Principles Of Green Bioethics

Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. Green bioethics synthesizes environmental ethics and biomedical ethics, thus creating an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable health care. Notably, green bioethics addresses not the structure of environmental sustainability in health-care institutions but the sustainability of individual health-care offerings. It parallels traditional biomedical ethics by providing four principles for ethical guidance: distributive justice, resource conservation, simplicity, and ethical economics. Through these four principles, green bioethics presents a coherent framework for evaluating the sustainability of medical developments, techniques, and procedures. The future of our world may very well depend on how effectively we halt ecological destruction and conserve our resources in all areas of life. The principles of green bioethics, outlined in this book, will advance sustainability in health care.

Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. Green bioethics synthesizes environmental ethics and biomedical ethics, thus creating an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable health care. Notably, green bioethics addresses not the structure of environmental sustainability in health-care institutions but the sustainability of individual health-care offerings. It parallels traditional biomedical ethics by providing four principles for ethical guidance: distributive justice, resource conservation, simplicity, and ethical economics. Through these four principles, green bioethics presents a coherent framework for evaluating the sustainability of medical developments, techniques, and procedures. The future of our world may very well depend on how effectively we halt ecological destruction and conserve our resources in all areas of life. The principles of green bioethics, outlined in this book, will advance sustainability in health care.

As the state of the natural world declines, environmentally related health problems will increasingly shape the landscape of human health and disease. The confluence of several global trends - rapid population growth combined with an even more dramatic increase in natural resource consumption - drives ecological deterioration, and this in turn poses serious challenges to health. U.S. medicine and bioethics have too long ignored the relevance of these global trends to health care. This groundbreaking work is a call to attention. It brings bioethics and health care squarely into the 21st century. The book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It outlines the environmental trends that will strongly affect health, and challenges us to see the connections between ways of practicing medicine and the very environmental problems that damage ecosystems and make people sick. In addition to philosophical analysis of the converging values of bioethics and environmental ethics, the book offers case studies as well as a number of practical suggestions for moving health care toward sustainability. The exploration of a hypothetical Green Health Center, in particular, offers an intellectual and moral framework for talking about environmental values in health care. Engaging and challenging, this book will appeal not only to health professionals and philosophers, but to anyone concerned about how to preserve and promote both human health and the health of the natural world.

This book offers a systematic analysis of the moral principles that should apply to biomedicine. We understand "biomedical ethics" as one type of applied ethics. In our discussions of ethical theory per se, we offer anaylses of levels of moral deliberation and justification and of the ways two major approaches interpret principles, rules, and judgments. The systematic core of the book presents four fundamental moral principles--autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice.

Bioethics needs an expanded moral vision. Born in the ferment of the 1970s, the field responded to rapid developments in biomedical technology and injustices in clinical care and research. Since then, bioethics has predominantly focused on respect for autonomy, beneficence and nonmaleficence, and the zero-sum "lifeboat" ethics of distributive justice, applying these principles almost exclusively within the walls of medical institutions. It is now time for bioethics to take full account of the problems of health disparities and structural injustice that are made newly urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change. This book shows why and how the field must embrace a broader and more meaningful view of justice, principally by incorporating the tools and insights of the social sciences, epidemiology, and public health. Nancy M. P. King, Gail E. Henderson, and Larry R. Churchill make the case for a more social understanding and application of justice, a deeper humility in assessing expertise in bioethics consulting, a broader and more relevant research agenda, and greater appreciation of the profound health implications of global warming.

Catholic health care is one of the key places where the church lives Catholic social teaching (CST). Yet the individualistic methodology of Catholic bioethics inherited from the manualist tradition has yet to incorporate this critical component of the Catholic moral tradition. Informed by the places where Catholic health care intersects with the diverse societal injustices embodied in the patients it encounters, this book brings the lens of CST to bear on Catholic health care, illuminating a new spectrum of ethical issues and practical recommendations from social determinants of health, immigration, diversity and disparities, behavioral health, gender-questioning patients, and environmental and global health issues.

Environmental bioethics addresses the environmental impact of the health care industry and climate change health hazards as two ethical issues which impact each other. This edited volume examines the theory of environmental bioethics and offers practical examples of practices which make health care more sustainable. Written in an accessible style which allows readers to understand what environmental bioethics is and why it is important, this book presents real-life case studies and thoughtful reflections from leading doctors, clinicians, and ethicists. Contributions to this volume address ethical frameworks for environmental bioethics and delve into the role of doctors in environmentally sustainable health care. Together, they offer hope for a more sustainable health care industry while also recognizing how much more needs to be done. A key resource for scholars, practitioners and researchers of philosophy, environmental studies, public health, and the allied health sciences, this book will also be relevant to international policymakers, especially in countries which have socialized health care (such as those in the EU), who want a rationale for health care decarbonization and practical examples. It will also appeal to educated citizens, particularly those that demand positive environmental change and are interested in the concept of sustainable health care. This book was originally published as a special issue of The New Bioethics.