Since public health seeks to protect the health of populations, it inevitably confronts a range of ethical challenges having to do primarily with the friction between individual freedoms and what might be perceived as governmental paternalism. This volume brings together twenty-five articles by leading thinkers in the field, writing on topics that concern both classic and novel problems. They open up new terrain in each area, including tobacco and drug control, infectious disease, environmental and occupational health, the effect of new genetics on the publics health, and the impact of social...

Ethics in Hospice Care: Challenges to Hospice Values in a Changing Health Care Environment explores the pressures and challenges facing hospice and aims to produce new studies and educational materials on hospice ethics to help professionals in the field. Many of the tensions felt by caregivers and practitioners in hospice stem from uncertainty about the ethical mission of hospice and the ethical dilemmas arising in practice. This volume, a result of The Hastings Center and the Hospice Foundation of America s project on Ethical and Policy Issues in Hospice Care, addresses these issues in a...

This volume examines the specific areas of concern that the Collaborative for Palliative Care group has addressed in its education programs and advocacy, as well as the processes that have been so successful in building community assets.

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some cases, the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the...

hope of obtaining a comprehensive and coherent understand- ing of the human condition, we must somehow weave together the biological, sociological, and psychological components of human nature and experience. And this cannot be done- indeed, it is difficult to even make sense of an attempt to do it-without first settling our accounts with Darwin, Marx, and Freud. The legacy of these three thinkers continues to haunt us in other ways as well. Whatever their substantive philosophical differences in other respects, Darwin, Marx, and Freud shared a common, overriding intellectual orientation:...

Reproductive technology allows us to test embryos' genes before deciding whether to transfer them to a woman's uterus. Embryo selection raises many ethical questions but is virtually unregulated in the United States. This comprehensive study considers the ethical, medical, political, and economic aspects of developing appropriate regulation.

Emergency Ethics brings together leading scholars in the fields of public health ethics and bioethics to discuss disaster or emergency ethics and ethical aspects of preparedness and response with specific application to public health policy and practice. The book fills a gap in the existing public health ethics literature by providing a comprehensive ethical conception of emergency preparedness as a distinctive form of civic "practice" brought about by the interrelationships and coordination of many groups, disciplines, and interests and drawing on numerous bodies of knowledge and...