MIES biblioteka

     This book is the result of more than thirty years of collaboration among its authors. It uses the systematic account of our common morality developed by one of its authors to provide a useful foundation for dealing with the moral problems and disputes that occur in the practice of medicine. The analyses of impartiality, rationality, and morality as a public system not only explain why some bioethical questions, such as the moral accept­ability of abortion, cannot be resolved, but also provide a method for determining the correct answer for those occasions when a bioethical question has a unique correct answer. This new edition includes an entire chapter that addresses the controversial issue of abortion within the authors' distinct framework....

     In this edition, the authors also offer a new, more developed perspective on the concept of valid or informed consent by con­sidering what information physicians should be required to know before proposing screen­ing, diagnostic testing, prescribing medica­tions, or performing surgery. The book also integrates some of the important insights of the field of clinical epidemiology into its dis­cussion of valid consent. Its account of pater­nalism and its justification, perhaps the most ubiquitous moral problem in medical ethics, has had considerable influence. Its discussion of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide challenges the standard views that have been put forward by both proponents and opponents of physician-assisted suicide and voluntary-active euthanasia.