Ending Life Ethics and the Way We Die [Hardcover]

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 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, and 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.

Praise forThe Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life

Battin is not only a good philosopher, she is a practical philosopher. She adopts a problem-oriented approach to bioethics, selecting a specific issue and always attempting to provide circumspect and reasoned solutions. --Journal of Medical Ethics

She is surely one of the most erudite and articulate scholars pondering questions of euthanasia, suicide, and the withdrawal of medical treatment in the Western world. -- Arthur L. Caplan,Ethics

She does what analytically trained philosophers do best, namely, provide illuminating analyses and clarifications of difficult concepts and advance logically rigorous arguments in support of her analyses and positions. --Medical Humanities Review

Margaret Pabst Battin is one of the most intelligent lS#