PDF-(BOOK)-Autonomy and the Situated Self: A Challenge to Bioethics

Bioethics tells a heroic story about its origins and purpose The impetus for its contemporary development can be traced to concern about widespread paternalism in medicine mistreatment of research subjects used in medical experimentation and questions about the implication of technological developments in medical practice Bioethics then began as a defender of the interests of patients and the rights of research participants and understood itself to play an important role as a critic of powerful interests in medicine and medical practice Autonomy and the Situated Self argues that as bioethics has become successful it no longer clearly lives up to these founding ideals and it offers a critique of the way in which contemporary bioethics has been coopted by the very institutions it once sought with good reason to criticize and transform In the process it has become mainstream moved from occupying the perspective of a critical outsider to enjoying the status of a respected insider whose primary role is to defend existing institutional arrangements and its own privileged position The mainstreaming of bioethics has resulted in its domestication it is at home in the institutions it would once have viewed with skepticism and a central part of practices it would once have challenged Contemporary bioethics is increasingly dominated by a conception of autonomy that detaches the value of choice from the value of the things chosen and the central role occupied by this conception makes it difficult for the bioethicist to make ethical judgments Consequently despite its very public successes contemporary bioethics is largely failing to offer the ethical guidance it purports to be able to provide In addition to providing a critique this book offers an alternative framework that is designed to allow bioethicists to address the concerns that led to the creation of bioethics in the first place This alternative framework is oriented around a conception of autonomy that works within the ethical guidelines provided by a contemporary form of virtue ethics and which connects the value of autonomous choice to a conception of human flourishing. . . By: Erica . Jasman. GRS623. Jean Lave . . Social Anthropologist. Etienne Wagner. . Artificial Intelligence. Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (1991). Origin. Communities of Practice. How can we make our research count in academia and in practice. Wendy Rogers, CAVE, . Mq. . Uni. Catriona. Mackenzie, CAVE, . Mq. . Uni. Katrina Hutchison, CAVE, . Mq. . Uni. Ainsley Newson, VELIM, . Chteau La RameRosenthal Wine Merchant 14931e Mad Rose Groupinfomadrosecom 149 madrosecom At the onset of Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Leon Kass gives us a status report on where we stand today: Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic \'enhancement,\' for wholesale redesign. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come for paying attention. Trained as a medical doctor and biochemist, Dr. Kass has become one of our most provocative thinkers on bioethical issues. Now, in this brave and searching book, he also establishes himself as a prophetic voice summoning us to think deeply about the new biomedical technologies threatening to take us back to the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. As in Huxley\'s dystopia, where life has been smoothed out by genetic manipulation, psychoactive drugs and high tech amusement, our own accelerating efforts to master reproduction and genetic endowment, to retard aging, and to conquer illness, imperfection, and death itself are animated by our most humane and progressive aspirations. But we are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia, Kass believes, without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new biology. In a series of meditations on cloning, embryo research, the human genome project, the sale of organs, and the assault on mortality itself, Kass evaluates the ongoing effort to break down the natural boundaries given us and to remake the human body into an instrument of our will. What does it mean to treat nascent human life as raw material to be exploited? What does it mean to blur the line between procreation and manufacture? What are the proper limits to this project for the remaking of human nature? These are the questions we should be asking to prevent runaway scientism with its utopian longings from reshaping humankind in the image of our own choosing. Kass believes that technology has done and will continue to do wonders for our health and longevity and that we have much to be thankful for. But there is more at stake in the biological revolution that saving life and avoiding death. We must also strive to protect the ideas and practices that give us dignity and keep us human. Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity challenges us to confront the posthuman future that may await us by thinking deeply about the life and death issues we face today. Dr. Farhat Moazam has written a wonderful book, based on her extraordinary first-hand study.... [S]he is an exceptionally gifted and evocative writer. Her book not only has the attributes of a superb piece of intellectual work, but it has literary artistic merit. --Renee C. Fox, Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences at the University of PennsylvaniaThis is an ethnographic study of live, related kidney donation in Pakistan, based on Farhat Moazam\'s participant-observer research conducted at a public hospital. Her narrative is both a thick description of renal transplant cases and the cultural, ethical, and family conflicts that accompany them, and an object lesson in comparative bioethics. Human dignity has been enshrined in international agreements and national constitutions as a fundamental human right. The World Medical Association calls on physicians to respect human dignity and to discharge their duties with dignity. And yet human dignity is a term--like love, hope, and justice--that is intuitively grasped but never clearly defined. Some ethicists and bioethicists dismiss it other thinkers point to its use in the service of particular ideologies. In this book, Michael Barilan offers an urgently needed, nonideological, and thorough conceptual clarification of human dignity and human rights, relating these ideas to current issues in ethics, law, and bioethics. Combining social history, history of ideas, moral theology, applied ethics, and political theory, Barilan tells the story of human dignity as a background moral ethos to human rights. After setting the problem in its scholarly context, he offers a hermeneutics of the formative texts on Imago Dei provides a philosophical explication of the value of human dignity and of vulnerability presents a comprehensive theory of human rights from a natural, humanist perspective explores issues of moral status and examines the value of responsibility as a link between virtue ethics and human dignity and rights. Barilan accompanies his theoretical claim with numerous practical illustrations, linking his theory to such issues in bioethics as end-of-life care, cloning, abortion, torture, treatment of the mentally incapacitated, the right to health care, the human organ market, disability and notions of difference, and privacy, highlighting many relevant legal aspects in constitutional and humanitarian law. Tod Chambers suggests that literary theory is a crucial component in the complete understanding of bioethics. The Fiction of Bioethics explores the medical case study and distills the idea that bioethicists study real-life cases, while philosophers contemplate fictional accounts. Why has autonomy been a leading idea in philosophical writing on bioethics, and why has trust been marginal? In this important book, Onora O\'Neill suggests that the conceptions of individual autonomy so widely relied on in bioethics are philosophically and ethically inadequate, and that they undermine rather than support relations of trust. She shows how Kant\'s non-individualistic view of autonomy provides a stronger basis for an approach to medicine, science and biotechnology, and does not marginalize untrustworthiness, while also explaining why trustworthy individuals and institutions are often undeservingly mistrusted. Her arguments are illustrated with issues raised by practices such as the use of genetic information by the police or insurers, research using human tissues, uses of new reproductive technologies, and media practices for reporting on medicine, science and technology. Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics will appeal to a wide range of readers in ethics, bioethics and related disciplines. Modern scientific and medical advances bring new complexity and urgency to ethical issues in health care and biomedical research. This book applies the American philosophical theory of pragmatism to such bioethics. Critics of pragmatism argue that it lacks a universal moral foundation. Yet it is this very lack of a metaphysical dividing line between facts and values that makes pragmatism such a rigorous and appropriate method for solving problems in bioethics. For pragmatism, ethics is a way of satisfying the complex demands of multiple individuals and groups in a contingent and changing world. Pragmatism also demands careful attention to the ways in which scientific advances change our values and ethics. The essays in this book present different approaches to pragmatism and different ways of applying pragmatism to scientific and medical matters. They use pragmatism to guide thinking about such timely topics as stem cell research, human cloning, genetic testing, human enhancement, and care for the poor and aging. This new edition contains three new chapters, on difficulties with applying pragmatism to law and bioethics, on helping people to die, and on embryonic stem cell research. In recent years, bioethicists have worked on government commissions, on ethics committees in hospitals and nursing homes, and as bedside consultants. Because ethical knowledge is based on experience within the field rather than on universal theoretical propositions, it is open to criticism for its lack of theoretical foundation. Once in the clinic, however, ethicists noted the extent to which medical practice itself combined the certitudes of science with craft forms of knowledge. In an effort to forge a middle path between pure science and applied medical and ethical knowledge, bioethicists turned to the work of classical philosophy, especially the theme of a practical wisdom that entails a variable knowledge of