The Foundations of Bioethics 2nd Ed.

Since the first edition of this book was published, the moral diversity of our society has continued to increase, resulting in controversial dilemmas regarding many health care issues. This new, thoroughly recast second edition of The Foundations of Bioethics is a substantial reconsideration of the issues addressed in the first edition, such as the nature of health and disease, the definition of death, the morality of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, germline genetic engineering, and triage decisions as well as distributive justice in health. The philosophical explorations of secular bioethics have been fully expanded in this new volume. It challenges the foundations of much of contemporary bioethics and health care policy by confronting their failure to secure the moral norms they seek to apply. New material has been added to this edition regarding social justice, health care reform and environmental ethics. The whole of bioethics is re-examined by taking seriously the difficulties of applied ethics in the face of persistent controversies regarding the content of morality and the justification of any particular ethic, and the very possibility and meaning of a secular bioethics are also re-explored.

About the Author: H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Ph.D., M.D., is Professor in the Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, and the Department of Philosophy, Rice University, and Member, Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor.