Medical Ethics

The issues of medical ethics, from moral quandaries of euthanasia and the morality of killing to political dilemmas like fair healthcare distribution, are rarely out of today's media. This area of ethics covers a wide range of issues, from mental health to reproductive medicine, as well as including management issues such as resource allocation, and has proven to hold enduring interest for the general public as well as the medical practitioner. This Very Short Introduction provides an invaluable tool with which to think about the ethical values that lie at the heart of medicine.

This new edition explores the ethical reasoning we can use to approach medical ethics, introducing the most important 'tools' of ethical reasoning, and discussing how argument, thought experiments, and intuition can be combined in the consideration of medical ethics. Considering its practical application, Tony Hope and Michael Dunn explore how medical ethics supports health professionals through the growing use of ethics expertise in clinical settings. They also contemplate the increasingly important place of medical ethics in the wider social context, particularly in this age of globalization, not only in healthcare practice, but also policy, discussions in the media, pressure group and activism settings, and in legal judgments.

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Tony Hope recently retired as Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He developed the teaching in medical ethics at the University of Oxford and founded the Ethox Centre, a world-class centre in medical ethics research within the medical faculty at Oxford. He is also Emeritus Fellow at St Cross College, Oxford. In addition to over 200 research papers he has co-authored a number of books including a general textbook of medicine, a self-help psychology book, and several books in medical ethics and law.

Michael Dunn is a lecturer at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, where he also acts as the Director of Undergraduate Medical Ethics and Law Education within the Clinical School. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, an Editorial Board member for Ethics and Social Welfare, and a member of both research ethics committees and clinical ethics committees across the UK. Michael has published two co-edited books in addition to being the author of over 50 peer-reviewed papers and chapters in the fields of bioethics, medical, social welfare and family law, and health/social services research.