“Public health is directly shaped by war, conflict, and capitalism, yet exploring the connections between these processes remains neglected in scholarship and policymaking arenas.” This chapter five lede by social work professors Scott Harding and Kathryn Libal could serve as the epigraph to the entire volume. War and Health is edited by two prominent researchers from Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project, which seeks a meaningful aggregation of the actual cost of wars, especially those of the new millennium. (...) The volume presents significant findings from nineteen researchers at various institutions, including culturally competent anthropologists. The result is a deep exegesis of syndemics—or synergistic epidemics—that endanger the health of all combatants and civilians. (shrink)

In this book, the British Academy presents an in-depth exploration of the metaphysical philosophy of F.H. Bradley. It offers a comprehensive understanding of this complex and compelling subject. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, (...) as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The 1994 edition is here enlarged with new sections on the goals and allocation of medicine and human cloning. There is no index.

Book reviewed in this article: Suffering and the Beneficent Community: Beyond Libertarianism. By Erich H. Loewy. The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. By Eric J. Cassell.

Medical screening is justified on the strength of the assumption that the earlier disease is detected, the better it is for the patient. On examination, however, the assumption turns out to be severely flawed, and inadequate anyway, since it is not only the patient with whom we should be concerned, but healthy people as well. Instead of making assumptions about the ill, we should prove a test's overall benefit to the individual taking it before we recommend it.

This essay analyzes two types of patient‐experience data to broaden and deepen understanding of trust in health care. Analysis of patients’ open‐ended comments shows a close connection between patients’ feelings of trust and their intent to recommend providers and provider organizations—a global measure to evaluate patients’ perceptions of care experiences. Patients’ comments also reveal the bidirectional building of trust between the patient and the caregiver. Trust gets built when patients perceive their caregivers to trust their knowledge of their bodies as (...) well as when caregivers demonstrate caring behaviors that earn the patients’ trust. Patients’ ratings of a closed‐ended survey item on “confidence in provider” create the greatest differentiation for the global measure of patient experience—whether patients did or did not recommend a practice or provider. The essay also discusses related findings on pre‐visit friction and the use of humor by the caregiver to expand understanding of trust. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is that "wonder is the foundation of the whole of philosophy.... It is not only the beginning but also the end; it guides and accompanies thought. It is not only the first but also the last word." This is because "wonder is man’s attitude in the face of the mystery of things." That is, "in wonder, things are no longer what they were and it can thus be said that they lose their identity.... Only when (...) we decide to think no further do things acquire an apparent identity." Thought and wonder live only in the distance between the trivial identity of things and their infinitely deferred divine identity. Wonder, and therefore philosophy, are threatened on many sides: by a complacency which takes things as simply thus and so, by general education which equips one to converse about many things but gives knowledge of nothing, by haste which rushes by things without noticing them, by systematization and certitude impatient with identity deferred. The study of philosophy as an academic discipline is no guarantee of wonder and can even be its enemy. The author’s intent is to excite wonder, to provide an incitement to philosophy. The ten chapters of the book orchestrate his theme from different starting points and by different paths. The starting points are as different as the symbolism of the noonday sun, Plato’s myths, poetic response to a rose in bloom, and the nature of gift and festivity. The paths are lyrical, etymological, phenomenological. The cumulative effects are not so much clear and distinct ideas as paradoxes. The result is a provocative and often obscure book, which makes considerable demands upon the reader. As such, it hardly seems like the sort of book one would hand to an undergraduate who wanted to know what philosophy is about. Rather, it might better be thought of as a book for people who think they know what philosophy is about, a book which could serve to make one wonder if he does know what philosophy and many other things are and are not.—H. F. (shrink)

Prompted by a 2019 essay by Jonathan Moreno in the Hastings Center Report, the Center's board of directors undertook a careful examination of the name of its preeiminent award, the Henry Knowles Beecher Award, which has been given to twenty‐nine individuals who have made lifetime contributions to bioethics. citing new research that revealed that Beecher's earlier experimentation on drugs had involved nonconsenting adults, Moreno urged the Center to reevaluate honoring Beecher through this award. After reviewing the relevant published evidence and (...) holding extensive discussions, the board decided to rename the award. We also took the opportunity to reframe the award to emphasize quality of scholarship and impact on thinking, practice, and policy rather than lifetime achievement. The new name—the Founders’ Award of The Hastings Center—reflects our desire to honor not only the Center's cofounders, Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin, but also others who helped found the field of bioethics. With great pride, the Center has announced that Patricia King of the Georgetown University Law Center is the 2021 recipient of the Founders’ Award. A distinguished civil rights lawyer, King was instrumental in ensuring justice as one of the three principles of The Belmont Report. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 42-50, January/February 2022.

Book reviewed in this article: For the Patient's Good: The Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care. By Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma.

Book reviewed in this article: The Moral Foundations of Professional Ethics. By Alan H. Goldman.

Bioethicists’ attraction to principlism is rooted in a Western view of how matters that affect the public ought to be deliberated and decided: their resolution ought to be so structured and constrained that it can be understood and verified even by those at a remove from the circumstances of the problem. That view of deliberation, itself fostered by the Western view of government, has encouraged principlism to spread from its source in human subjects research into other areas of bioethics discourse.

Should the assessment of decision‐making capacity (DMC) be risk sensitive, that is, should the threshold for DMC vary with risk? The debate over this question is now nearly five decades old. To many, the idea that DMC assessments should be risk sensitive is intuitive and commonsense. To others, the idea is paternalistic or incoherent, or both; they argue that the riskiness of a given decision should increase the epistemic scrutiny in the evaluation of DMC, not increase the threshold for DMC. (...) We respond to the critics’ main concerns by providing a comprehensive account of how risk‐sensitive DMC is coherent, avoids paternalism, and best fulfills the epistemic goal of DMC evaluations. (shrink)

To the Editor: In the November–December 2010 issue, the Seattle Growth Attenuation and Ethics Working Group (“Navigating Growth Attenuation in Children with Profound Disabilities”) analyzed the arguments for and against growth attenuation in children with permanent, profound intellectual disabilities and identified conditions under which its use may be ethically acceptable. The working group’s conclusion is based on a particular construction of the issue that is not always justified. It focuses on the possibility that growth attenuation will increase children’s involvement in (...) family social and recreational activities. The critique of the biomedical model of disability, however, highlights the potential gap between .. (shrink)

Optimistic predictions that genetic and genomic testing will provide health benefits have been tempered by the concern that individuals who receive their results may experience negative psychosocial outcomes. This potential ethical and clinical concern has prompted extensive conversations between policy‐makers, health researchers, ethicists, and the general public. Fortunately, the psychosocial consequences of such testing are subject to empirical investigation, and over the past quarter century, research that clarifies some of the types, likelihood, and severity of potential harms from learning the (...) results of the testing has accumulated. I aim to provide an overview of the findings of this research by looking at selected systematic reviews. This will convey the gist of the literature’s quality and coverage, reveal gaps in existing knowledge, and highlight promising areas for future scholarship. (shrink)