Overview
- Focuses on the role of social/political ideology in the development of bioethics
- Has as its focus a retrospective on the ideological foundations of bioethics as a discipline
- Offers a variety of perspectives of the role that ideology plays in the discipline of bioethics
- Shows how the ideology of bioethics is both secularism and paternalism
Part of the book series: Philosophy and Medicine (PHME, volume 100)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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History of Bioethics: Four Perspectives
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The Practice of Bioethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation: Three Views
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The Incredible Search for Bioethical Professionalism: Some Final Critical Reflections on Circular Thinking
Keywords
About this book
Bioethics developed as an academic and clinical discipline during the later part of the 20th century due to a variety of factors. Crucial to this development was the increased secularization of American culture as well as the dissolution of medicine as a quasi-guild with its own professional ethics. In the context of this moral vacuum, bioethics came into existence. Its raison d’être was opposition to the alleged paternalism of the medical community and traditional moral frameworks, yet at the same time it set itself up as a source of moral authority with respect to biomedical decision making. Bioethics serves as biopolitics in so far as it attempts to make determinations about how individuals ought to make medical decisions and then attempts to codify that in law. Progressivism and secularism are ultimately the ideology of bioethics.
Editors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Bioethics Critically Reconsidered
Book Subtitle: Having Second Thoughts
Editors: H. Tristram Engelhardt
Series Title: Philosophy and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2244-6
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-007-2243-9Published: 19 November 2011
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-9494-8Published: 26 January 2014
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-2244-6Published: 19 November 2011
Series ISSN: 0376-7418
Series E-ISSN: 2215-0080
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 202
Topics: Ethics, Theory of Medicine/Bioethics