Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making

This book is the most comprehensive treatment available of one of the most urgent—and yet in some respects most neglected—problems in bioethics: decisionmaking for incompetents. Part I develops a general theory for making treatment and care decisions for patients who are not competent to decide for themselves. It provides an in-depth analysis of competence, articulates and defends a coherent set of principles to specify suitable surrogate decisionmakers and to guide their choices, examines ...