Breakthroughs in biomedicine often lead to new life-giving treatments but may also raise troubling, even life-and-death, quandaries.


Society's Choices discusses ways for people to handle today's bioethics issues in the context of America's unique history and culture—and from the perspectives of various interest groups.


The book explores how Americans have grappled with specific aspects of bioethics through commission deliberations, programs by organizations, and other mechanisms and identifies criteria for evaluating the outcomes of these efforts. The committee offers recommendations on the role of government and professional societies, the function of commissions and institutional review boards, and bioethics in health professional education and research.


The volume includes a series of 12 superb background papers on public moral discourse, mechanisms for handling social and ethical dilemmas, and other specific areas of controversy by well-known experts Ronald Bayer, Martin Benjamin, Dan W. Brock, Baruch A. Brody, H. Alta Charo, Lawrence Gostin, Bradford H. Gray, Kathi E. Hanna, Elizabeth Heitman, Thomas Nagel, Steven Shapin, and Charles M. Swezey.

Table of Contents


Front Matter
Contents
Executive Summary
Part I
1. Introduction
2. The Social Context of Bioethical Problem Solving
3. Systematic Approaches to Bioethics
4. The Spectrum of Societal Responses
5. Criteria for Success
6. Conclusions and Recommendations
Part II: Commissioned Papers
Moral Epistemology
Public Moral Discourse
The Value of Consensus
Bioethics Commissions: What Can We Learn from Past Successes and Failures?
Limiting Life-Prolonging Medical Treatment: A Comparative Analysis of the President's Commission and the New York State Task Force
The Formulation of Health Policy by the Three Branches of Government
The Role of Religious Participation and Religious Belief in Biomedical Decision Making
Trust, Honesty, and the Authority of Science
Institutional Ethics Committees: Local Perspectives on Ethical Issues in Medicine
The Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Program of the National Center for Human Genome Research: A Missed Opportunity?
AIDS, Ethics, and Activism: Institutional Encounters in the Epidemic's First Decade
La Penible Valse Hesitation: Fetal Tissue Research Review and the Use of Bioethics Commissions in France and the United States
Appendix: Past Commissions and Advisory Boards
Index