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Taking Advance Directives Seriously
Prospective Autonomy and Decisions Near the End of Life
Robert S. Olick
Georgetown University Press, 2001

In the quarter century since the landmark Karen Ann Quinlan case, an ethical, legal, and societal consensus supporting patients' rights to refuse life-sustaining treatment has become a cornerstone of bioethics. Patients now legally can write advance directives to govern their treatment decisions at a time of future incapacity, yet in clinical practice their wishes often are ignored.

Examining the tension between incompetent patients' prior wishes and their current best interests as well as other challenges to advance directives, Robert S. Olick offers a comprehensive argument for favoring advance instructions during the dying process. He clarifies widespread confusion about the moral and legal weight of advance directives, and he prescribes changes in law, policy, and practice that would not only ensure that directives count in the care of the dying but also would define narrow instances when directives should not be followed. Olick also presents and develops an original theory of prospective autonomy that recasts and strengthens patient and family control.

While focusing largely on philosophical issues the book devotes substantial attention to legal and policy questions and includes case studies throughout. An important resource for medical ethicists, lawyers, physicians, nurses, health care professionals, and patients' rights advocates, it champions the practical, ethical, and humane duty of taking advance directives seriously where it matters most-at the bedside of dying patients.

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Taking Issue
Pluralism and Casuistry in Bioethics
Baruch A. Brody
Georgetown University Press, 2003

A pioneer in the theory of pluralistic casuistry, the idea that there are almost as many facets to moral choices as there are cases that call for choices, Baruch Brody takes issue with conventional bioethical wisdom and challenges the rigid principalism of contemporary bioethics. His views have been seen as controversial, but they are firmly held, and convincingly argued—all of which have led him to be one of the most widely discussed and highly admired bioethicists of our time. He argues for the fundamental distinction between active and passive euthanasia, for a need to reconceptualize approaches to brain death, and for the right of providers to unilaterally discontinue life support. He shows support for the waiving of the requirement of informed consent for some research, for the widespread use of animals in research, and for the use of placebos in many international clinical trials.

When it comes to morality as it is practiced in medicine, Brody makes clear that the ethical issues are never as simple as black and white—that there are myriad factors and fine nuances that can and should challenge decision making as it is commonly practiced in difficult medical cases. In this collection, delving thoughtfully and systematically into methodology, research ethics, clinical ethics, and Jewish medical ethics, he tackles thorny life-and-death questions head-on and fearlessly. He casts a light into all the corners of end-of-life decisions—a field in which he has exemplary credentials—while illuminating a new understanding of morality and ethics.

The introduction outlines Brody's approach, defines the terminology used, and contrasts his ethical positions with much of the competing literature. Taking Issue will be invaluable to students and scholars in medical ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of medicine.

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The Taming of the Samurai
Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan
Eiko Ikegami
Harvard University Press, 1995

Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century.

This book demonstrates how Japan’s so-called harmonious collective culture is paradoxically connected with a history of conflict. Ikegami contends that contemporary Japanese culture is based upon two remarkably complementary ingredients, honorable competition and honorable collaboration. The historical roots of this situation can be found in the process of state formation, along very different lines from that seen in Europe at around the same time. The solution that emerged out of the turbulent beginnings of the Tokugawa state was a transformation of the samurai into a hereditary class of vassal-bureaucrats, a solution that would have many unexpected ramifications for subsequent centuries.

Ikegami’s approach, while sociological, draws on anthropological and historical methods to provide an answer to the question of how the Japanese managed to achieve modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries. The result is a work of enormous depth and sensitivity that will facilitate a better understanding of, and appreciation for, Japanese society.

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The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Volume 33
Mark Matheson
University of Utah Press, 2014
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 33 features lectures given during the academic year 2012-2013 at Stanford University; the University of Michigan; the University of Oxford; the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; the University of Utah; and the U.S. Ambassador’s Palace, Paris, France.
 
