This review essay examines H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s The Foundations of Bioethics, a contemporary nonfeminist text in mainstream biomedical ethics. It focuses upon a central concept, Engelhardt's idea of the moral community and argues that the most serious problem in the book is its failure to take account of the political and social structures of moral communities, structures which deeply affect issues in biomedical ethics.

[This book] develops an account of rationality and justice that is tradition specific.-http://undpress.nd.edu.

Speech and phenomena.--Form and meaning.--Differance.

This 80-page, spiral bound manual designed by the American College of Surgeons Division of Education as a companion publication to Ethical Issues in Clinical Surgery for Instructors and Practicing Surgeons. This case-based manual helps residents examine the ethical underpinnings of clinical practice and address the ethics issues and questions they face everyday while caring for patients. Each chapter includes realistic surgery-based cases, questions for discussion, bioethics bottom line sections, learning objectives, suggested readings, a glossary, and additional resources. Special margins designed (...) for note-taking add to the utility of the manual. Topics addressed include a framework for considering ethical issues in clinical surgery, competition of interests, truth telling and the surgeon-patient relationship, confidentiality, professional obligations of surgeons, end-of-life issues, and substitute decision making. (shrink)

Over the past quarter of a century the work of few philosophers has exerted such powerful influence, or been the centre of such vigorous debate, as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. And although MacIntyre has not often formally addressed educational issues, the thrust of his writing has seemed to bear more clearly on education than that of most philosophers. His assault on central tenets of the Enlightenment in After Virtue already contained an implicit critique of public education in the modern era. (...) That critique was extended and made more explicit in later writings such as his Richard Peters Lecture ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ (1987), the concluding chapters of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), the final chapter of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and the essay ‘Aquinas’s Critique of Education: Against his Age, Against Ours’ (1998). With less polemical intensity he furnished some further arguments on education and upbringing in his book Dependent Rational Animals (1999a). And his most recent comments on the subject are presented in the dialogue published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (MacIntyre and Dunne, 2002). Moreover, even in his most critical writing MacIntyre has also developed an affirmative vision that has seemed to offer resources for a fruitful reconceptualisation of education: his steady concern with human flourishing, strongly linked to his own distinctive conceptions of virtue and of practice, as well as to his ideas of the biographical unity of a life and the encompassing power of traditions, flows easily into discourse about the aims of education and the kind of undertaking engaged in by teachers. (shrink)