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Communitarian Bioethics

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Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics
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Abstract

Communitarian bioethics aims to balance concerns for individual rights and interests that are central to liberal and libertarian bioethics with the common good that is the primary concern of authoritarian approaches to bioethics. Communitarian bioethics is founded on four principles, which are here illustrated through comparative case studies of varying global practices relating to bioethical dilemmas. These principles are preference for moral rather than financial appeals to convert attitudes into action on the individual level, the use of informal rather formal social controls to engender voluntary compliance with public policy on the community level, the promotion of moral dialogues rather than purely rational deliberation as means of discovering shared values to guide social change, and the balance of the common good with individual rights.

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Further Readings

  • Emanuel, E. J. (2014). Reinventing health care: How the affordable care act will improve our terribly complex, blatantly unjust, outrageously expensive, grossly inefficient, error prone system. Philadelphia: Public Affairs.

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  • Responsive Community Platform. (1991). http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcplatform.html . Accessed 2 Jun 2014.

  • Sandel, M. (2009). Justice: What’s the right thing to do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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  • Selznick, P. (2002). The communitarian persuasion. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Correspondence to Amitai Etzioni .

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Etzioni, A. (2014). Communitarian Bioethics. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_111-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_111-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05544-2

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