Bioethics Mediation offers stories about patients, families, and health care providers enmeshed in conflict as they wrestle with decisions about life and death. It provides guidance for those charged with supporting the patient's traditional and religious commitments and personal wishes. Today's medical system, without intervention, privileges those within shared cultures of communication and disadvantages those lacking power and position, such as immigrants, the poor, and nonprofessionals. This book gives clinical ethics consultants, palliative care providers, and physicians, nurses, and other medical staff the tools they need to understand and manage conflict while respecting the values of patients and family members. Conflicts come in different guises, and the key to successful resolution is early identification and intervention. Every bioethics mediator needs to be prepared with skills to listen, "level the playing field," identify individual interests, explore options, and help craft a "principled resolution" -- a consensus that identifies a plan aligned with accepted ethical principles, legal stipulations, and moral rules and that charts a clear course of future intervention. The organization of the book makes it ideal for teaching or as a handbook for the practitioner. It includes actual cases, modified to protect the privacy of patients, providers, and institutions; detailed case analyses; tools for step-by-step mediation; techniques for the mediator; sample chart notes; and a set of actual role plays with expert mediator and bioethics commentaries. The role plays include: - discharge planning for a dying patient - an at-risk pregnancy - HIV and postsurgical complications in the ICU - treatment for a dying adolescent - dialysis and multiple systems failure Expanded by two-thirds from the 2004 edition, the new edition features two new role plays, a new chapter on how to write chart notes, and a discussion of new understandings of the role of the clinical ethics consultant.

Mediation Ethics is a groundbreaking text that offers conflict resolution professionals a much-needed resource for traversing the often disorienting landscape of ethical decision making. Edited by mediation expert Ellen Waldman, the book is filled with illustrative case studies and authoritative commentaries by mediation specialists that offer insight for handling ethical challenges with clarity and deliberateness. Waldman begins with an introductory discussion on mediation's underlying values, its regulatory codes, and emerging models of practice. Subsequent chapters treat ethical dilemmas known to vex even the most experienced practitioner: power imbalance, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, attorney misconduct, cross-cultural conflict, and more. In each chapter, Waldman analyzes the competing values at stake and introduces a challenging case, which is followed by commentaries by leading mediation scholars who discuss how they would handle the case and why. Waldman concludes each chapter with a synthesis that interprets the commentators' points of agreement and explains how different operating premises lead to different visions of what an ethical mediator should do in a given case setting. Evaluative, facilitative, narrative, and transformative mediators are all represented. Together, the commentaries showcase the vast diversity that characterizes the field today and reveal the link between mediator philosophy, method, and process of ethical deliberation. Commentaries by Harold Abramson Phyllis Bernard John Bickerman Melissa Brodrick Dorothy J. Della Noce Dan Dozier Bill Eddy Susan Nauss Exon Gregory Firestone Dwight Golann Art Hinshaw Jeremy Lack Carol B. Liebman Lela P. Love Julie Macfarlane Carrie Menkel-Meadow Bruce E. Meyerson Michael Moffitt Forrest S. Mosten Jacqueline Nolan-Haley Bruce Pardy Charles Pou Mary Radford R. Wayne Thorpe John Winslade Roger Wolf Susan M. Yates

Named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 byChoice! "[A] set of almost 70 essays, all well informed and many with attitude." Harold Shapiro, PhD Professor Emeritus and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Princeton University, Former Chair, National Bioethics Advisory Board "This most noteworthy and authoritative collection of 67 essays...represents 'the Penn way of doing bioethics' ....The Penn Center is widely known for multidisciplinary scholarship that emphasizes empirical inquiry on bioethical issues coupled with practical application(s)....The book provides excellent coverage of...both classical topics (e.g., informed consent, infertility, eugenics) and emerging issues (e.g., cloning, nonprofessional caregiving, privacy of thought in the age of brain imaging). The contributors, including the three editors, are either well-established or emerging scholars. Each essay offers historical background, an overview of relevant issues, a conclusion, and a list of references....Summing Up: Highly recommended."--Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries "This well-written book addresses a wide-ranging assortment of traditional bioethics issues that persist in the field as well as contemporary bioethics concerns that have evolved with new technologies and medical advances. This is a great resource for scholars in bioethics as well as various other relevant disciplines concerned with bioethical issues." Score: 96, 4 stars--Doody's Medical Reviews The Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania is the internationally recognized leader in bioethical education and research. Its interdisciplinary faculty is drawn from the fields of medicine, law, nursing, education, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Arthur L. Caplan, the Center's founding director, is recognized as one of the most influential experts in bioethics. He has authored numerous books and articles, and served as the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on human cloning. The Penn Center's leading fellows, Autumn Fiester and Vardit Ravitsky, have combined their expertise with Dr. Caplan and over 80 other contributors to create The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics--the foremost authority on both traditional and cutting-edge bioethical issues. The Penn Guide navigates uncharted ethical terrains, undoubtedly shaping both academic and public discourses on the challenging controversies generated by new technologies, theories, and medical advances. This volume represents the Penn Center's distinct, pioneering approach to bioethics, one that emphasizes empirical treatment of bioethical issues, and the integration of bioethical scholarship with practical application. Learn what the Penn Center has to say about: Neuroethics and brain imaging: Is my mind mine? Choosing future people: reproductive technologies and identity Eugenics and survival of the fittest in the modern world Bioethics and national security Vaccination, abortion, nanotechnology, organ transplantation, end-of-life issues, and more The Penn Guide will be the definitive text for policy makers, health practitioners, researchers, and students. This book will also inform the general public, patients, and family members as they seek answers to the bioethical issues of the day.

