Naturalized Bioethics: Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice

by Edited by Hilde Lindemann , Marian Verkerk , Margaret Urban Walker

• ISBN13: 9780521719407
• ISBN10: 0521719402
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Naturalized bioethics represents a revolutionary change in how health care ethics is practised. It calls for bioethicists to give up their dependence on utilitarianism and other ideal moral theories and instead to move toward a self-reflexive, socially inquisitive, politically critical, and inclusive ethics. Wary of idealisations that bypass social realities, the naturalism in ethics that is developed in this volume is empirically nourished and acutely aware that ethical theory is the practice of particular people in particular times, places, cultures, and professional environments. These essays situate the bioethicist within the clinical or research context, take seriously the web of relationships in which all human beings are nested, and explore a number of the different kinds of power relations that inform health care encounters. Naturalized Bioethics aims to help bioethicists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, disability studies scholars, medical researchers, and other health professionals address the ethical issues surrounding health care.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: Groningen Naturalism in Bioethics	p. 1
Responsible Knowing
Moral Bodies: Epistemologies of Embodiment	p. 23
Choosing Surgical Birth: Desire and the Nature of Bioethical Advice	p. 42
Holding on to Edmund: The Relational Work of Identity	p. 65
Caring, Minimal Autonomy, and the Limits of Liberalism	p. 80
Narrative, Complexity, and Context: Autonomy as an Epistemic Value	p. 106
Toward a Naturalized Narrative Bioethics	p. 125
Responsible Practice
Motivating Health: Empathy and the Normative Activity of Coping	p. 143
Economies of Hope in a Period of Transition: Parents in the Time Leading Up to Their Child's Liver Transplantation	p. 162
Consent as a Grant of Authority: A Care Ethics Reading of Informed Consent	p. 182
Professional Loving Care and the Bearable Heaviness of Being	p. 199
Ideal Theory Bioethics and the Exclusion of People with Severe Cognitive Disabilities	p. 218
Epilogue: Naturalized Bioethics in Practice	p. 238
Bibliography	p. 249
Index	p. 267
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