Heroic measures: Just bioethics in an unjust world

Hasting Center Report

Volumn 31, Issue 6, 2001, Pages 34-40

  Zoloth, Laurie ^a  

^a SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ALTRUISM; ARTICLE; BIOETHICS; BIOETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH; HEALTH CARE DELIVERY; HUMAN; MORALITY; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL JUSTICE; UNITED STATES;

BIOETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; HEALTH CARE AND PUBLIC HEALTH;

ALTRUISM; BIOETHICS; DELIVERY OF HEALTH CARE; HUMANS; MORAL OBLIGATIONS; SOCIAL JUSTICE; SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0141721812     PISSN: 00930334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3527780     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Also, I want to thank them for teaching me how the health care system works.
2. Aside from the likely fact that few of us actually sat and spoke face to face with the families involved and so had only the dimmest of ideas about the entire matter, but nonetheless felt confident to reflect on it.
3. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
4. S. Miles, "The Future of Bioethics and Spirituality," manuscript for the Greenwall Foundation grant awards, 2000.
5. California Nurses Association, Rally for the Patients and Nurses' Wall of Testimony (San Francisco: California Nurses Association, 1998).
6. M. Walzer, Spheres Of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
7. At a recent meeting of Robert Wood Johnson grant recipients, all of whom struggled to create end of life care programs, we noted that even programs in university medical centers were being dramatically cut back and defunded. The Balm of Gilead Project, a hospice for the poorest residents of the poorest county in Alabama, struggled to find doctors, nurses, and beds when the county system shut down.
8. L. Churchill, "Are We Professionals? A Critical Look at the Social Role of Bioethicists,"
9. C. Rosenburg, "Meaning, Politics, and Medicine: On the Bioethical Enterprise and History," both in Daedalus 128, no. 4 (1999).
10. The problem is not that we lack an agreed-upon plan, or even a stance. Of course we would disagree about much, including what we mean by "justice" and how to achieve it. The problem is that we do not vigorously pursue this debate.
11. The sins of Nineveh are really sins. We do not have a thickly developed account of evildoing in bioethics, so confrontation is hard for us. We are better able to think about theories of the good, so we are somewhat befuddled when rational actors seem to choose values that we understand as wrong. It is of note that our failure to offer leadership here has led to the odd social phenomena of Americans getting their ethics, particularly their sense of the straightforward naming of good and evil, from other people who call themselves ethicists - Dr. Laura, Judge Judy, Randy Cohen, Oprah, or theethicsguy.com.
12. S. Rubin, When Doctors Say No (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
13. I am no exception: I am transfixed by nanotechnology and genetics.
14. R. Gibbs, Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
15. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 64.
16. E. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence, tr. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University, 1998), p. 97.
17. D. Novack, Covenental Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 25.
18. J.L. Nelson and H.L. Nelson, Family: An Ethics of Medicine and Families (New York: Routledge, 1995);
19. T. Murray, The Worth of the Child (Berkeley: University of California, 1996).
20. K. Montgomery, "Medicine is Not a Science," paper delivered at Northwestern University Medical School.
21. I asked the members of ASBH to join me in making public justice the center of the talk I stated I would instigate that year.