Naturalized Bioethics
Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice

Naturalized Bioethics shows bioethicists and health care professionals a new way to address the ethical issues surrounding health care.

Hilde Lindemann (Edited by), Marian Verkerk (Edited by), Margaret Urban Walker (Edited by)

9780521895248, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 October 2008

292 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

“…Naturalized Bioethics is an excellent anthology, well-worth reading. Many of the issues it raises are in fact new and it deepens our understanding of concepts such as autonomy and responsibility. Also welcome is the book’s persistent focus on power issues. In this connection, I found the concluding chapter particularly good. In it, Verkerk and Lindemann plead with bioethicists to rethink their own professional identity. Bioethicists are not ethics experts in the sense of being more morally right or morally good than other people…Bioethicists are the enablers of moral conversation. It may begin with them, but it should not end with them -- at least not in the real/natural world in which we actually live.”
Rosemarie Tong, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Naturalized bioethics represents a revolutionary change in how health care ethics is practised. It calls for bioethicists to give up their dependence on utilitarianism and other ideal moral theories and instead to move toward a self-reflexive, socially inquisitive, politically critical, and inclusive ethics. Wary of idealisations that bypass social realities, the naturalism in ethics that is developed in this volume is empirically nourished and acutely aware that ethical theory is the practice of particular people in particular times, places, cultures, and professional environments. These essays situate the bioethicist within the clinical or research context, take seriously the web of relationships in which all human beings are nested, and explore a number of the different kinds of power relations that inform health care encounters. Naturalized Bioethics aims to help bioethicists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, disability studies scholars, medical researchers, and other health professionals address the ethical issues surrounding health care.

Part I. Responsible Knowing: 1. Moral bodies: epistemologies of embodiment Jackie Leach Scully
2. Choosing surgical birth: desire and the nature of bioethical advice Raymond DeVries, Lisa Kane Low, and Elizabeth Bogdan-Lovis
3. Holding on to Edmund: the relational work of identity Hilde Lindemann
4. Caring, minimal autonomy, and the limits of liberalism Agnieszka Jaworska
5. Narrative, complexity, and context: autonomy as an epistemic value Naomi Scheman
6. Toward a naturalized narrative bioethics Tod Chambers
Part II. Responsible Practice: 7. Motivating health: empathy and the normative activity of coping Jodi Halpern and Margaret Olivia Little
8. Economies of hope in a period of transition: parents in the time leading up to their child's liver transplantation Marre Knibbe and Marian Verkerk
9. Consent as a grant of autonomy: a care ethics reader of informed consent Joan Tronto
10. Professional loving care and the bearable heaviness of being Annelies van Heijst
11. Ideal theory bioethics and the exclusion of people with severe cognitive disabilities Eva Feder Kittay
12. Epilogue: naturalized bioethics in practice Marian Verkerk and Hilde Lindemann.

Subject Areas: Medical ethics & professional conduct [MBDC], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]