MIES biblioteka

     MARGARET PABST BATTIN has established a reputation as one of the top philosophers working in bioethics today. This work is a sequel to Battin's 1994 volume The Least Worst Death. The last ten years have seen fast-moving developments in end-of-life issues, from the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands, to a furor over proposed restrictions of scheduled drugs used for causing death, and the development of "NuTech" methods of assistance in dying. Battin's new collection covers a remarkably wide range of end-of-life topics, including suicide prevention, AIDS, suicide bombing, serpent-handling and other religious practices that pose a risk of death, genetic prognostication, suicide in old age, and global justice as it relates to the "duty to die." It also examines suicide, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia in both American and international contexts....
    

As with the earlier volume, these new essays are theoretically adroit but draw richly from historical sources, fictional techniques, and ample factual material. Praise for The Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life. "Margaret Pabst Battin is one of the most intelligent writers on medical ethics..." - Studies in Christian Ethics.
"Battin is not only a good philosopher, she is a practical philosopher. She adopts a problem-ori ented approach to bioethics, selecting a specific issue and always attempting to provide cir cumspect and reasoned solutions."  - journal of Medical Ethics.
"She does what analytically trained philosophers do best, namely, provide illuminating analyses and clarifications of difficult concepts and advance logically rigorous arguments in support of her analyses and positions." - Medical Humanities Review.
"She is surely one of the most erudite and articulate scholars pondering questions of euthanasia, suicide, and the withdrawal of medical treatment in the Western world." - Arthur L. Caplan, Ethics.

3 Introduction Ending Life: The Way We Do It, the Way We Could Do It
Part I Dilemmas about Dying
1. 17 Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide
2. 47 Euthanasia: The Way We Do It, the Way They Do It
3. 69 Going Early, Going Late: The Rationality of Decisions about
Physician-Assisted Suicide in AIDS
4. 88 Is a Physician Ever Obligated to Help a Patient Die?
5. 108 Case Consultation: Scott Ames, A Man Giving Up on Himself
6. 113 Robeck

Part II Historical, Religious, and Cultural Concerns
7. 163 Collecting the Primary Texts: Sources on the Ethics of Suicide
8. 175 July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-Day Deaths of John Adams
and Thomas Jefferson (and What Could This Mean for Bioethics?)
9. 186 High Risk Religion: Informed Consent in Faith Healing,
Serpent Handling, and Refusing Medical Treatment
10. 226 Terminal Procedure
11. 240 The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice: What's Wrong with Suicide Bombing?
Part III Dilemmas about Dying in a Global Future
12. 251 Genetic Information and Knowing When You Will Die
13. 269 Extra Long Life: Ethical Aspects of Increased Life Span
14. 280 Global Life Expectancies and International Justice:
A Reemergence of the Duty to Die?
15. 301 New Life in the Assisted-Death Debate: Scheduled Drugs
versus NuTech
16. 316 Empirical Research in Bioethics: The Method of
"Oppositional Collaboration"
17. 321 Safe, Legal, Rare? Physician-Assisted Suicide and Cultural Change
in the Future
333 Index