Public Bioethics Principles and Problems

Public Bioethics collects the most influential essays and articles of James F. Childress, a leading figure in the field of contemporary bioethics. These essays, including new, previously-unpublished material, cohere around the idea of 'public bioethics,' which concerns the analysis and assessment of public policies in biomedicine, health care, and public health.

The volume is divided into four sections - The first examines the principle of respect for autonomy and paternalistic policies and practices. The second explores the tension between bioethics, public policy, and religious convictions, such as the right of health care providers to conscientiously refuse to provide treatment to certain patients. The third section looks at practices and policiies related to organ transplantation; Childress places particular focus on determining death, obtaining first-person consent for deceased organ donation, fairly allocating donated organs, and related issues in the distribution of scarce resources. The final section maps the broad terrain of public ethics; Childress propoposes a triage framework for the use of resources in public health crises, addresses public health interventions that potentially infringe civil liberties, and sheds light on John Stuart Mill's misunderstood legacy on public health ethics.

Public Bioethics deftly explicates both contemporary bioethical issues and the processes involved in determining appropriate policies and publicly justifying collective recommendations, reflecting the author's vast experience serving on public bioethics committees, particularly at the national level in the United States. Providing a thorough account of the principles that govern issues within the healthcare system, this book will appeal to bioethicists, physicians, and public policy-makers.

James F. Childress is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. He was born in North Carolina, and studied at Guilford and Yale. He held the position of research chair at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown, and has been actively involved in several national committees examining bioethics and public policy. He was vice chair of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation and served on the Board of Directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, and the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, among others. He was appointed by President Clinton to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission from 1996-2001. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Hastings Center. He is the co-author (with Tom L. Beauchamp) of Principles of Bioethics, and has authored several books and numerous articles on biomedical ethics, and other topics within the field of ethics.