Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus

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Audience:
The intended audience is first and foremost bioethicists, healthcare professionals, and philosophers dealing with contemporary ethical and moral issues.  Philosophers more generally, as well as those interested in contemporary ethical and moral issues, will find this volume to offer a fresh perspective on the culture wars.

Description:
Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus explores the persistent failure to produce a universal set of standards for bioethics. The predicament of contemporary morality, the post-modern condition, is such that we find ourselves in the position of numerous competing moralities that not only reach conflicting judgments about particular issues, but also reflect radically divergent world-views. Consensus, therefore, is impossible to achieve.

These essays analyze and diagnose the causes and results of the diversity of moral world-views in both philosophy and everyday life. Some of the essays in this volume argue that the post-modern condition is actually the direct result of the philosophical-theological synthesis of the Western Christian Middle Ages.

The essays in this volume explore the difficulties, both procedural and contentful, that have arisen from the failure of various attempts to arrive at a global secular bioethics by means of rational-discursive reflection.

Reviews:
"For more than a millennium, the best minds of the West, religious and secular, have been in search of a cosmopolitan ethics.  Just when we enter a new era of globalization this project seems to be in profound disarray.  The problem is not so simple as a merely subjective moral relativism, the remedy of which would be moral realism and earnestness.  It is precisely among those who take ethics seriously that the moral diversity has proved most persistent and resistant to consensus, either theoretical or practical.  The editor notes that these essays constitute a 'disturbing study of the contemporary moral predicament.' He understates the impact of these essays."

Russell Hittinger, William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research, Professor of Law, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma

"Readers will find here a provocative volume that brings into question the hope for global consensus on issues in bioethics, such as that proclaimed by the 'Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights'. The volume brings together contributors from around the world who are largely in agreement about the range of disagreement on matters of both content and method.  Whether or not one is fully persuaded by the essays, they provide an importnat contribution to contemporary debates on bioethics and on our assessments of the culture wars."

B. Andrew Lustig,Holmes Rolston III Professor of Religion and Science, Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

About the Editor:
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., holds degrees in both medicine and philosophy. He is professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University, professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine. In addition to having authored over 300 articles and chapters of books, as well as having co-edited more than 30 volumes, his books include ‘The Foundations of Bioethics’ (2nd ed., 1996), which has appeared in Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, ‘Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality’, which has also appeared in Chinese, and ‘The Foundations of Christian Bioethics’, which has appeared in Portuguese and Romanian. He is the editor of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophyand two book series, Philosophy and Medicine, and Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture. He is also the founding and senior editor of Christian Bioethics.