William G. Bowen, “Costs and Productivity in Higher Education” and “Prospects for an Online Fix: Can We Harness Technology in the Service of Our Aspirations?”
 
Craig Calhoun, “The Problematic Public: Revisiting Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas”
 
Michael Ignatieff, “Representation and Responsibility: Ethics and Public Office”
 
F. M. Kamm, “Who Turned the Trolley?” and How Was the Trolley Turned?”
 
Claude Lanzmann, “Resurrection”
 
Robert Post, “Representative Democracy: The Constitutional Theory of Campaign Finance Reform” and Campaign Finance Reform and the First Amendment”
 
Michael J. Sandal, “The Moral Economy of Speculation: Gambling, Finance, and the Common Good”
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The Tanner Lectures Vol 26
Peterson, Grethe B
University of Utah Press, 2006
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 26 features lectures given by Stephen Breyer, Carl Bildt, Axel Honneth, Paul Farmer, and Avishai Margalit.
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Testing the National Covenant
Fears and Appetites in American Politics
William F. May
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Since the end of World War II, runaway fears of Soviet imperialism, global terrorism, and anarchy have tended to drive American foreign policy toward an imperial agenda. At the same time, uncurbed appetites have wasted the environment and driven the country’s market economy into the ditch. How can we best sustain our identity as a people and resist the distortions of our current anxieties and appetites?

Ethicist William F. May draws on America’s religious and political history and examines two concepts at play in the founding of the country—contractual and covenantal. He contends that the biblical idea of a covenant offers a more promising way than the language of contract, grounded in self-interest alone, to contain our runaway anxieties and appetites. A covenantal sensibility affirms, “We the people (not simply, We the individuals, or We the interest groups) of the United States.” It presupposes a history of mutual giving and receiving and of bearing with one another that undergirds all the traffic in buying and selling, arguing and negotiating, that obtain in the rough terrain of politics. May closes with an account of the covenantal agenda ahead, and concludes with the vexing issue of immigrants and undocumented workers that has singularly tested the covenant of this immigrant nation.

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Themes in Kant's Metaphysics and Ethics
Arthur Melnick
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
Intended for those interested in Kant's contribution to philosophy, this volume provides an overview of Kant's arguments concerning central issues in metaphysics and ethics.
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Theological Bioethics
Participation, Justice, and Change
Lisa Sowle Cahill
Georgetown University Press, 2005

The field of bioethics was deeply influenced by religious thinkers as it emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. Since that time, however, a seemingly neutral political liberalism has pervaded the public sphere, resulting in a deep suspicion of those bringing religious values to bear on questions of bioethics and public policy.

As a theological ethicist and progressive Catholic, Lisa Sowle Cahill does not want to cede the "religious perspective" to fundamentalists and the pro-life movement, nor does she want to submit to the gospel of a political liberalism that champions individual autonomy as holy writ. In Theological Bioethics, Cahill calls for progressive religious thinkers and believers to join in the effort to reclaim the best of their traditions through jointly engaging political forces at both community and national levels.

In Cahill's eyes, just access to health care must be the number one priority for this type of "participatory bioethics." She describes a new understanding of theological bioethics that must go beyond decrying injustice, beyond opposing social practices that commercialize human beings, beyond painting a vision of a more egalitarian future. Such a participatory bioethics, she argues, must also take account of and take part in a global social network of mobilization for change; it must seek out those in solidarity, those involved in a common calling to create a more just social, political, and economic system.

During the past two decades Cahill has made profound contributions to theological ethics and bioethics. This is a magisterial and programmatic statement that will alter how the religiously inclined understand their role in the great bioethics debates of today and tomorrow that yearn for clear thinking and prophetic wisdom.

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Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights
Ethna Regan
Georgetown University Press, 2010

What are human rights? Can theology acknowledge human rights discourse? Is theological engagement with human rights justified? What place should this discourse occupy within ethics?

