Life and Death

How should modern medicine’s dramatic new powers to sustain life be employed? How should limited resources be used to extend and improve the quality of life? In this collection, Dan Brock, a distinguished philosopher and bioethicist and co-author of Deciding for Others (Cambridge, 1989), explores the moral issues raised by new ideals of shared decision making between physicians and patients. The book develops an ethical framework for decisions about life-sustaining treatment and euthanasia, and examines how these life and death decisions are transformed in health policy when the focus shifts from what is best for a patient to what is just for all patients. Professor Brock combines acute philosophical analysis with a deep understanding of the realities of clinical health policy. This is a volume for philosophers concerned with medical ethics, health policy professionals, physicians interested in bioethics, and undergraduate courses in biomedical ethics.

Part I. Physicians and Patients Making Treatment Decisions: 1. Informed consent; 2. The ideal of shared decision making between physicians and patients; 3. When competent patients make irrational choices (co-authored by Steven A. Wartman); Part II. Life-and-Death Decisions in the Clinic: 4. Moral rights and permissible killing; 5. Taking human life; 6. Death and dying; 7. Forgoing life-sustaining food and water: Is it killing?; 8. Voluntary active euthanasia; Part III. Life-and-Death Decisions in Health Policy: 9. The value of prolonging human life; 10. Quality of life measures in health care and medical ethics; 11. The problem of low benefit/high cost health care; 12. Justice and the severely demented elderly; 13. Justice, health care, and the elderly; 14. Truth or consequences: the role of philosophers in policy-making; Index.