Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics

August 22, 2007

JAMA — Book Review: “Bonnie Steinbock, The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics,” by Mary Anderlik Majumder, JD, PhD. August 2007, 298(8): 927-928.

The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics is an ambitious effort to bring together established and emerging leaders in the field of bioethics and some of the most controversial issues in contemporary biomedicine. Each of the 30 essays is meant to reflect the particular “take” of its author, and so it is perhaps a mark of success that this reader was sometimes nodding in agreement, sometimes challenged and forced to reevaluate a belief, and sometimes frustrated owing to a lack of sympathy with an author’s position or mode of argument.

The volume is organized into 8 parts, uniting essays that are sometimes very different in focus and tone. Part I, “Theoretical and Methodological Issues,” illustrates this diversity. It includes a general essay on methods by James Childress, a professor of religious studies and coauthor of the highly influential Principles of Biomedical Ethics; an entertaining discussion of the method of reflective equilibrium by the philosopher John Arras; a dissection of the concept of autonomy by Bruce Jennings, one of the few bioethics scholars trained in political science; and a reinvention and defense of the rule of double effect by Daniel Sulmasy, a philosopher-friar-physician. Jeannette Kennett, an Australian philosopher in the “up-and-comer” category, contributes an essay that examines notions of autonomous agency, reciprocity, and responsibility in the context of mental illness. Other parts combine general reflections on a policy or clinical domain with essays on narrower topics. (For the rest of the review . . .)