Ethna Regan seeks to answer these questions about human rights, Christian theology, and philosophical ethics. The main purpose of this book is to justify and explore theological engagement with human rights. Regan illustrates how that engagement is both ecumenical and diverse, citing the emerging engagement with human rights discourse by evangelical theologians in response to the War on Terror. The book examines where the themes and concerns of key modern theologians—Karl Rahner, J. B. Metz, Jon Sobrino, and Ignacio Ellacuría—converge with the themes and concerns of those committed to the advancement of human rights. Regan also critically engages with the “disdain” for rights discourse that is found in the postliberal critiques of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.

This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of systematic theology, theological ethics, human rights, religion and politics, and political theory.

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Theology for a Liberating Church
The New Praxis of Freedom
Alfred T. Hennelly, SJ
Georgetown University Press, 1989

Freedom is a fundamental Christian theological category, as much a challenge to construct a new way of seeing oneself and others as it is an announcement of what Christ has already done for us in his death and resurrection. Liberation theology is, most simply, the effort to spell out what such freedom means for Christians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book has as its principle premise the conviction that if we are to construct a North American liberation theology we must begin listening to and understanding Latin American theology not so much as a model to be slavishly followed but as a challenge to our own cultural, political, and even religious assumptions. The focus thus is not so much on the theoretical meaning of Christian freedom but on its practice, and more exactly its praxis, that is to say the dialectic between theory and practice.

After focusing on the creation and development of liberating theological methods and sources and, above all, the revitalization and renewal of structures that will contribute to the development of a liberated and liberating church, Fr. Hennelly ends with an analysis of the most recent and the most important vatican document on liberation theology, The Instruction of Christian Freedom and Liberation, which he sees as an acknowledgement by the universal church that the theme of liberation is central to the meaning of Christian theology.

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The Theory of Morality
Alan Donagan
University of Chicago Press, 1977
"Let us . . . nominate this the most important theoretical work on ethical or moral theory since John Rawls's Theory of Justice. If you have philosophical inclinations and want a good workout, this conscientious scrutiny of moral assumptions and expressions will be most rewarding. Donagan explores ways of acting in the Hebrew-Christian context, examines them in the light of natural law and rational theories, and proposes that formal patterns for conduct can emerge. All this is tightly reasoned, the argument is packed, but the language is clear."—Christian Century