particulars. In this book contemporary bioethicists and scholars of ancient philosophy explore the import of classical ethics on such pressing bioethical concerns as managed care, euthanasia, suicide, and abortion. Although the contributors write within the limits of their own disciplines, through cross references and counterarguments they engage in fruitful dialogue. NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINT PRODUCT--OVERSTOCK SALE -- Significantly reduced list price while supplies lastContains a collection of essays exploring human dignity and bioethics, a concept crucial to today\'s discourse in law and ethics in general and in bioethics in particular. This publication gives some examples of how human dignity can be a difficult concept to apply in bioethical controversies, explores some of the complex roots of the modern notion of human dignity, in order to shed light on why its application to bioethics is so problematic, and suggests, tentatively, that a certain conception of human dignity—dignity understood as humanity— has an important role to play in bioethics, both now and especially in the future. Related products:Ethics and Code of Conduct resources collection can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/law...   The questions of whether there is a shared nature common to all human beings and, if so, what essential qualities define this nature are among the most widely discussed topics in the history of philosophy and remain the subject of perennial interest and controversy. This book offers a metaphysical investigation of the composition of the human essence-that is, with what is a human being identical or what types of parts are necessary for a human being to exist: an immaterial mind, a physical body, a functioning brain, a soul? It also considers the criterion of identity for a human being across time and change-that is, what is required for a human being to continue existing as a person despite undergoing physical and psychological changes over time? Jason Eberl\'s investigation presents and defends a theoretical perspective from the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Advancing beyond descriptive historical analysis, this book places Aquinas\'s account of human nature into direct comparison with several prominent contemporary theories: substance dualism, emergentism, animalism, constitutionalism, four-dimensionalism, and embodied mind theory. There are practical implications of exploring these theories as they inform various conclusions regarding when human beings first come into existence-at conception, during gestation, or after birth-and how we ought to define death for human beings. Finally, each of these viewpoints offers a distinctive rationale as to whether, and if so how, human beings may survive death. This book\'s central argument is that the Thomistic account of human nature includes several desirable features that other theories lack and offers a cohesive portrait of one\'s continued existence from conception through life to death and beyond. Modern scientific and medical advances bring new complexity and urgency to ethical issues in health care and biomedical research. This book applies the American philosophical theory of pragmatism to such bioethics. Critics of pragmatism argue that it lacks a universal moral foundation. Yet it is this very lack of a metaphysical dividing line between facts and values that makes pragmatism such a rigorous and appropriate method for solving problems in bioethics. For pragmatism, ethics is a way of satisfying the complex demands of multiple individuals and groups in a contingent and changing world. Pragmatism also demands careful attention to the ways in which scientific advances change our values and ethics. The essays in this book present different approaches to pragmatism and different ways of applying pragmatism to scientific and medical matters. They use pragmatism to guide thinking about such timely topics as stem cell research, human cloning, genetic testing, human enhancement, and care for the poor and aging. This new edition contains three new chapters, on difficulties with applying pragmatism to law and bioethics, on helping people to die, and on embryonic stem cell research. In recent years, bioethicists have worked on government commissions, on ethics committees in hospitals and nursing homes, and as bedside consultants. Because ethical knowledge is based on experience within the field rather than on universal theoretical propositions, it is open to criticism for its lack of theoretical foundation. Once in the clinic, however, ethicists noted the extent to which medical practice itself combined the certitudes of science with craft forms of knowledge. In an effort to forge a middle path between pure science and applied medical and ethical knowledge, bioethicists turned to the work of classical philosophy, especially the theme of a practical wisdom that entails a variable knowledge of particulars. In this book contemporary bioethicists and scholars of ancient philosophy explore the import of classical ethics on such pressing bioethical concerns as managed care, euthanasia, suicide, and abortion. Although the contributors write within the limits of their own disciplines, through cross references and counterarguments they engage in fruitful dialogue.