Leading bioethicists from America, Asia and Europe discuss Jahr's visionary concept of an ethics of 'bios', integrating the ethics of land, community, health, and culture in light of global challenges in the 21st century.

The ethics of valuing bios in all their forms and shapes has been an essential part of great and successful cultures from the millennia-old Vedic tradition of 'tattvamasi'-this is also you: this plant, this animal, this microbe, this ecosystem-to the simple hands-on call of Jesus's 'love your neighbor.' But as a term bioethics was coined 90 years ago by Fritz Jahr, an educator and pastor in Halle in his Bioethical Imperative 'Respect every Living Being as an end in itself and treat it, if possible, as such.' This book examines the development of Fritz Jahr's concept of bioethics over the last ninety years. (Series: Practical Ethics - Controversies / Ethik in der Praxis - Kontroversen, Vol. 33) [Subject: Ethics, Bioethics, Philosophy]

The book presents the results of a long research into the life and work of the German theologian and teacher Fritz Jahr (1895–1953) from Halle an der Saale, who was the first to use the term "bioethics", as early as 1926. It is a revised history of bioethics with an overview of all 22 of Jahr’s known published papers. The analysis follows the diffusion after 1997 of the discovery of Fritz Jahr worldwide and particularly the contribution of Croatian bioethicists to it.

Van Rensselaer Potter created and defined the term "bioethics" in 1970, to describe a new philosophy that sought to integrate biology, ecology, medicine, and human values. Bioethics is often linked to environmental ethics and stands in sharp contrast to biomedical ethics. Because of this confusion (and appropriation of the term in medicine), Potter chose to use the term "Global Bioethics" in 1988. Potter's definition of bioethics from Global Bioethics is, "Biology combined with diverse humanistic knowledge forging a science that sets a system of medical and environmental priorities for acceptable survival."

Van Rensselaer Potter (1911-2001), the biochemist-oncologist of University of Wisconsin-Madison, was long been related to the invention of the term "bioethics". Even today, knowing that the German theologian Fritz Jahr (1895-1953) is to be credited for this invention, Potter's ideas do not lose on their importance, primarily for his opposition to a bioethics narrowed down onto biomedical issues. The book represents the first monograph on Potter's life and work worldwide, telling a fascinating story about a concerned top scientist and humanist.

This book presents the first critical examination of the overlapping ethical, sociocultural, and policy-related issues surrounding disasters, global bioethics, and public health ethics. These issues are elucidated under the conceptual rubric: Public health disasters (PHDs). The book defines PHDs as public health issues with devastating social consequences, the attendant public health impacts of natural or man-made disasters, and latent or low prevalence public health issues with the potential to rapidly acquire pandemic capacities. This notion is illustrated using Ebola and pandemic influenza outbreaks, atypical drug-resistant tuberculosis, and the health emergencies of earthquakes as focal points. Drawing on an approach that reckons with microbial, existential, and anthropological realities; the book develops a relational-based global ethical framework that can help address the local, anthropological, ecological, and transnational dynamics of the ethical issues engendered by public health disasters. The book also charts some of the critical roles that relevant local and transnational stakeholders may play in translating the proposed global ethical framework from the sphere of concept to the arena of action. This title is of immense benefit to bioethics scholars, public and global health policy experts, as well as graduate students working in the area of global health, public health ethics, and disaster bioethics.

​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.