"The man value of this book seems to me to be that it shows the force of the Hebrew-Christian moral tradition in the hands of a creative philosopher. Throughout the book, one cannot but feel that a serious philosopher is trying to come to terms with his religious-moral background and to defend it against the prevailing secular utilitarian position which seems to dominate academic philosophy."—Bernard Gert, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
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Thinking About Morality
William K. Frankena
University of Michigan Press, 1980
Many people think about, and talk about, morality: journalists, novelists, social scientists, doctors, lawyers, and theologians. Most of their thinking and talking is either polemical—attacking or defending morality or proclaiming a "new" morality—or it is concerned with some popular, practical moral issue like abortion, euthanasia, or war. The author of Thinking About Morality believes that, to be helpful and sound, such moral thinking must be done in the context of a general theory or systematic philosophy of morality—something moral philosophers have long been trying to provide. In this book the author offers much of his own basic theory of morality, hoping that it will be of use to his readers in their thinking about morality, whatever the nature of their interest may be.
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Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love
A Summa of the Summa on the Theological Virtues
Christopher Kaczor
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love is designed to make as easy as possible a first reading of key passages from the Summa theologiae. This book contains selections from the Summa that are most influential, most important, or likely to be most interesting to the contemporary reader. The text of the Summa itself is edited and arranged for beginners. Each article begins with Thomas’s answers to the question at hand and then goes to the first objection, followed by the reply to the first objection, the second objection and its reply, and so on. This arrangement provides a greater accessibility and ease in following the argument. Below the text, copious footnotes illuminate the text as a professor in the classroom might. Some notes provide historical background to figures that Thomas presupposes his reader will know such as Gratian, Dionysius, and Lombard. Other notes offer doctrinal summaries of other parts of the Summa that illuminate what Thomas says about faith, hope, or love. Thomas had an enormous influence on theologians, Church councils, and popes after his time, so some footnotes examine this influence. Thomas drew heavily on sources of wisdom before him, so other footnotes summarize the teachings of earlier authors, such as Aristotle and Augustine. This book also contains introductory essays on the Summa, on faith, on hope, and on love, which provide an overview to situate the reader and place treatment of the theological virtues in its larger context of the Summa. For those who have never read Thomas Aquinas on faith, hope, and love (and for those who teach them), this book provides ready access to the wisdom of the Angelic doctor.
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Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues
A Summa of the Summa on Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage
Christopher Kaczor
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues provides essential passages from Thomas's treatment of the cardinal virtues in the Summa theologiae, edited and explained for classroom use or the independent reader. Arranged for beginners, this book contains passages from the Summa theologiae of great historical import, contemporary relevance, or intrinsic interest combined with abundant footnotes aiding the modern reader. Each individual article is arranged so that the question, e.g. “Is capital punishment moral?” is followed directed by Thomas’s answer. Then the first objection is raised, followed immediately by Thomas’s response, the second objection is raised and then Thomas answers it, and so forth. The abundant footnotes help first time readers navigate key theological and philosophical terms which may be unfamiliar. In addition, the notes provide biographical information about key authors cited by Thomas, such as Tully, Vegetius, and Gregory the Great. The footnotes sometimes look back at the sources and philosophical roots of what Thomas teaches. Other notes note how authors after Aquinas including theologians, church councils, and popes developed, synthesized, and sometimes rejected what Thomas teaches. In sum, this book seeks to illuminate Thomas’s teaching on the cardinal virtues such as a teacher might do in the classroom.
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Thomas Stamford Raffles
Schemer or Reformer?
Syed Hussein Alatas
National University of Singapore Press, 2020
More than two hundred years after Thomas Stamford Raffles established a British factory on the island of Singapore, he continues to be a towering figure in the nation. Not one but two statues of Raffles stand prominently in Singapore’s civic and heritage district, streets and squares are named after him, and important local businesses use his name. But does Raffles deserve this recognition? Should he continue to be celebrated—or like Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, must Raffles fall?
 
This is not a new question—in fact, it was considered at length as far back as 1971, in Syed Hussein Alatas’s slim but devastating volume Thomas Stamford Raffles: Schemer or Reformer?. While the book failed to spark a wide debate on Raffles’s legacy in 1970s Singapore, nearly 50 years after its original publication this powerful work feels wholly fresh and relevant. This edition features a new introduction by Syed Farid Alatas assessing contemporary Singapore’s take on Raffles, and how far we have, or have not, come in thinking through Singapore’s colonial legacy.
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Tomorrow's Troubles
Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance
Georgetown University Press, 2022

The first examination of predictive technology from the perspective of Catholic theology

Probabilistic predictions of future risk govern much of society. In business and politics alike, institutional structures manage risk by controlling the behavior of consumers and citizens. New technologies comb through past data to predict and shape future action. Choosing between possible future paths can cause anxiety as every decision becomes a calculation to achieve the most optimal outcome.

Tomorrow’s Troubles is the first book to use virtue ethics to analyze these pressing issues. Paul Scherz uses a theological analysis of risk and practical reason to show how risk-based decision theory reorients our relationships to the future through knowledge of possible dangers and foregone opportunities—and fosters a deceptive hope for total security. Scherz presents this view of temporality as problematic because it encourages a desire for stability through one’s own efforts instead of reliance on God. He also argues that the largest problem with predictive models is that they do not address individual reason and free will. Instead of dwelling on a future, we cannot control, we can use our past experiences and the Christian tradition to focus on discerning God’s will in the present.

