London: Routledge, 2011; 263 + xiii pp

Guest Post by Yonghui Ma

For those who have a particular interest in cross-cultural bioethics, Nie’s book, Medical Ethics in China, is an absolute feast.  Luckily, I am one of them and it more than satisfied my appetite for the subject.  It brings us much closer to a fascinating but complex topic through a multi-disciplinary approach to address ethical issues and a trans-cultural interpretation far beyond the Chinese context.

 This book covers many key topics in bioethics (some are quite sensitive to Chinese) in the Chinese socio-cultural context – topics such as attitudes towards the foetuse, sexuality, medical truth-telling by medical professionals, informed consent, professional medical ethics, health promotion, human rights, and theories on personhood.  Nie examines these issues from a wide range of perspectives, from the traditional Chinese doctor’s to the modern feminist’s.  What distinguishes this book from other works is Nie’s perspective, which lies outside the mainstream of contemporary Chinese bioethics. They are based on his academic experiences in and outsideChinaand, more importantly, his in-depth understanding of the relationship between culture and ethics.  His own angle is rather unique as, in Robert Veatch’s words in the foreword of the book, he can “seriously claim to be at home as an insider in both Chinese and Western thought” rather than most others who are “rooted in one culture and communicate to others as outsiders.”  This not only makes Nie investigate medical ethics from a Chinese-Western comparative perspective but has helped him to avoid stereotypes and develop a theory of “trans-cultural bioethics”.  Overall, the book is a triumph as an exploration of transcultural medical ethics and sophisticated philosophical argument.

The book is divided into four parts and in the first two Nie identifies and proposes approaches to challenge some popular myths and stereotypes on Chinese medical ethics and culture, and Chinese-Western cultural differences. more…

Note: There’s a couple of errors of interpretation in this post.  I’m not going to re-write it, because I wrote what I wrote, and it’s in the public domain, and I don’t think it’s all that dignified to pretend that one never makes blunders; it’s better to acknowledge them, take the hit, and move on.  But please do have a look at Rebecca Skloot’s response in the comments, and at my answer to her. – IB, 8.ii.12

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Since I read it in the autumn, there’s been a few things nagging at the back of my mind about Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  A few things that don’t seem quite right somehow; and prompted by Pär Segerdahl’s post on The Ethics Blog, I’m tempted to see if I can put them into words.

For those who haven’t read the book, it deals with the story of how it was that an apparently immortal cell culture line, HeLa, was obtained.  The cells were taken from a cervical tumour that went on to kill one Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who lived near Baltimore.  During the course of her treatment, a sample of cancerous cells was taken for testing, as was a sample of healthy cells.  (“HeLa” gets its name from the convention of naming culture lines by contracting the name of the person from whom they’re derived.)  These biopsies were apparently unconsented.  But what’s important about them is that, whereas most cell lines at the time died fairly quickly, the cancer sample kept on dividing and dividing.  The HeLa strain proved to be important in all kinds of areas of research.  Doubtless, some of this research has made some people very wealthy.  Yet Henrietta’s descendents have seen none of this profit.  Indeed, many of them are not much more enfranchised today than a black woman would have been 60 years ago; they weren’t even aware that there was such a thing as HeLa.

So what’s the problem?

One of them is definitely stylistic.  I have problems with something that Skloot thinks is a virtue, which is that “dialogue appears in native dialects” (xi).  I don’t share the notion that it’s in any way dishonest to polish out people’s linguistic infelicities, just as one would polish out all the ums and ahs and placeholders in everyday speech.  And I can’t shake the feeling that the professionals who get speaking parts in the book have had their speech tidied; though it’s probably true that the higher your social status, the less susceptible you are to malapropisms, I don’t believe that the educated people directly quoted in the book were always grammatically perfect and never used colloquialisms.  But this is a minor quibble.

What’s more nagging – and potentially more interesting from an ethicist’s point of view – is a question about why any of this is particularly important. more…

London: Allen Lane, 2011; 276 + xii pp

If some people are to be believed – not least certain former JME editors – saving lives is a duty that doesn’t stop with children drowning in ponds: it extends to there being a moral obligation to pursue scientific research so that death can be actively avoided for as long a time as possible, and by as many people as possible.  Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey both, in their different ways, have devoted significant chunks of their careers to not dying, too.  John Gray’s subtitle, “Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death”, hints that he’s going to offer us an investigation into the putative-and-possibly-real strangeness of this project.

He doesn’t. more…

Woodstock: Princeton UP, 2010; 244 + xii pp

This has to be one of the most French books I’ve ever read.  Pascal Bruckner has written a whole book taking aim at happiness – a kind of obtuseness that is, on the face of it, the preserve of a particular kind of Gallic writer – and “the duty to be happy”.  It’s an interesting project, since – if it turns out to have any substance to it – it represents a possible counter to Millian aspirations about an hedonic calculus.

So what is Bruckner’s claim?   more…

Washington DC: Georgetown UP, 2010; 372+x pp

“Here’s the story; it starts at the end,” says the dead narrator at the beginning of Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World.  It’s a bit of a cliche to say that the dead have stories to tell, but they do have stories to be told about them.  Among them are stories about what happens to them bioogically, and what happens to them legally.  It’s some of these stories that Norman Cantor seeks to tell in After We Die.

It’s worth stressing that it’s some of these stories that’s recounted.  On one level, that may be a problem with the book: it combines a bit of anthropology, a bit of legal history, a bit of social history, a bit of pathology, a bit of all manner of other things.  To some extent, this means that it’s neither fish nor fowl.  But if Cantor wanted to write, say, a law book proper, I assume that he’d have done so – as a legal professor, he’s more than qualified; and if he wanted to write a book on pathology, he’d have known that he, a lawyer, ought to let someone else do it.  So I think that the book’s best viewed as a set of essais, rather as a monograph that sets out to defend a particular hypothesis. more…

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…

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

Edward Elgar Publishing, UK and USA, 187 + 7 pp. Price: £55 (hb)
Reviewed by Loane Skene, Melbourne Law School
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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

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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

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