Udo Schüklenk - This Is Bioethics

This Is Philosophy: An IntroductionSteven D. Hales

This Is Philosophy of Mind: An IntroductionPete Mandik

This Is Ethics: An IntroductionJussi Suikkanen

This Is Political Philosophy: An IntroductionAlex Tuckness and Clark Wolf

This Is Business Ethics: An IntroductionTobey Scharding

This Is MetaphysicsKris McDaniel

This Is Bioethics: An IntroductionRuth F. Chadwick and Udo Schüklenk

This Is EpistemologyAdam Carter and Clayton Littlejohn

Forthcoming:

This Is Philosophy Of ReligionNeil Manson

This Is Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd editionSteven D. Hales

This Is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction, 2nd editionPete Mandik

RUTH F. CHADWICK

UDO SCHÜKLENK

This edition first published 2021 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Chadwick, Ruth F., author. | Schüklenk, Udo, author.

Title: This is bioethics : an introduction / Ruth F. Chadwick, Udo Schüklenk.

Other titles: This is philosophy (Series)

Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Series: This is philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020029285 (print) | LCCN 2020029286 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118770740 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118770795 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118770733 (epub)

Subjects: MESH: Bioethical Issues | Bioethics

Classification: LCC R724 (print) | LCC R724 (ebook) | NLM WB 60 | DDC 174.2–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029285LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029286

Cover design: Wiley

Ruth F. Chadwickis Professor Emerita, Cardiff University and Visiting Professor, University of Leeds. She co‐edits the journal Bioethics and has served on numerous bodies including the Council of the Human Genome Organisation. She is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the Hastings Center, New York, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Society of Biology and the Learned Society of Wales.

Udo Schüklenkholds the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University at Kingston, in Canada. He is a Joint Editor‐in‐Chief of the journal Bioethics . Born in Germany, his academic career has included teaching and research appointments in Australia, South Africa, and the UK.

Jeff Dean, our then Commissioning Editor at Wiley‐Blackwell, suggested to one of us in 2014 to produce a bioethics introductory text. It’s always easier to agree to do a thing, then to actually do it, and so it took a ‘mere’ six years – on and off – to write this volume for you. Marissa Koors, Jeff Dean’s successor at Wiley, and Steven D. Hales, our long‐suffering series editor for the This is Philosophy series at Wiley‐Blackwell, showed an unusual degree of patience with us, our book, and our seemingly never‐ending delays. There is a German saying along the lines that a good thing takes time. You be the judge on This is Bioethics . Last but by no means least, we owe a great deal of gratitude to Nivetha Udayakumar, this book’s Production Editor, for a job very well done.

Both of us have spent our academic careers in the field of bioethics, we jointly have been Editors of Bioethics , arguably the top philosophical bioethics journal, for more than two decades. Still, as we discovered, it’s one thing to successfully author and publish peer reviewed research content, and it’s quite another to write content specifically for introductory, and for teaching purposes. We deliberately did not review other bioethics textbooks to decide on what to include or not to include as far as the book’s content is concerned. This book reflects what we think a student of bioethics, who takes an introductory course, should – at a minimum – have read and thought about. Quite deliberately we kept the tone informal, aiming to strike a conversational tone. We also quite deliberately avoided technical jargon where that was possible. Some of the external reviewers of an earlier draft of this manuscript had mixed feelings about this. We hope it works for you!

How should you go about reading this book? For one thing, we included plenty of links to sites that we hope won’t have disappeared by the time you read this. Check them out if a particular issue catches your interest, and you want to know more. Definitely read Chapters 1– 4, in that order, the other chapters can mostly be read independently of each other, even though we have taken care to cross‐reference relevant content in other chapters where that was appropriate. We have also added guiding questions at the end of each chapter. We strongly recommend that you take a moment to reflect on these questions. Thinking about defensible answers will assist you in using the concepts and arguments you read about, and so you will gain a better understanding of them and their respective strengths and weaknesses. If you choose to do so, you would likely find yourself in a better position to defend your views on any number of current‐day contentious issues, based on sound ethical analysis.