Tomorrow’s Troubles offers a thoughtful new framework that will help Christians benefit from the positive aspects of predictive technologies while recognizing God’s role in our lives and our futures.

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Torture and Dignity
An Essay on Moral Injury
J. M. Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In this unflinching look at the experience of suffering and one of its greatest manifestations—torture—J. M. Bernstein critiques the repressions of traditional moral theory, showing that our morals are not immutable ideals but fragile constructions that depend on our experience of suffering itself. Morals, Bernstein argues, not only guide our conduct but also express the depth of mutual dependence that we share as vulnerable and injurable individuals.  
           
Beginning with the attempts to abolish torture in the eighteenth century, and then sensitively examining what is suffered in torture and related transgressions, such as rape, Bernstein elaborates a powerful new conception of moral injury. Crucially, he shows, moral injury always involves an injury to the status of an individual as a person—it is a violent assault against his or her dignity. Elaborating on this critical element of moral injury, he demonstrates that the mutual recognitions of trust form the invisible substance of our moral lives, that dignity is a fragile social possession, and that the perspective of ourselves as potential victims is an ineliminable feature of everyday moral experience. 
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The Torture Doctors
Human Rights Crimes and the Road to Justice
Georgetown University Press

Torture doctors invent and oversee techniques to inflict pain and suffering without leaving scars. Their knowledge of the body and its breaking points and their credible authority over death certificates and medical records make them powerful and elusive perpetrators of the crime of torture. In The Torture Doctors, Steven H. Miles fearlessly explores who these physicians are, what they do, how they escape justice, and what can be done to hold them accountable.

At least one hundred countries employ torture doctors, including both dictatorships and democracies. While torture doctors mostly act with impunity—protected by governments, medical associations, and licensing boards—Miles shows that a movement has begun to hold these doctors accountable and to return them to their proper role as promoters of health and human rights. Miles’s groundbreaking portrayal exposes the thinking and psychology of these doctors, and his investigation points to how the international human rights community and the medical community can come together to end these atrocities.

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Toward a Philosophy of the Act
By M. M. Bakhtin
University of Texas Press, 1993

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse—all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism.

A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. mci will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

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Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction
Narratives of Cultural Remission
Leona Toker
The Ohio State University Press, 2010

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The Trace of Judaism
Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas
Val Vinokur
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship

The defining quality of Russian literature, for most critics, is its ethical seriousness expressed through formal originality. The Trace of Judaism addresses this characteristic through the thought of the Lithuanian-born Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Steeped in the Russian classics from an early age, Levinas drew significantly from Dostoevsky in his ethical thought. One can profitably read Russian literature through Levinas, and vice versa.
 
Vinokur links new readings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, and Osip Mandelstam to the work of Levinas, to ask: How does Judaism haunt Russian literature? In what ways is Levinas' ethics as "Russian" as it is arguably "Jewish"? And more broadly, how do ethics and aesthetics inflect each other? Vinokur considers how the encounter with the other invokes responsibilities ethical and aesthetic, and shows how the volatile relationship between ethics and aesthetics--much like the connection between the Russian and Jewish traditions--may be inextricably symbiotic. In an ambitious work that illuminates the writings of all of these authors, Vinokur pursues the implications of this reading for our understanding of the function of literature--its unique status as a sphere in which an ethical vision such as that of Levinas becomes comprehensible.
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Trade-Offs
An Introduction to Economic Reasoning
Harold Winter
University of Chicago Press, 2023

The highly engaging introduction to thinking like an economist, updated for a new generation of readers.

When economists wrestle with any social issue—be it unemployment, inflation, healthcare, or crime and punishment—they do so impersonally. The big question for them is: what are the costs and benefits, or trade-offs, of the solutions to such matters? These trade-offs constitute the core of how economists see the world—and make the policies that govern it.

Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach of analyzing controversial policy issues. A useful introduction to the various factors that inform public opinion and policymaking, Trade-Offs is composed of case studies on topics drawn from across contemporary law and society.

Intellectually stimulating yet accessible and entertaining, Trade-Offs will be appreciated by students of economics, public policy, health administration, political science, and law, as well as by anyone following current social policy debates.

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Trade-Offs
An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and Social Issues
Harold Winter
University of Chicago Press, 2005
When economists wrestle with issues such as unemployment, inflation, or budget deficits, they do so by incorporating an impersonal, detached mode of reasoning. But economists also analyze issues that, to others, do not typically fall within the realm of economic reasoning, such as organ transplants, cigarette addiction, smoking in public, and product safety. Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach to analyzing these controversial public policy issues.

Harold Winter provides readers with the analytical tools needed to identify and understand the trade-offs associated with these topics. By considering both the costs and benefits of potential policy solutions, Winter stresses that real-world policy decision making is best served by an explicit recognition of as many trade-offs as possible.

Intellectually stimulating yet accessible and entertaining, Trade-Offs will be appreciated by students of economics, public policy, health administration, political science, and law, as well as by anyone who follows current social policy debates.
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Trade-Offs
An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and Social Issues, Second Edition
Harold Winter
University of Chicago Press, 2013
When economists wrestle with issues such as unemployment, inflation, or budget deficits, they do so by incorporating an impersonal, detached mode of reasoning. But economists also analyze issues that, to others, typically do not fall within the realm of economic reasoning, such as organ transplants, cigarette addiction, overeating, and product safety. Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach to analyzing these controversial public policy issues.
 
Harold Winter provides readers with the analytical tools needed to identify and understand the trade-offs associated with these topics. By considering both the costs and benefits of potential policy solutions, Winter stresses that real-world decision making is best served by an explicit recognition of as many trade-offs as possible. This new edition incorporates recent developments in policy debates, including the rise of “new paternalism,” or policies designed to protect people from themselves; alternative ways to increase the supply of organs available for transplant; and economic approaches to controlling infectious disease.
 
Intellectually stimulating yet accessible and entertaining, Trade-Offs will be appreciated by students of economics, public policy, health administration, political science, and law, as well as by anyone who follows current social policy debates.
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Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics
Georgetown University Press, 2022

The first book to argue for the concept of tragic dilemmas in Christian ethics

Moral dilemmas arise when individuals are unable to fulfill all of their ethical obligations. Tragic dilemmas are moral dilemmas that involve great tragedy. The existence of moral and tragic dilemmas is debated in philosophy and often dismissed in theology based on the notion that there are effective strategies that completely solve hard ethical situations. Yet cases from real-life events in war and bioethics offer compelling evidence for the existence of tragic dilemmas.

In Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics, Jackson-Meyer expertly explores the thought of Augustine and Aquinas to show the limits of their treatment of hard cases, as well as where their thought can be built on and expanded in relation to tragic dilemmas. She recognizes and develops a new theological understanding of tragic dilemmas rooted in moral philosophy, contemporary case studies, and psychological literature on moral injury. Jackson-Meyer argues that in tragic dilemmas moral agents choose between conflicting nonnegotiable moral obligations rooted in Christian commitments to protect human life and the vulnerable. Personal culpability is mitigated due to constrained situations and society is also culpable when tragic dilemmas are a result of structural sin. In response, Jackson-Meyer implores Christian communities to offer individual and communal healing after tragic dilemmas and to acknowledge their own participation in injustice.

Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics offers practical strategies that Christian communities can use to provide healing to those who have acted in tragic dilemmas and to transform the unjust structures that often cause these tragedies.

