This volume gathers together previously unpublished articles focusing on the relationship between preference adaptation and autonomy in connection with human enhancement and in the end-of-life context. The value of individual autonomy is a cornerstone of liberal societies. While there are different conceptions of the notion, it is arguable that on any plausible understanding of individual autonomy an autonomous agent needs to take into account the conditions that circumscribe its actions. Yet it has also been suggested that allowing one’s options to affect one’s preferences threatens autonomy. While this phenomenon has received some attention in other areas of moral philosophy, it has seldom been considered in bioethics. This book combines for the first time the topics of preference adaptation, individual autonomy, and choosing to die or to enhance human capacities in a unique and comprehensive volume, filling an important knowledge gap in the contemporary bioethics literature.

An examination of the ethical issues raised by the possibility of human life extension, including its desirability, unequal access, and the threat of overpopulation. Life extension—slowing or halting human aging—is now being taken seriously by many scientists. Although no techniques to slow human aging yet exist, researchers have successfully slowed aging in yeast, mice, and fruit flies, and have determined that humans share aging-related genes with these species. In New Methuselahs, John Davis offers a philosophical discussion of the ethical issues raised by the possibility of human life extension. Why consider these issues now, before human life extension is a reality? Davis points out that, even today, we are making policy and funding decisions about human life extension research that have ethical implications. With New Methuselahs, he provides a comprehensive guide to these issues, offering policy recommendations and a qualified defense of life extension. After an overview of the ethics and science of life extension, Davis considers such issues as the desirability of extended life; whether refusing extended life is a form of suicide; the Malthusian threat of overpopulation; equal access to life extension; and life extension and the right against harm. In the end, Davis sides neither with those who argue that there are no moral objections to life enhancement nor with those who argue that the moral objections are so strong that we should never develop it. Davis argues that life extension is, on balance, a good thing and that we should fund life extension research aggressively, and he proposes a feasible and just policy for preventing an overpopulation crisis.

This book engages in a critical discussion on how to respect and promote patients’ autonomy in difficult cases such as palliative care and end-of-life decisions. These cases pose specific epistemic, normative, and practical problems, and the book elucidates the connection between the practical implications of the theoretical debate on respecting autonomy, on the one hand, and specific questions and challenges that arise in medical practice, on the other hand. Given that the idea of personal autonomy includes the notion of authenticity as one of its core components, the book explicitly includes discussions on underlying theories of the self. In doing so, it brings together original contributions and novel insights for “applied” scenarios based on interdisciplinary collaboration between German and Serbian scholars from philosophy, sociology, and law. It is of benefit to anyone cherishing autonomy in medical ethics and medical practice.

This book provides a comprehensive picture for understanding the experiences and dynamics of precarious workers’ in-work poverty in western China. The research presented in this book identifies the causes and the consequences of precarious employment and in-work poverty and analyses the stakeholders’ responses to the changes in the context of employment in China's socialist market economy. The book explains why precarious workers tend to remain outsiders to rapid socio-economic transformation and informs readers as to how people make choices, how those with different abilities adapt to the process of de-traditionalisation and how marketisation changes people’s lifestyles, value systems, policy designs. Detailing empirical investigations of the experience and dynamics of workers’ precarious life, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese society, social policy and poverty.

When, if ever, is it permissible to intervene in a person's affairs for his or her own good? This, in essence, is the moral problem of paternalism. Many consider paternalism morally objectionable. In this book, Jason Hanna argues boldly for an alternative pro-paternalist view: that intervention is permissible so long as it serves the best interest of the person subject to it, without thereby wronging others. To Hanna, the moral debate over paternalism is most fundamentally a debate about the weight and relevance of a certain kind of reason or rationale for intervention. In arguing that paternalistic rationales provide valid and weighty reasons, Hanna considers the objections that paternalism is disrespectful, that it wrongly imposes values on people, that it violates individual rights, and that it is likely to be misapplied or abused. He argues that each of these objections fails to demonstrate that there is anything distinctively problematic about paternalism. Moreover, he attempts to situate pro-paternalism within a popular rights-based moral theory. Hanna shows that popular alternatives to pro-paternalism confront serious problems of their own, especially insofar as they attempt to distinguish permissible intervention on behalf of incompetent persons from impermissible intervention on behalf of competent adults. Although the book's central aim is to defend a moral view, it suggests how this view can be fruitfully applied in a number of real-world contexts.

Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives is the first book to offer students the full breadth of philosophical issues that are raised by the end of life. Included are many of the essential voices that have contributed to the philosophy of death and dying throughout history and in contemporary research. The 38 chapters in its nine sections contain classic texts (by authors such as Epicurus, Hume, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer) and new short argumentative essays, specially commissioned for this volume, by world-leading contemporary experts. Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying introduces students to both theoretical issues (whether we can survive death, whether death is truly bad for us, whether immortality would be desirable, etc.) and urgent practical issues (the ethics of suicide, the value of grief, the appropriate medical criteria for declaring death, etc.) raised by human mortality, enabling instructors to adapt it to a wide array of institutions and student audiences. As a pedagogical benefit, PowerPoints, discussion questions, and test questions for each chapter are included as online ancillary materials.

This handbook explores the topic of death and dying from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on the United States. The chapters examine a range of ethical topics related to death, dying, palliative care and decision-making at the end of life.