A Virtue Based Defense Of Perinatal Hospice

Perinatal hospice is a novel form of care for an unborn child who has been diagnosed with a significantly life-limiting condition. In this book, Aaron D. Cobb develops a virtue-based defense of the value of perinatal hospice. He characterizes its promotion and provision as a common project of individuals, local communities, and institutions working together to provide exemplary care. Engaging with important themes from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Adams, he shows how perinatal hospice manifests virtues crucial to meeting the needs of families in these difficult circumstances. As a work of applied virtue ethics, this book has important normative, social, and political implications for the creation and development of structured programs of care. It grounds the view that communities ought (i) to devote resources to ensure that these programs are widely available and (ii) to develop social structures that promote awareness of and accessibility to these forms of care. A Virtue-Based Defense of Perinatal Hospice will be of interest to philosophers working in bioethics and applied virtue ethics, as well as scholars in the fields of neonatology, nursing, palliative and hospice care, and counseling who are interested in the study of perinatal hospice.

Now updated and expanded—a gentle and comprehensive guide for parents expecting a baby with a prenatal diagnosis of a life-limiting condition. When prenatal testing reveals that a baby is expected to die before or shortly after birth, many parents choose to proceed with the pregnancy and embrace the time they are able to have with their baby, before birth as well as afterward. With compassion and support, A Gift of Time walks these parents step-by-step through this challenging and emotional experience—from receiving the diagnosis to coping with the pregnancy and making plans for the baby's birth and peaceful death. The second edition of this gentle guide offers inspiration and reassurance through the voices of numerous parents who have walked this path with their beloved baby. Their moving experiences are stories not only of grief but of joy and peace. This edition: • Expands the content substantially to incorporate new research and guidelines • Features additional vignettes from more than 160 parents about their experiences and coping strategies • Offers encouragement and more practical ideas for moving forward, including updated guidance for decision-making and ideas for embracing the time with the baby, from before birth to after death • Describes the importance of perinatal hospice and palliative care, which has continued to grow worldwide since the first edition was published, and how to access this care Drawing from parent experiences and published research, this new edition is full of practical suggestions for parents as well as health care professionals. Caring and thoughtful, A Gift of Time helps parents navigate this difficult news and the journey that follows.

This book provides extensive and critical engagement with some of the most recent and compelling arguments favoring abortion choice. It features original essays from leading and emerging philosophers, bioethicists and medical professionals that present philosophically sophisticated and novel arguments against abortion choice. The chapters in this book are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of essays focuses primarily on unborn human individuals—zygotes, embryos and fetuses. In these chapters, it is argued, for example, that human organisms begin to exist at conception and that zygotes, embryos and fetuses are persons. These chapters also explore questions about whether or not zygotes, embryos and fetuses are part of their mothers’ bodies. The second set of essays focuses primarily on elective abortion and the debates surrounding it. These chapters consider whether or not opponents of abortion are commonly hypocritical, how opponents of abortion should think about adoption, how emerging technologies may affect the current debate and whether or not those participating in the debate should rely on analogies to support their case. Finally, the third set of essays shifts focus from the legal and moral status of elective abortion to its place in medical practice. In these chapters, it is argued that elective abortion embodies a kind of ableism, that elective abortion is medically unnecessary, harmful to women’s mental health and that telemedicine abortion poses significant risks to women’s health. Agency, Pregnancy and Persons offers an up-to-date examination of unborn human beings, the debates surrounding elective abortion and the place of elective abortion within medical practice. It will be of interest to medical professionals and those who work in philosophy, bioethics and medical ethics alike.

This book explores the ethical implications of managing uncertainty in clinical decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic. It develops an ethics of clinical uncertainty that brings together insights from the clinical and biomedical ethical literatures. The book sets out to recognize the central role uncertainty plays in clinical decision-making and to acknowledge the different levels, kinds, and dimensions of clinical uncertainty. It also aims to aid clinicians and patients in managing clinical uncertainty and to recognize the ethical duty they have to manage clinical uncertainty. The book addresses four ethical duties related to clinical uncertainty: (1) to advance the welfare of those in clinical medicine, (2) to respect the rights of those in clinical medicine, (3) to promote just access to health care, and (4) to care for one another in clinical medicine. These duties took on select urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic because clinical risk assessments about COVID-19 were limited, we were asked to give informed consent in the context of limited and changing knowledge, the pandemic unearthed myriad problems about the distribution of health care, and the pandemic raised questions about how we care for each other in medicine. An Ethics of Clinical Uncertainty will appeal to scholars, advanced students, and medical professionals working in philosophy of medicine, biomedical ethics, clinical medicine, nursing, public health care, and gerontology.

