A volume on religious/theological methods in biomedical ethics inevitably of whether the methodological dimension can be distin raises the question guished from the various other things that go on in ethical discourse. It is difficult to answer this question definitively since many elements in moral conversation can be interpreted in different ways. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen illustrates this issue in this volume when she defines one of her crucial cate gories, gender justice, as being both procedural and substantive/normative. This difficulty of finally separating the methodological from the...

Despite reservoirs of moral discourse about duties in religious communities, professional caregiving traditions, and philosophical perspectives, the dominant moral language in contemporary biomedical ethics is that of rights'. Duties to Others begins to correct this imbalance in our ethical language through theoretical expositions of the ideas of duty and of the other', and by applied exemplifications of particular duties to identified others that arise in the context of health care. A pronounced multidisciplinary orientation informs this analysis of our moral call to respond to the...

How ought we evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend? In the briefest of terms, this question poses what is addressed here as the problem of contingent future persons, and as such it poses relatively novel challenges for philosophical and theological ethicists. For though it may be counter-intuitive, it seems that those contingent future persons who are actually brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by these actions in any conventional sense of the terms. This intriguing problem was...