patricia A. Hayes Endowed Professor of Applied Ethics and Associate Professor of Philosophy at
St. Edward’s University
in Austin, Texas. He is the senior
associate editor of The Journal of
Medicine and Philosophy, senior
associate editor of Christian Bioethics,
and editor-in-chief of HealthCare
Ethics Committee Forum.
Julia
Tao Lai, Po-wah is professor
in the department of public and social
administration
at the
City University of Hong Kong. She
is currently
a member
of the Ethics Committee of the Hong
Kong Medical Council. She is also
a member
of the editorial
advisory board of the International
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
Joseph
Boyle is professor of philosophy at St Michael's
College in the University
of
Toronto and he is
also a Senior Scholar at the Canadian
Catholic Bioethics Institute.
Nicholas
Capaldi is the Legendre-Soulé Distinguished
Chair in Business Ethics at Loyola
University New Orleans.
Kurt
W. Schmidt is the
director of the Center for Medical Ethics
at
the Markus-Hospital
in Frankfurt,
Germany.
Kurt
Bayertz is a professor
in the department of philosophy
at the University
of Münster in
Germany. He was the head of the
department of technology assessment
at the Institute for the Systems
and
Technology Analyses in Biomedicine in Bad Oeynhausen. |
