Cover Image

The basics of bioethics /

Show other versions (2)
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Veatch, Robert M.
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Prentice Hall, [2000]
Subjects:
Ethics, Medical.
Bioethics.
Table of Contents:
  • The Hippocratic Oath and its challengers: a brief history
  • The Hippocratic tradition
  • The Hippocratic Oath
  • Modern codes in the Hippocratic tradition
  • The collapse of the Hippocratic tradition
  • Codes and oaths that break with the Hippocratic tradition
  • Sources from outside professional medicine
  • Defining death, abortion, and animal welfare: the basis of moral standing
  • Persons, humans, and individuals: the language of moral standing
  • The concept of moral standing
  • Moral and nonmoral uses of the term person
  • Moral and nonmoral uses of the word human
  • Defining death
  • A cardiac definition of death
  • A whole-brain-oriented definition of death
  • A higher-brain definition of death
  • Definitions and moral standing
  • Abortion
  • Symmetry between definition of death and abortion
  • Possible basis for a breakdown in the symmetry
  • The moral status of nonhuman animals
  • Problems in benefiting and avoiding harm to the patient
  • What counts as a benefit?
  • Subjective vs. objective estimates of benefit and harm
  • Medical vs. other personal benefits
  • Conflicting goals within the medical sphere
  • Ways to balance benefits and harms
  • Bentham and arithmetic summing
  • Comparing the ratio of benefits to harms
  • First of all, do no harm
  • The problem of medical paternalism
  • The ethics of respect for persons: breaking promises, cheating, and lying and why physicians have considered them ethical
  • The principle of fidelity
  • Different concepts of duty
  • Theories of conflict resolution
  • The ethics of confidentiality
  • The principle of autonomy and the doctrine of informed consent
  • The concept of autonomy
  • Positive and negative rights
  • Informed consent and its relation to the principle of autonomy and therapeutic privilege
  • Standards of disclosure for consent to be adequately informed
  • The principle of veracity: lying and the duty to tell the truth
  • The change in physician attitudes
  • Accounting for the change in attitudes
  • The principle of avoidance of killing
  • Active killing vs. allowing to die
  • Distinguishing active killing from allowing to die
  • New legal initiatives for physician-assisted suicide
  • Stopping vs. not starting
  • The distinction between direct and indirect effects
  • The distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means
  • The meaning of the terms
  • The criteria for classifying treatments as morally expendable
  • The subjectivity of all benefit and harm assessments
  • Withholding food, fluids, CPR, and medications
  • Death and dying: the incompetent patient
  • Formerly competent patients
  • The principle of autonomy extended
  • Substituted judgment
  • Going beyond advance directives
  • Mechanisms for expressing wishes
  • Issues to be addressed in an advance directive
  • Never-competent patients without family or other pre-existing surrogates
  • The principles
  • The legal standard
  • Who should be the surrogate?
  • Never-competent patients with family or other pre-existing surrogates
  • What is the standard underlying this family discretion?
  • The social ethics of medicine: allocation of resources, transplantation, and human subjects research
  • The need for a social ethic for medicine
  • The limits of the ethics of individual relations
  • The social ethical principles for medical ethics
  • Ways of reconciling competing claims
  • Allocation of health care resources
  • The demand for health care services
  • The inevitability of rationing
  • Ethical responses to the pressures for cost containment
  • The role of the clinician in allocation decisions
  • Organ transplantation
  • Is performing transplants "playing God"?
  • Procurement of organs
  • Organ allocation
  • Research involving human subjects
  • Distinguishing research and innovative therapy
  • Social ethics for research involving human subjects
  • Resolving conflicts among principles in research on human subjects
  • Human control of life: genetics, birth technologies, and modifying human nature
  • The human as created and as creator
  • Medical manipulation as playing God
  • Having dominion over the Earth
  • Genetics and the control of human reproduction
  • Genetics
  • New reproductive technologies
  • Appendix: Hippocratic Oath
  • Principles of Medical Ethics (1980) of the American Medical Association.