Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Bioethics (Third Edition)

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The table of contents looked good, so I ordered this book in the hope it could be used as an inexpensive introductory text for freshman courses on applied ethics. Big disappointment: The prose is trite and awkward, and the discussion barely gets into any of the interesting philosophical arguments that I want to discuss with my students.

As an example of the abysmal quality of the discussion, consider the author's criticism of consequentialism: "The major problem of this theory is that the theory itself provides no standard by which one would measure one outcome against another. That is, while being sensitive to the circumstances, consequentialism has no basis for evaluating one outcome against another" (p. 22).

If you're looking for a textbook on bioethics, try Beauchamp and Childress's Principles or the relevant sections of a decent applied ethics textbook, such as J. Olen and V. Barry, Applying Ethics, or B. MacKinnon, Ethics. Another good choice is J. Teichman, Social Ethics. As to anthologies of readings, try Beauchamp and Walters's Contemporary Issues or Kuhse and Singer's Bioethics.