Rarely do ethics consults focus on genuine moral puzzlement in which people collectively wonder what is the right thing to do. Far more often, consults are about conflict. Each side knows quite well what is “right.” The problem is that the other side is too blind or stubborn to recognize it. And so the ethics consultant is called, perhaps in the hope that s/he will throw the weight of ethics toward one side and end the controversy so everyone can get on with other business. Perhaps the greater problem in these scenarios is that even if one side “wins” by gaining the power to dictate what happens next, the toxicity permeating the relationships often markedly worsens and other conflicts erupt, major and minor. Accordingly, where an ethics consultant cannot or should not declare an obvious winner on substantive grounds, the challenge often becomes largely procedural: how shall the situation be addressed in a way that acknowledges the legitimacy of diverse voices and strives to preserve, perhaps even to rebuild, the relationships on which good healthcare depends? At that point thoughtful negotiation and creative problem-solving are generally preferable to entrenched combat. This is the point at which “clinical-setting mediation” or other conflict management tools, such as coaching or facilitation, might be invoked. This article focuses on mediation. This paper broadens the conversation to encompass the conflict that permeates healthcare generally. Conflict resolution skills can readily address disputes and tensions throughout healthcare and, in the process, provide a kind of preventive ethics. Part I illustrates these broader conflict resolution opportunities by describing a recent mediation regarding a difficult discharge negotiation. Part II then outlines broader opportunities for conflict resolution across the spectrum of healthcare and describes several initiatives in that direction, particularly from the legal community. Finally, Part III discusses several ways in which clinical-setting mediation, as described in this article, differs significantly from bioethics mediation as it is often described in the literature, and offers a few suggestions for ethics committees interested in providing conflict resolution services.

An examination of ethical challenges that technology presents to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human and a proposal for a new ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of alterity. Bioethical dilemmas—including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion—have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, among the public, and in professional and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media, Joanna Zylinska argues, is the transformation of the very notion of life. In this provocative book, Zylinska examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, she goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose a new “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. After a detailed discussion of the classical theoretical perspectives on bioethics, Zylinska describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac's infamous fluorescent green bunny. Zylinska addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, Zylinska makes the case for a new nonsystemic, nonhierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

The Fifth Edition of Bioethics and the Law takes a multidisciplinary approach that combines legal discussion with jurisprudential, philosophical, and sociological materials. Strong expressions of different points of view highlight debates about bioethical issues. The text underscores the need to mediate between the law's focus on broad rules and the bioethicist's concern with context and detail. Bioethics and the Law supplements the traditional focus of bioethics on the interest of the individual with a second focus on the broader developments that shape healthcare. Connecting broad public healthcare issues to concerns of the individual patient/healthcare consumer, the text promotes understanding of unsettling and complex situations and shows the implications of bioethical developments for understandings of personhood. New to the Fifth Edition: New coauthor Ashley Hurst joins for this edition Presentation of technological innovations (e.g., artificial intelligence [AI]) and their implications for healthcare Expansive discussion of COVID-19 pandemic and public health emergencies Updated discussions of genetics and genomics and the implications for society and law Innovations in assisted reproduction Changes in abortion law Updated discussion of Medical Aid in Dying laws Professors and students will benefit from: Considering the ethical implications of health care as a business, an essential service based in professional expertise and a set of significant relationships Facing the shifting parameters of the provider/patient relationship in healthcare Understanding the role of government in designing and implementing healthcare programs such as Medicaid and Medicare Exploring the conflicts between a focus on individual autonomy and on the health of communities