The ethics of suffering : modern law, philosophy and medicine
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The ethics of suffering : modern law, philosophy and medicine
（Ashgate studies in applied ethics）
Ashgate, c2000
Available at 12 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [176]-188) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Philosophically, this text aims to express a simple, if forgotten, truth which is expressed in the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas: justice (be it state justice or informal one) is not possible without the one that renders it finding himself caught in proximity. The book examines various situations arising in the context of medical law and medical ethics in both the English and North American contexts. Looking closely at the suffering involved in controversial legal cases of euthanasia, withdrawal of life support from comatose patients, treating elderly patients without consent and sterilization of incompetent patients, the book engages the law with some of Emmanuel Levinas's key notions. Moreover, the work attempts to explain the general aspects of judicial policy in relation to patients and doctors. The author's purpose is to show that the inappropriate use of legal doctrine and the political instrumentalization of medicine can only occur effectively in conditions in which both the legal and medical practices are ethically disorientated.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: the premises - ethics, proximity, law
- the arguments, the theoretical context and the order of presentation of ideas. What's in a face? Law and the man without consciousness: the death of my other and the surviving "me" - non-sense and sensibility
- legal vision and the appropriation of death's absurdity
- the case of common law
- the other as "living thing" and legal closure - "freedom (from the other) or death!" Rights as compassion - law and the incompetent: Levinas' disinterested intensities and "good violence"
- the law on the consent of the incompetent
- the shame
- the guilt
- "empathy". Medicine, law and the non-sense of suffering: suffering as non-phenomenon
- in the matter of the right to procreate
- affective "sincerity"
- the exceptionalization of the doctor-patient relationship in medical law
- the scene of irresponsibility for suffering - scientific medicine. Medico-legal mysteries: legal ambivalence towards the doctor-patient relationship
- theoretical ambiguities towards the ethics of care
- shared treatment decision making
- false witness
- in the matter of "informed consent" - how the object of medico-legal interest is the patient's soul-less "being". The "naked being" - a face (non-persona) grata: the constitutive ethical perversity of modern law
- the redundant expulsion of ethical subjectivity
- ethical proximity in the ethics of alterity and the "aporia of justice"
- the Messiah is me. Neighbours: obsession with "informal justice"
- the other left in the cold and brought back to the fold
- between unwarranted optimism and despair
- "seeking ego without adversity"
- of pastors converting the being-for-the-other into "collective good"
- beyond formal-informal justice.
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