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Tragic Effects
Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation
Therese Augst
The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Tragic Effects: Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation confronts the peculiar fascination with Greek tragedy as it shapes the German intellectual tradition, with particular focus on the often controversial practice of translating the Greeks. Whereas the tradition of emulating classical ideals in German intellectual life has generally emerged from the impulse to identify with models, the challenge of translating the Greeks underscores the linguistic and historical discontinuities inherent in the recourse to ancient material and inscribes that experience of disruption as fundamental to modernity.

Friedrich Hölderlin’s translations are a case in point. Regarded in his own time as the work of a madman, his renditions of Sophoclean tragedy intensify dramatic effect with the unsettling experience of familiar language slipping its moorings. His attention to marking the distances between ancient source text and modern translation has granted his Oedipus and Antigone a distinct longevity as objects of discussion, adaptation, and even retranslation. Cited by Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Bertolt Brecht, and others, Hölderlin’s Sophocles project follows a path both marked by various contexts and tinged by persistent quandaries of untranslatability.

Tragedy has long functioned as a cornerstone for questions about ethical life. By placing emphasis on processes of translation and adaptation, however, Tragic Effects approaches the question of ethics from a perspective informed by recent discourse in translation studies. Reconstructing an ancient text in this context requires negotiating the difficult tension between comprehending the distant past and preserving its radical singularity.

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Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy
Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory
Gerald L. Bruns
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers—have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, events over structures, inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it.
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Transformed States
Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990-2020
Martin Halliwell
Rutgers University Press
Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post-Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.
 
The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar.
 
By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyses thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested.
 
Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of Covid-19.
 
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Transhumanism and Transcendence
Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement
Ronald Cole-Turner, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2013

The timeless human desire to be more beautiful, intelligent, healthy, athletic, or young has given rise in our time to technologies of human enhancement. Athletes use drugs to increase their strength or stamina; cosmetic surgery is widely used to improve physical appearance; millions of men take drugs like Viagra to enhance sexual performance. And today researchers are exploring technologies such as cell regeneration and implantable devices that interact directly with the brain. Some condemn these developments as a new kind of cheating—not just in sports but in life itself—promising rewards without effort and depriving us most of all of what it means to be authentic human beings. “Transhumanists,” on the other hand, reject what they see as a rationalizing of human limits, as if being human means being content forever with underachieving bodies and brains. To be human, they insist, is to be restless with possibilities, always eager to transcend biological limits.

As the debate grows in urgency, how should theology respond? Christian theologians recognize truth on both sides of the argument, pointing out how the yearnings of the transhumanists—if not their technological methods—find deep affinities in Christian belief. In this volume, Ronald Cole-Turner has joined seasoned scholars and younger, emerging voices together to bring fresh insight into the technologies that are already reshaping the future of Christian life and hope.

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Transplantation Ethics
Robert M. Veatch
Georgetown University Press, 2000

Three decades after the first heart transplant surgery stunned the world, organs including eyes, lungs, livers, kidneys, and hearts are transplanted every day. But despite its increasingly routine nature-or perhaps because of it-transplantation offers enormous ethical challenges. A medical ethicist who has been involved in the organ transplant debate for many years, Robert M. Veatch explores a variety of questions that continue to vex the transplantation community, offering his own solutions in many cases.

Ranging from the most fundamental questions to recently emerging issues, Transplantation Ethics is the first complete and systematic account of the ethical and policy controversies surrounding organ transplants. Veatch structures his discussion around three major topics: the definition of death, the procurement of organs, and the allocation of organs. He lobbies for an allocation system-administered by nonphysicians-that considers both efficiency and equity, that takes into consideration the patient's age and previous transplant history, and that operates on a national rather than a regional level.

Rich with case studies and written in an accessible style, this comprehensive reference is intended for a broad cross section of people interested in the ethics of transplantation from either the medical or public policy perspective: patients and their relatives, transplantation professionals, other health care professionals and administrators, social workers, members of organ procurement organizations, and government officials involved in the regulation of transplants.

