Thieves of virtue
Subtitle: when bioethics stole medicine
By: Tom Koch
Series: Basic bioethics; Basic bioethics
Publisher: MIT Press; The MIT Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780262526784
Subjects: Bioethics; History; Political aspects; Philosophy; Medical ethics; Éthique médicale; Aspect politique; Philosophie
Description: Bioethics emerged in the 1960s from a conviction that physicians and researchers needed the guidance of philosophers in handling the issues raised by technological advances in medicine. It blossomed as a response to the perceived doctor-knows-best paternalism of the traditional medical ethic and today plays a critical role in health policies and treatment decisions. Bioethics claimed to offer a set of generally applicable, universally accepted guidelines that would simplify complex situations. In this book the author contends that bioethics has failed to deliver on its promises. Instead, he argues, bioethics has promoted a view of medicine as a commodity whose delivery is predicated not on care but on economic efficiency. At the heart of bioethics, he writes, is a "lifeboat ethic" that assumes scarcity of medical resources is a natural condition rather than the result of prior economic, political, and social choices. The idea of natural scarcity requiring ethical triage signaled a shift in ethical emphasis from patient care and the physician's responsibility for it to neoliberal accountancies and the promotion of research as the preeminent good. The solution to the failure of bioethics is not a new set of simplistic principles. Here the author points the way to a transformed medical ethics that is humanist, responsible, and defensible. -- From publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Dead Germans and other philosophers: ethics as a professional or public occupation; title: Something old: a brief review; title: Something newer: supply-side ethics; title: Lifeboat ethics: scarcity as an unnatural state; title: Biopolitics, biophilosophies, and bioethics; title: Principles of biomedical ethics; title: Bioethics and conformal humans; title: Research and genetics: "for the benefit of humankind"; title: Choice, freedom, and the paternalism thing; title: Complex ethics: toward an ethics of medicine.