Steve Clarke, Julian Savulescu, C.A.J. Coady, Alberto Giubilini, and Sagar Sanyal (eds): The ethics of human enhancement: understanding the debate
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 28, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Palliative sedation: clinical context and ethical questions
AbstractPractitioners of palliative medicine frequently encounter patients suffering distress caused by uncontrolled pain or other symptoms. To relieve such distress, palliative medicine clinicians often use measures that result in sedation of the patient. Often such sedation is experienced as a loss by patients and their family members, but sometimes such sedation is sought as the desired outcome. Peace is wanted. Comfort is needed. Sedation appears to bring both. Yet to be sedated is to be cut off existentially from human experience, to be made incapable of engaging self-consciously in any human action. To that extent, i...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 22, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Nicholas Agar: Truly human enhancement: a philosophical defense of limits
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 21, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The last low whispers of our dead: when is it ethically justifiable to render a patient unconscious until death?
AbstractA number of practices at the end of life can causally contribute to diminished consciousness in dying patients. Despite overlapping meanings and a confusing plethora of names in the published literature, this article distinguishes three types of clinically and ethically distinct practices: (1) double-effect sedation, (2) parsimonious direct sedation, and (3) sedation to unconsciousness and death. After exploring the concept of suffering, the value of consciousness, the philosophy of therapy, the ethical importance of intention, and the rule of double effect, these three practices are defined clearly and evaluated e...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 21, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Nicholas Agar: Truly human enhancement: a philosophical defense of limits
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 21, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Henk ten Have: Global bioethics: an introduction
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 18, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Violence, research, and non-identity in the psychiatric clinic
AbstractViolence in psychiatric clinics has been a consistent problem since the birth of modern psychiatry. In this paper, I examine current efforts to understand and reduce both violence and coercive responses to violence in psychiatry, arguing that these efforts are destined to fall short. By and large, scholarship on psychiatric violence reduction has focused on identifying discrete factors that are statistically associated with violence, such as patient demographics and clinical qualities, in an effort to quantify risk and predict violent acts before they happen. Using the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, I characteri...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 17, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Proportionate palliative sedation and the giving of a deadly drug: the conundrum
AbstractAmong the oldest extant medical ethics, the HippocraticOath prohibits the giving of a deadly drug, regarding this act as an egregious violation of a medical ethic that is exclusively therapeutic. Proportionate palliative sedation involves the administration of a deadly drug. Hence it seems to violate the venerable Hippocratic promise associated with the dawn of Western medicine not to give a deadly drug. Relying on distinctions commonly employed in the analysis and evaluation of human actions, this article distinguishes physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, as acts that necessarily violate the prohibition agai...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 17, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Sarah Ferber: Bioethics in historical perspective
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 16, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Letter to the editor
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 14, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Reckoning with the last enemy
AbstractDeveloping the ethics of palliative sedation, particularly in contrast to terminal sedation, requires consideration of the relation between body and soul and of the nature of death and dying. Christianly considered, it also requires attention to the human vocation to immortality and hence to the relation between medicine (as aid for the body) and discipline (as aid to the soul). Leaning on Augustine ’s rendering of the latter, this paper provides a larger anthropological and soteriological frame of reference for the ethics of palliative sedation, organized by way of nine briefly expounded theses. It argues that p...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Benjamin Smart: Concepts and causes in the philosophy of disease
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The discourse on faith and medicine: a tale of two literatures
AbstractResearch and writing at the intersection of faith and medicine by now include thousands of published studies, review articles, books, chapters, and essays. Yet this emerging field has been described, from within, as disheveled on account of imprecision and lack of careful attention to conceptual and theoretical concerns. An important source of confusion is the fact that scholarship in this field constitutes two distinct literatures, or rather meta-literatures, which can be termed (a) faith as a problematic for medicine and (b) medicine as a problematic for faith. These categories represent distinct theoretical lens...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 9, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