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Transplantation Ethics
Second Edition
Robert M. Veatch and Lainie F. Ross
Georgetown University Press, 2015

Although the history of organ transplant has its roots in ancient Christian mythology, it is only in the past fifty years that body parts from a dead person have successfully been procured and transplanted into a living person. After fourteen years, the three main issues that Robert Veatch first outlined in his seminal study Transplantation Ethics still remain: deciding when human beings are dead; deciding when it is ethical to procure organs; and deciding how to allocate organs, once procured.

However, much has changed. Enormous strides have been made in immunosuppression. Alternatives to the donation model are debated much more openly—living donors are used more widely and hand and face transplants have become more common, raising issues of personal identity. In this second edition of Transplantation Ethics, coauthored by Lainie F. Ross, transplant professionals and advocates will find a comprehensive update of this critical work on transplantation policies.

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The Treacherous Imagination
Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction
Robert McGill
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Many authors have been accused of betraying their loved ones by turning them into fictional characters. In The Treacherous Imagination, Robert McGill examines the ethics of writing such stories. He argues that while fiction has long appealed to readers with its narratives of private life, contemporary autobiographical fiction channels a widespread ambivalence about the value of telling all in a confessional age—an age in which fiction has an unprecedented power to leave people feeling libeled or exposed when they recognize themselves in it.
Observing that the interests of authors and their loved ones in such cases are often less divergent than they appear, McGill assess strategies by which both parties might use fiction not to hurt each other but to revise and revitalize intimacy. Discussing authors such as Philip Roth, Alice Munro, A. S. Byatt, and Hanif Kureishi, McGill questions whether people should always require exclusivity of each other with regard to the stories they tell about private life. Instead, authors and their intimates might jointly embrace fiction’s playful, transgressive qualities, even while reexamining the significance of that fiction’s intimations.
In treating autobiographical fiction as both a willful public indiscretion and a mediator of intimate relations, The Treacherous Imagination provides a comprehensive account of the various potentials that fiction holds to harm and to help those who write it, those who read it, and those who see themselves in it.
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The Trouble with Normal
Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
Michael Warner
Harvard University Press
Michael Warner, one of our most brilliant social critics, argues that gay marriage and other moves toward normalcy are bad not just for the gays but for everyone. In place of sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame, and identity.
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Troubled Bodies
Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism, Medical Ethics, and the Body
Paul A. Komesaroff
Duke University Press, 1995
Setting out the implications of the postmodern condition for medical ethics, Troubled Bodies challenges the contemporary paradigms of medical ethics and reconceptualizes the nature of the field. Drawing on recent developments in philosophy, philosophy of science, and feminist theory, this volume seeks to expand familiar ethical reflections on medicine to incorporate new ways of thinking about the body and the dilemmas raised by recent developments in medical techniques.
These essays examine the ways in which the consideration of ethical questions is shaped by the structures of knowledge and communication at work in clinical practice, by current assumptions regarding the concept of the body, and by the social and political implications of both. Representing various perspectives including medicine, nursing, philosophy, and sociology, these essays look anew at issues of abortion, reproductive technologies, the doctor-patient relationship, the social construction of illness, the cultural assumptions and consequences of medicine, and the theoretical presuppositions underlying modern psychiatry. Diverging from the tenets of mainstream bioethics, Troubled Bodies suggests that, rather than searching for the correct "coherent perspective" from which to draw ethical principles, we must apprehend the complexity and diversity of the discursive systems within which we dwell.
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The Troubled Dream of Life
In Search of a Peaceful Death
Daniel Callahan
Georgetown University Press

Drawing on his own experience, and on literature, philosophy, and medicine, Daniel Callahan offers great insight into how to deal with the rewards of modern medicine without upsetting our perception of death. He examines how we view death and the care of the critically ill or dying, and he suggests ways of understanding death that can lead to a peaceful acceptance. Callahan's thoughtful perspective notably enhances the legal and moral discussions about end-of-life issues.

Originally published in 1993 by Simon and Schuster.

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