Overview
- Applies moral theory to actual court cases
- Shows how moral rights apply to problems arising in medical practice
- Defines the content and identifies the grounds of several important human rights
- Advocates specific moral reforms of current medical law
Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library (LAPS, volume 71)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Medical Law and Moral Rights discusses live issues arising in modern medical practice. Do patients undergoing intolerable irremediable suffering have a moral right to physician-assisted suicide? Ought they to have a comparable legal right? Do the moral duties of a mother to care for and not abuse her child also apply to her fetus? Ought fetuses to be given legal rights requiring pregnant women to submit to medical treatment without their consent? Ought single women, homosexual couples or persons carrying serious genetic defects to have a legal right to procreate? Ought a physician to perform an abortion requested for some frivolous reason? Ought physicians to be permitted to refuse to provide medically futile treatment demanded by their patients? An examination of relevant court cases shows how United States law answers these questions. The author then advocates improvements in the law to make it respect our moral rights more fully. To justify his conclusions, he proposes original conceptions of the human rights to life, procreational autonomy, privacy, equitable treatment and personal security. Thus, these essays test the usefulness of the theory of rights explained and defended in An Approach to Rights and elsewhere.
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Medical Law and Moral Rights
Authors: Carl Wellman
Series Title: Law and Philosophy Library
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3752-X
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2005
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-3751-1Published: 26 October 2005
Softcover ISBN: 978-90-481-6953-5Published: 28 October 2010
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-3752-8Published: 29 December 2005
Series ISSN: 1572-4395
Series E-ISSN: 2215-0315
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 215
Topics: Philosophy, general, Ethics, Theory of Medicine/Bioethics, Law, general, Theories of Law, Philosophy of Law, Legal History