Bioethical Responsibilities in Twenty-First Century Crises

Bioethical Responsibilities in Twenty-First Century Crises argues for an expanded role and scope for the field of bioethics to tackle the pressing challenges confronting health and healthcare now and on the horizon. The diverse chapters in this collection, edited by Elizabeth Lanphier and Larry R. Churchill, address the need for new bioethical methods, attention to overlooked difference, responding to climate change, and charting new identities for and within bioethics. Taken as a whole, this volume shows how bioethics, with its core commitment to justice, needs to update its tools and attention to realize justice in the twenty-first century. This includes better understanding of and responding to the ways that structural inequities and intersectional oppression impact not only individual medical care and healthcare access, health policy, or research priorities and participation, but also individual and community contributions to and vulnerability from climate change, and the impact social and political choices have on health and well-being.

Elizabeth Lanphier is assistant professor in the Ethics Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, USA.
Larry R. Churchill is Professor of Medical Ethics Emeritus, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, USA