Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die

by Margaret Pabst Battin

Overview

Margaret Pabst Battin has established a reputation as one of the top philosophers working in bioethics today. This work is a sequel to Battin's 1994 volume The Least Worst Death. The last ten years have seen fast-moving developments in end-of-life issues, from the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands to furor over proposed restrictions of scheduled drugs used for causing death, and the development of "NuTech" methods of assistance in dying. Battin's new collection covers a remarkably wide range of end-of-life topics, including suicide prevention, AIDS, suicide bombing, serpent-handling and other religious practices that pose a risk of death, genetic prognostication, suicide in old age, global justice and the "duty to die," and suicide, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia, in both American and international contexts.

As with the earlier volume, these new essays are theoretically adroit but draw richly from historical sources, fictional techniques, and ample factual material.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195140262
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/05/2005
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	9.54(w) x 6.34(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Margaret Pabst Battin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine, Division of Medical Ethics, at the University of Utah. She has authored, edited, or co-edited fourteen books.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Ending Life: The Way We Do It, the Way We Could Do It	3
Part I	Dilemmas about Dying
1	Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide	17
2	Euthanasia: The Way We Do It, the Way They Do It	47
3	Going Early, Going Late: The Rationality of Decisions about Physician-Assisted Suicide in AIDS	69
4	Is a Physician Ever Obligated to Help a Patient Die?	88
5	Case Consultation: Scott Ames, A Man Giving Up on Himself	108
6	Robeck	113
Part II	Historical, Religious, and Cultural Concerns
7	Collecting the Primary Texts: Sources on the Ethics of Suicide	163
8	July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-Day Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (and What Could This Mean for Bioethics?)	175
9	High Risk Religion: Informed Consent in Faith Healing, Serpent Handling, and Refusing Medical Treatment	186
10	Terminal Procedure	226
11	The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice: What's Wrong with Suicide Bombing?	240
Part III	Dilemmas about Dying in a Global Future
12	Genetic Information and Knowing When You Will Die	251
13	Extra Long Life: Ethical Aspects of Increased Life Span	269
14	Global Life Expectancies and International Justice: A Reemergence of the Duty to Die?	280
15	New Life in the Assisted-Death Debate: Scheduled Drugs versus NuTech	301
16	Empirical Research in Bioethics: The Method of "Oppositional Collaboration"	316
17	Safe, Legal, Rare? Physician-Assisted Suicide and Cultural Change in the Future	321
	Index	333

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life

"Battin is not only a good philosopher, she is a practical philosopher. She adopts a problem-oriented approach to bioethics, selecting a specific issue and always attempting to provide circumspect and reasoned solutions."—Journal of Medical Ethics

"She is surely one of the most erudite and articulate scholars pondering questions of euthanasia, suicide, and the withdrawal of medical treatment in the Western world."— Arthur L. Caplan, Ethics

"She does what analytically trained philosophers do best, namely, provide illuminating analyses and clarifications of difficult concepts and advance logically rigorous arguments in support of her analyses and positions."—Medical Humanities Review

"Margaret Pabst Battin is one of the most intelligent writers on medical ethics."—Studies in Christian Ethics

From the Publisher