Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-h4f6x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-12T08:41:16.912Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2009

By
A. M. Viens  and
Peter A. Singer
Edited by
Peter A. Singer  and
A. M. Viens
A. M. Viens
Affiliation:
Hertford College University of Oxford
Peter A. Singer
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Peter A. Singer
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
A. M. Viens
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

You probably faced a clinical issue today with an ethical component. Did you recognize it? Did you know how to address it? Did you have an organized framework? Did you know what to say to the patient and their family? Did you know what to do? Did you feel comfortable and confident in this aspect of your clinical practice? This book seeks to address how greater recognition of ethical issues and their resolution can improve patient care, research practices, and institutional arrangements.

What is bioethics?

Bioethics, while a modern term, is as old as medicine itself. The Code of Hammurabi and the Hippocratic Oath, for instance, include provisions concerning the importance of ethical considerations to clinical practice. In addition to its initial focus on ethical issues relevant to clinical care, bioethics concerns the moral, legal, political, and social issues raised by medicine, biomedical research, and life sciences technologies.

While bioethical considerations will remain a central aspect of medicine, it can do so at different levels. One can distinguish between three broad spheres of bioethics. The first is academic bioethics, a sphere primarily focused on how theoretical and practical aspects of medicine affect considerations such as special obligations or responsibilities of clinicians, what is valuable, good, right, etc. in the biomedical context and how one might go about providing systematic accounts of such considerations.

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Textbook of Bioethics , pp. 1 - 6
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Agich, G. J. (2005). What kind of doing is clinical ethics?Theor Med 26: 7–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beauchamp, T. L. (1984). On eliminating the distinction between applied ethics and ethical theory. Monist 67: 514–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beauchamp, T. L. and Childress, J. F. (2001). The Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
BBC (2003). Doctors make medical ethics plea. BBC News 2 December (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3253786.stm) accessed 1 November 2006.
Caplan, A. L. (1983). Can applied ethics be effective in healthcare and should it strive to be?Ethics 93: 311–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clouser, K. D. and Gert, B. (1990). A critique of principlism. J Med Philos 15: 219–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daniels, N. (1996). Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, M. (1999). Case method. In Ethics and the University. London: Routledge, pp. 143–74.Google Scholar
Dubler, N. N. and Marcus, L. J. (1994). Mediating Bioethics Disputes: A Practical Guide. New York: United Hospital Fund of New York.Google Scholar
Jonsen, A. R. (1991). Casuistry as methodology in clinical ethics. Theor Med 12: 295–307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jonsen, A. R. and Toulmin, S. (1998). The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kimball, B. A. (1995). The Emergence of Case Method Teaching, 1872–1990s: A Search for Legitimate Pedagogy. Bloomington, IN: The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University.Google Scholar
Kopelman, L. M. (1994). Case method and casuistry: the problem of bias. Theor Med 15: 21–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osler, W. (1906). The hospital as a college. In Aequanimitas, With Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine. Philadelphia, PA: P. Blakiston, pp. 327–42.Google Scholar
Reynolds, D. F. (1994). Consultectonics: ethics committee case consultation as mediation. Bioethics Forum 10, 4: 54–60.Google Scholar
Richardson, H. S. (2000). Specifying, balancing and interpreting bioethical principles. J Med Philos 25: 285–307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Siegler, M. (1978). A legacy of Osler: teaching clinical ethics at the bedside. JAMA 239: 951–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Siegler, M., Pellegrino, E. D., and Singer, P. A. (1990). Clinical medical ethics. J Clin Ethics 1: 5–9.Google ScholarPubMed
West, M. B. and Gibson, J. M. (1992). Facilitating medical ethics case review: what ethics committees can learn from mediation and facilitation techniques. Camb Q Healthc Ethics 1: 63–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Young, J. O. (1986). The immortality of applied ethics. The Int J App Ethics 3: 37–43.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×