Review by Choice Review
This book deftly presents the main modern bioethical debates, posing 15 specific questions on issues ranging from universal health care to physician-assisted suicide, stem cell research, and genetic enhancement; two chapters presenting opposing views follow. As the editors note, "contemporary debates" frequently emerge from public controversy and are always emotionally charged. Conditioned by their own conjunctures, these debates tend to be hasty and short-lived, a limitation of the field. But bioethics has another more worrisome limitation: as the child of scandal and emotion, it often seems to rest on the premises that human actions are morally wrong and should be banned unless proven otherwise, and that the government does not need strong moral reasons to interfere with people's freedoms. These premises run contrary to the basic paradigms of modern liberal democracies, where permission is the rule and prohibition the exception for individuals, while the opposite is true for governments. Unfortunately, by asking authors to justify the moral acceptability of different actions, this volume subscribes to the above-mentioned premises and implicitly promotes them. Nonetheless, it is a useful classroom tool to foster a critique of bioethics and a clear, didactic glimpse into the last 40 years of bioethics discussions. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students. P. Rodriguez del Pozo Weill Cornell Medical College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
