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Global Bioethics

The Collapse of Consensus
Edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.
Series: Conflicts and Trends: Studies in Values and Policies
Copyright: 2006   |   Status: Published
ISBN: 9780976404132  |  Hardcover  |  1.5 lbs
408 pages
Price: $44.95 USD
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One Line Description
Twelve essays from international top class scholars analyze the issue of the repeated failure to derive a universal set of standards for bioethics and diagnose why consensus has been elusive.

Audience
The intended audience is first and foremost bioethicists, healthcare professionals, and philosophers dealing with contemporary ethical and moral issues. Philosophers more generally, as well as those interested in contemporary ethical and moral issues, wi

Description
Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus explores the persistent failure to produce a universal set of standards for bioethics. The predicament of contemporary morality, the post-modern condition, is such that we find ourselves in the position of numerous competing moralities that not only reach conflicting judgments about particular issues, but also reflect radically divergent world-views. Consensus, therefore, is impossible to achieve.

These essays analyze and diagnose the causes and results of the diversity of moral world-views in both philosophy and everyday life. Some of the essays in this volume argue that the post-modern condition is actually the direct result of the philosophical-theological synthesis of the Western Christian Middle Ages.

The essays in this volume explore the difficulties, both procedural and contentful, that have arisen from the failure of various attempts to arrive at a global secular bioethics by means of rational-discursive reflection.

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Reviews
This is a coherent volume and the range of views represented in the volume marks this text as a unique contribution to the literature on global bioethics and a must-read for bioethics scholars.
The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy

For more than a millennium, the best minds of the West, religious and secular, have been in search of a cosmopolitan ethics. Just when we enter a new era of globalization this project seems to be in profound disarray. The problem is not so simple as a merely subjective moral relativism, the remedy of which would be moral realism and earnestness. It is precisely among those who take ethics seriously that the moral diversity has proved most persistent and resistant to consensus, either theoretical or practical. The editor notes that these essays constitute a 'disturbing study of the contemporary moral predicament.' He understates the impact of these essays.
Russell Hittinger, William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research, Professor of Law, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma

Readers will find here a provocative volume that brings into question the hope for global consensus on issues in bioethics, such as that proclaimed by the 'Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights'. The volume brings together contributors from around the world who are largely in agreement about the range of disagreement on matters of both content and method. Whether or not one is fully persuaded by the essays, they provide an importnat contribution to contemporary debates on bioethics and on our assessments of the culture wars.
B. Andrew Lustig, Holmes Rolston III Professor of Religion and Science, Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

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Author / Editor Details
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., holds degrees in both medicine and philosophy. He is professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University, professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine, Baylor College of

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BISAC SUBJECT HEADINGS
PHI015000: Philosophy/Ethics & Moral Philosophy
MED050000: Medical Ethics
 
BIC CODES
PSAD: Bioethics

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Read the Introduction