Rethinking Health Care Ethics

Stephen Scher is Senior Editor, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and Lecturer in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, USA, and University of Sydney Medical School, Australia. He recently stepped down as Senior Editor of the American Journal of International Law.Kasia Kozlowska is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Medical School, Australia.

“There is much to admire about Scher and Kozlowska’s approach, and much to aspire to in their vision of the future of health care ethics. The book is smoothly written and easy to read; it is provocative without being abrasive. It is a valuable counterweight to overly formal, technical approaches to medical ethics.” (Samuel Reis‑Dennis, Monash Bioethics Review, April 18, 2020)“There are many reasons to recommend Scher and Kozlowska’s text. It presents an excellent case for rethinking the way that health care ethics is taught to health practitioners. It is well written, thoughtful, brief, and freely available via open access online, which should give it wide appeal and make it eminently suitable as a teaching text. … the authors are making a potentially significant contribution to an ecological turn away from merely instrumental and toward truly humane health care practice.” (Patrick Daly, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Vol. 40, August 07, 2019)“These authors provide a comprehensive review of social science literature and an exploration of how the rise of bioethics in the US and the European response to bioethics culminated in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. … Scher and Kozlowska's goal is the empowerment of clinicians to respect their moral thinking when addressing health care dilemmas. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty and professionals.” (B. A. D'Anna, Choice, Vol. 56 (11), July, 2019) “The book is a lucid critique of healthcare ethics as a [distinct] subject; a critique that naturally leads into constructive suggestions for an alternative pedagogy. The book should be of high interest to teachers in healthcare ethics, to ethicists, and to anyone who finds that ethics often is presented in ways that make us estranged from ourselves. What most impresses me in this book is its trust in the human. The foundation of ethics is in the human self, not in moral theory.” (Pär Segerdahl, The Ethics Blog, ethicsblog.crb.uu.se, October, 03, 2018)“Individual moral experience as fundamental … . highly persuasive in its logic and practical orientation … .” (Amir Muzur, European Journal of Bioethics, Vol. 9 (2), 2018)

• 1 A Brief Introduction.- 2 The Limitations of Bioethics: A Personal History.- 3 The Rise of Bioethics: A Historical Overview.- 4 Theory and Practice: From the Top Down.- 5 The Elusiveness of Closure.- 6 Ethics and the Self.- 7 The Self in an Interpretive Community.- 8 A Framework for Teaching Clinical Health Care Ethics.- 9 Teaching Clinical Ethics in the Formal Curriculum.- 10 Teaching Ethics in a Clinical Setting.- 11 Empowering Clinicians.- Index.