The individual and structural biases that affect the American healthcare system have serious emotional and physical consequences that all too often go unseen. These biases are often rooted in power, class, racial, gender or sexual orientation prejudices, and as a result, the injured parties usually lack the resources needed to protect themselves. In Healthcare and Human Dignity, individual worth, equality, and autonomy emerge as the dominant values at stake in encounters with doctors, nurses, hospitals, and drug companies. Although the public is aware of legal battles over autonomy and dignity in the context of death, the everyday patient’s need for dignity has received scant attention. Thus, in Healthcare, law professor Frank McClellan’s collection of cases and individual experiences bring these stories to life and establish beyond doubt that human dignity is of utmost priority in the everyday process of healthcare decision making.

Dignity is often denounced as hopelessly amorphous or incurably theological: as feel-good philosophical window-dressing, or as the name given to whatever principles give you the answer that you think is right. This is wrong, says Charles Foster: dignity is not only an essential principle in bioethics and law; it is really the only principle. In this ambitious, paradigm-shattering but highly readable book, he argues that dignity is the only sustainable Theory of Everything in bioethics. For most problems in contemporary bioethics, existing principles such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and professional probity can do a reasonably workmanlike job if they are all allowed to contribute appropriately. But these are second order principles, each of which traces its origins back to dignity. And when one gets to the frontiers of bioethics (such as human enhancement), dignity is the only conceivable language with which to describe and analyse the strange conceptual creatures found there. Drawing on clinical, anthropological, philosophical and legal insights, Foster provides a new lexicon and grammar of that language which is essential reading for anyone wanting to travel in the outlandish territories of bioethics, and strongly recommended for anyone wanting to travel comfortably anywhere in bioethics or medical law.

Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity provides a solid foundation for comprehending what a human rights framework implies and the potential for greater justice in health it entails.

Contains a collection of essays exploring human dignity and bioethics, a concept crucial to today's discourse in law and ethics in general and in bioethics in particular.

A Defense of Dignity argues that all human beings should be treated with respect and considers how this belief should be applied in controversial cases.

A wide-ranging collection of essays from a leading scholar of legal ethics.

Concentrating on the rights and responsibilities of patients and health care professionals, Biggs (law, U. of Kent, Britain) discusses medical decision making at the end of life. She explores what decisions may legitimately be taken, when, and by whom. Choice is a central theme, especially when a person's ideal choice might be to die sooner than would be considered natural by professional and emotional care givers. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR