Product Description: As our economic and natural systems continue on their collision course, Bruce Jennings asks whether we have the political capacity to avoid large-scale environmental disaster. Can liberal democracy, he wonders, respond in time to ecological challenges that require dramatic changes in the way we approach the natural world? Must a more effective governance be less democratic and more autocratic? Or can a new form of grassroots ecological democracy save us from ourselves and the false promises of material consumption run amok?Ecological Governance is an ethicist’s reckoning with how our political culture, broadly construed, must change in response to climate change...read more

Product Description: Is denying a patient medical care ever justified?Should patents on living organisms be permitted?When does “consciousness” begin in human being?Are there circumstances under which people should be sterilized?Questions such as these and others are the basis of assignments, debate topics, and life and death decisions people face everyday...read more

Product Description: The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities...read more

Since public health seeks to protect the health of populations, it inevitably confronts a range of ethical challenges having to do primarily with the friction between individual freedoms and what might be perceived as governmental paternalism. This volume brings together twenty-five articles by leading thinkers in the field, writing on topics that concern both classic and novel problems. They open up new terrain in each area, including tobacco and drug control, infectious disease, environmental and occupational health, the effect of new genetics on the publics health, and the impact of social inequalities on patterns of morbidity and mortality. The volume editors offer a context for discussion with introductory essays for each of the books five sections.

Product Description: All manner of medical practitioners have had their scruples dissected ad infinitum. In spite of the attention paid to medical ethics and bioethics, little has been paid to the ethical roles and responsibilities of those who are ultimately in charge of hospital governance: hospital trustees...read more

Product Description: Ethics in Hospice Care: Challenges to Hospice Values in a Changing Health Care Environment explores the pressures and challenges facing hospice and aims to produce new studies and educational materials on hospice ethics to help professionals in the field...read more

Long-acting and reversible contraceptives, such as Norplant and Depo-Provera, have been praised as highly effective, moderately priced, and generally safe. Yet, as this book argues, the very qualities that make these contraceptives an important alternative for individual choice in family planning also make them a potential tool of coercive social policy. For example, policymakers have linked their use to welfare benefits, and judges, to probation agreements. In this book, authors from the fields of medicine, ethics, law, and the social sciences probe the unique and vexing ethical and policy issues raised by long-acting contraception. The book offers comprehensive ethical guidelines for health care professionals and policymakers, as well as an ethical framework for analyzing policies and practices concerning long?acting contraceptives. The authors consider cultural, social, and ethical issues pertaining to contraception, and they provide historical and scientific background on today's controversies. They explore alternative conceptual and theoretical frameworks, including analyses of autonomy, coercion, and responsibility in reproductive decisions. This volume also notes the special concerns that arise when policies promoting long?term birth control target low-income women and women of color, and when these contraceptives are used in developing countries.

Product Description: Civilization depends on the community's right to insist on certain conduct from its citizens. But today, our misguided reverence for individual freedom has denied the community its right, to the detriment of everyone. In this elegant and trenchant attack on all the individual rights laws that are increasingly endangering America, Gaylin and Jennings use tragic and all-too-familiar examples to show the extent to which the individual rights movement has run amok...read more