Ending Life Ethics and the Way We Die [Paperback]

Margaret Pabst Battin has established a reputation as one of the top philosophers working in bioethics today. This work is a sequel to Battin's 1994 volumeThe Least Worst Death. The last ten years have seen fast-moving developments in end-of-life issues, from the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands, to a furor over proposed restrictions of scheduled drugs used for causing death, and the development of NuTech methods of assistance in dying. Battin's new collection covers a remarkably wide range of end-of-life topics, including suicide prevention, AIDS, suicide bombing, serpent-handling and other religious practices that pose a risk of death, genetic prognostication, suicide in old age, global justice and the duty to die. It also examines suicide, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia in both American and international contexts.

As with the earlier volume, these new essays are theoretically adroit but draw richly from historical sources, fictional techniques, and ample factual material.

Introduction: Ending Life: The Way We Do It, The Way WeCouldDo It
PART I: Dilemmas about Dying
1. Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide
2. Euthanasia: The Way We Do It, the Way They Do It
3. Going Early, Going Late: The Rationality of Decisions about Physician-Assisted Suicide in AIDS
4. Is a Physician Ever Obligated to Help a Patient Die?
5. Case Consultation: Scott Ames, A Man Giving Up on Himself
6. Robeck
PART II: Historical, Religious, and Cultural Concerns
7. Collecting the Primary Texts: Sources on the Ethics of Suicide
8. July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-Day Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (And What Could This Mean for Bioethics?)
9. High Risk Religion: Informed Consent in Faith Healing, Serpent Handling, and Refusing Medical Treatment
10. Terminal Procedure
11. The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice: What's Wrong with Suicil3³