A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity

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More About This Textbook

Overview

Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and novelists such as Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, A Philosophical Disease brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life.
Carl Elliott moves beyond the standard menu of bioethical issues to explore the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of Deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics; how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular social institutions.
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Editorial Reviews

Jon Turney
An absorbing look at the effort to help doctors answer all those questions modern technology poses...Draw[s] on the best kinds of storytelling to illuminate bioethical decision making. He uses [Walker] Percy and other writers such as Kurt Vonnegut to make the point that the big, old questions about the good life and how to live it lie behind the immediate issues of bioethics...A refreshing alternative to routine bioethics discussions.
&151;New Scientist
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780415919395
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • Publication date: 11/28/1998
  • Series: Reflective Bioethics Series
  • Edition description: ANN
  • Pages: 256
  • Product dimensions: 5.70 (w) x 8.80 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Carl Elliott is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics. He is co-editor with John Lantos of The Last Physician and editor of Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers, both forthcoming.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements    xi
Introduction    xv
  
Notes of a Philosophical Scut Monkey: The Bureaucracy of Medical Ethics       1
You Are What You Are Afflicted By: Pathology, Authenticity and Identity     25
Lost at the Mall; or, The Use of Prozac in a Time of Normal Nihilism     49
Puppet-Masters and Personality Disorders: Psychopathology, Determinism and Responsibility     75
Nothing Matters: Depression and Competence in Clinical Research     91
What's Wrong with Living Heart Transplantation?   103
The Point of the Story: Narrative, Meaning and Final Justification   121
A General Anitheory of Bioethics   141
Notes   165
Index   185
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