Compassion is widely regarded as an important moral emotion – a fitting response to various cases of suffering and misfortune. Yet contemporary theorists have rarely given it sustained attention. This volume aims to fill this gap by offering answers to a number of questions surrounding this emotion. These questions include: What is the nature of compassion? How does compassion differ from other emotions, such as empathy, pity, or gratitude? Is compassion a virtue? Can we have too much compassion? How does compassion influence other mental states (desires, motivations, beliefs, and intentions) and behaviour? How is compassion influenced by the environment? Must compassion be deserved? Can one be moral while lacking the capacity for compassion? Compassion, like other emotions, has many facets – biological, social, psychological and neural, among others. The contributors to this volume will draw on a variety of disciplines and methods in order to develop a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of this often-neglected moral emotion.

Voluntariness is a necessary condition of valid consent. But determining whether a person consented voluntarily can be difficult, especially when people are subjected to coercion or manipulation, placed in a situation with no acceptable alternative other than to consent to something, or find themselves in an abusive relationship. This book presents a novel view on the voluntariness of consent, especially medical consent, which the author calls Interpersonal Consenter-Consentee Justification (ICCJ). According to this view, consent is voluntary if and only if the process by which it has been obtained aligns with specific principles of interpersonal justification. ICCJ is distinctive because it explains voluntary consent neither as a ‘psychological’ concept indicative of the inner states of a person’s mind (e.g. willingness or reluctance) nor as a ‘circumstantial’ concept indicative of a person’s set of options. Rather, ICCJ explains the voluntariness of consent as an ‘interpersonal’ concept focusing on the interaction between the person giving consent and the person receiving it and requiring the absence of illegitimate control by the consent-receiver. In so doing, ICCJ further develops the notion of interpersonal justification, known from contractualist theories in moral philosophy, and introduces it to the debate on consent. The author employs a top-down approach, defending ICCJ’s key characteristics on the basis of general theoretical arguments, as well as a bottom-up approach, supporting ICCJ in its application to clinical challenges such as nudging and manipulation, living organ donation, and clinical trials. Voluntary Consent will appeal to researchers and advanced students in normative ethics, bioethics, philosophy of law, behavioural psychology, and medicine.

Every year, millions of students in the United States and around the world graduate from high school and college. Commencement speakers—often distilling the hopes of parents and four years of messaging from educators—tell graduates that they must do something grand, ambitious, or far-reaching. Change the world. Disrupt the status quo. Every problem in the world is your problem, awaiting your solutions. This book is an antidote to that advice. It provides a clear-eyed assessment of three types of people who tend to believe and promote a commencement speaker’s view of the world: the moralizer, who imposes unnecessary social costs by inappropriately enforcing morality; the busybody, who thinks the stranger and close friend merit equal shares of our benevolent attention; and the pure hearted, who equates acting with good intentions with just outcomes. The book also provides a bold defense of living an ordinary life by putting down roots, creating a good home, and living in solitude. A quiet, peaceful life can be generous and noble. It’s OK to mind your own business.

This book offers a novel theory of childhood well-being as a social good. It re-examines our fundamental assumptions about parenting, parental authority, and a liberal society’s role in the raising of children. The author defends the idea that the good of a child is inexorably linked to the good of society. He identifies and critiques the problematic assumption that parenting is an extension of individual liberty and shows how we run into problems in medical decision-making for children because of this assumption. He develops an objective conception of what is good for a child in a liberal society, drawing on the assumptions of liberty, and from here constructs a set of things that society and its members owe children. There are ways in which society should support and intervene in parental decisions to guarantee a child’s well-being. Ultimately, raising children is a social activity that requires input from society. The author then applies this theory of childhood well-being to develop a framework for medical decision-making for children. He also uses practical examples, such as vaccinations, parental leave, and healthcare access, to demonstrate the implications of his theory for public policy. The Limits of Parental Authority: Childhood Wellbeing as a Social Good will be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and advanced students working in bioethics, political philosophy, and public health policy.