Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Reconceiving Medical Ethics

My review of Christopher Cowley (ed.) Reconceiving Medical Ethics is up at Metapsychology. Here's my conclusion:
Although it is not likely to change the face of medical ethics, the book does make valuable contributions to several debates within the field. It also brings out some of the problems with common ways of thinking about medical ethics, such as the idea that the end can justify the means, the desire to ignore as much as possible the religious beliefs of patients and medical practitioners, and the attempt to separate ethics from both legal and professional judgment, carving out areas of technical expertise where ethics supposedly does not belong. It could almost be said that the aim of the book is to bring ethics back into medical ethics. Certainly the way it points is worth exploring.    

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