30 Sep, 09 | by Iain Brassington
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009; 538+xv pp
£40, pb
A couple of months ago, Cambridge UP tried to post a cheeky advert for this book in the comments to one of the posts on this site. I sabotaged the link, but offered to restore it in return for a freebie, which CUP asked me to review. I’ve restored the link to the book’s webpage; but is it worth following? more…
5 Aug, 09 | by Søren Holm
I would have liked to be able to say that if you only read one book this summer you should read “Handbook of Econonomics and Ethics” and if I was only writing about the contents I would surely say that.
This is one of the most interesting books I have come across for years and its 75 chapters covers most of the important intersections between economics and ethics, primarily seen from the point of view of economics. For someone like me with a background in ethics it is interesting to see how orthodox economics struggles with concepts like “altruism” or how non-consequentialist theories of ethics are all, in their own way completely incompatible with orthodox economic thinking. Another set of very interesting chapters are the chapters discussing the main figures in economics and ethics.
This is a book that repays careful study and a ration of 2-4 chapters per day is probably about right.
Unfortunately it is also a very expensive book. One hundred and sixty British pounds (160 GBP) for a book of 624 pages is rather extortionate, even though it is a nice hardback and you can get 10% off if you order directly from the publisher. So my advice will have to be modified. If you only read one book this summer AND your library has a copy of “Handbook of Ethics and Economics” then borrow it ASAP and make that the book you read.
Link to the publishers web-site http://www.e-elgar.com/Bookentry_Main.lasso?id=4252
1 May, 09 | by BMJ Group
Edward Elgar Publishing, UK and USA, 187 + 7 pp. Price: £55 (hb)
Reviewed by Loane Skene, Melbourne Law School
more…
13 Mar, 09 | by BMJ Group
Elizabeth Bryan, Singing the Life - The Story of a Family in the Shadow of Cancer. London: Vermilion, 2007, ISBN 9780091917159, GBP12.99 hb
Book review by Richard Ashcroft
email: r.ashcroft@qmul.ac.uk
13 Mar, 09 | by BMJ Group
Choices in Palliative Care: Issues in Health Care Delivery
Blank, Arthur E.; O’Mahony, Sean; Selwyn, A. (Eds.) 2007, XVIII, 238 p. Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-387-70874-4 €54.95
Book Review by Simon Woods
29 Jan, 09 | by Iain Brassington
Here’s a handful of moral statements that, I guess, many people would take to be trivially true: We ought to save lives where possible; Saving more lives is better than saving fewer; It is a good thing to save lives as efficiently as possible; Saving lives is more important than improving tolerable lives. Nothing too controversial there, I don’t expect. (OK - there may be rough edges, but this is a blog, not a peer-reviewed paper, dammit…)
I mention these because I’ve just been reading Rose George’s The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste. It’s as much of an eye-opener as it as a nose-closer. Take this, for example, from the introduction:
2.6 billion people don’t have sanitation [...] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. The do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways. If they are women, they get up at 4 a.m. to be able to do their business under cover of darkness for reasons of modesty, risking rape and snakebites Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement, because it is in the bushes outside the village, or in their city yards, left by children outside the back door. it is tramped back in on their feet, carried on fingers onto clothes, food and drinking water
The disease toll of this is stunning. A gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. [...] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene and unsafe water - usually unsafe because it has faecal particles in it - cause one in ten of the world’s illnesses. Children suffer most. Diarrhoea [...] kills a child every fifteen seconds. [...] Public health professionals talk about water-related diseases, but that is a euphemism for the truth. These are shit-related diseases.
Now go back to the moral claims with which I started this post. If you think that they’re at least in the vicinity of correct, then it seems that there would be some hard questions to answer about our health priorities. more…
17 Sep, 08 | by Søren Holm
It is rare to be able to review a book long before it is published. But my copy bears the publication year of 2009, even though I bought it in July 2008.
Be that as it may, seven is the number of perfection so it is relevant to ask whether the 6th edition of Tom Beauchamp & James Childress (B&C) “Principles of Biomedical Ethics” is moving towards or away from perfection. This question is even more pressing since we are here dealing with one of the classics in bioethics and undoubtedly the bioethics book that has sold most copies worldwide (with the possible exceptions of the Bible and the Quran, books that play a major role in theological bioethics).
Let me first put your mind at rest. B&C are still believers in the four principles and their account of these principles have not changed much.
What is new in the 6th edition? As usual all chapters have been re-written and there is a new chapter on “Moral status” and a new major section on global justice issues. The authors have furthermore modified their account of the link between the famous four principles and common morality, probably to respond to criticism that the common morality used and the principles derived were too American.
The new moral status chapter illustrates the books strengths and weaknesses in equal measure. It gives a short and reasonably accurate account of a number of theories about what it is that gives an entity moral status, but claims in fairly typical B&C style that none of these give the correct answer and that we cannot sort out which of them is correct or reach a more consistent theoretical account. This is very similar to their treatment of theories of justice and in both cases the authors steadfastly refuse to nail their flag(s) to any mast(s). But this leaves the reader dissatisfied and the specific conclusions that B&C never the less reach dangling perilously in the air.
Over the years many of us have argued that what really needed improvement was the account of moral justification and the account of specification and balancing of principles. Very little has happened regarding specification and balancing and the account of justification which is presented in this edition is in my view even less plausible than the ones presented in previous editions.
So, perfection has not been reached in the 6th edition, but then the number six does have quite different connotations than the number seven.
Let me finally try to answer the question “Who should buy the new edition?” I think there are three groups for whom it might be rational to buy the book:
For most people who have the 3th, 4th or 5th edition there is probably not enough new material to warrant the purchase.
Søren Holm
Web-link to publisher
Analysis and discussion of developments in the medical ethics field. Visit site
