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Despite reservoirs of moral discourse about duties in religious communities, professional caregiving traditions, and philosophical perspectives, the dominant moral language in contemporary biomedical ethics is that of `rights'. Duties to Others begins to correct this imbalance in our ethical language through theoretical expositions of the ideas of duty and of the `other', and by applied exemplifications of particular duties to identified others that arise in the context of health care. A pronounced multidisciplinary orientation informs this analysis of our moral call to respond to the needs of others. The essays in this volume offer a stimulating intellectual freshness through a continual engagement of theological, professional, and philosophical understandings of the duties that arise in our relationships with others in medicine, nursing, and social contexts. Duties to Others provides provocative challenges about the terrain of our moral world for both students and professionals in biomedical ethics, medicine, philosophy, and theology.
List of contents
Section I: Conceptual Foundations.- Taking Duties Seriously? The Decline of Duties in a Rights Culture.- Encountering the Other.- Theology and the Invitation of the Stranger.- Self and Other in Feminist Thought.- Section II: Traditions of Duties.- Duties to Others in Roman Catholic Thought.- Duties to Others and Covenantal Ethics.- Duty, Virtue, and the Victim's Voice.- Section III: Duties and the Clinical Context.- Self-Interest, The Physician's Duties, and Medical Ethics: A Philosophical and Theological Challenge.- Duties to Others in Nursing.- Suffering, Compassion, and Care.- Gifts and Caring Duties in Medicine.- Duties of Patients to Their Caregivers.- Section IV: Duties in Social Context.- Needy Persons and Rationed Resources.- Bioethics in the Post-Modern World: Belief and Secularity.- Intergenerational Relations.- Section V: Duties in Conflict.- Conflict, Compromise, and Moral Integrity.- Genetic Testing, Individual Rights, and the Common Good.- Fidelity to Patients and Resource Constraints.- Notes on Contributors.
