Is there a such thing as a universal right to have children? Should medical assistance to have children be available to everyone? Are all methods of assisted reproduction legitimate?
The development of new reproductive technologies has spawned heated debate and deep controversy about how fertility treatments should be used clinically and by whom they should be controlled.
Many individuals and groups claim access to assisted reproduction as an essential right--not only clinically infertile heterosexual couples, but also single women, gay couples, post-menopausal women, and...

Moral Theory and Medical Practice aims to bring the practical needs of medicine closer to the theoretical interests of philosophy. While most work in the field of medical ethics has been concerned with the examination and solution of practical dilemmas, this book explores the potential benefits of philosophical analysis. By drawing directly on moral theory, philosophical analysis can help to resolve difficulties in the practice of medicine and psychiatry that arise from the obscurity of our concepts of illness and disease. The author provides a specifically philosophical contribution to an...

When Did I Begin? investigates the theoretical, moral, and biological issues surrounding the debate over the beginning of human life. With the continuing controversy over the use of in vitro fertilization techniques and experimentation with human embryos, these issues have been forced into the arena of public debate. Following a detailed analysis of the history of the question, Reverend Ford argues that a human individual could not begin before definitive individuation occurs with the appearance of the primitive streak about two weeks after fertilization. This, he argues, is when it becomes...

Discusses artificial and in vitro fertilization, egg and embryo donation, surrogate mothers, the storage of human semen, eggs, and embryos, and scientific and ethical issues in fertility.

All religion and much philosophy has been concerned with the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal. Human beings have always sought ways to overcome time, and to prove that death is not the end. This book consists then in an exploration of certain closely related ideas: personal identity, time, history and our commitment to the future, and the role of imagination in life.

Including three of his most famous and important essays, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Essay on Bentham, along with formative selections from Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, this volume provides a uniquely perspicuous view of Mill's ethical and political thought.

• Contains Mill's most famous and influential works, Utilitarianism and On Liberty as well as his important Essay on Bentham.
  
• Uses the 1871 edition of Utilitarianism, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime.
  
• Includes...

Imagination is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to...