From Physicians' Professional Ethos Towards Medical Ethics and Bioethics

This book assembles essays by thinkers who were at the center of the German post World War II development of ethical thought in medicine. It records their strategies for overcoming initial resistance among physicians and philosophers and (in the East) politicians. This work traces their different approaches, such as socialist versus liberal bioethics; illustrates their attempt to introduce a culture of dialogue in medicine; and examines their moral ambiguities inherent to the institutionalization of bioethics and in law. Furthermore, the essays in this work pay special attention to the problem of ethics expertise in the context of a pluralism, which the intellectual mainstream of the country seeks to reduce to "varieties of post-traditionalism". Finally, this book addresses the problem of "patient autonomy", and highlights the difficulty of harmonizing commitment to professional integrity with the project of enhancing physician's responsiveness to suffering patients. As these essays illustrate, the development of bioethics in Germany does not follow a linear line of progressiveness, but rather retains a sense of the traditional ethos of the guild. An ethos, however, that is challenged by moral pluralism in such a way that, even today, still requires adequate solutions. A must read for all academics interested in the origins and the development of bioethics.
About the Author: Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes studied Philosophy, German literature, and communication science in Bonn and Tübingen (Germany), received an MA on the interpretation of Hegel by G. Lukacz, and spent a year as teaching assistant at the Philosophy Department of the Pennsylvania State University. After her return to Bonn, she wrote her dissertation on a Hegelian reconstruction of David Hume's epistemology and was offered a position as Assistant Professor by Penn State. After two years she decided to return back to Germany in order to raise a family (2 children). Serving as Director of European Programs of the International Studies in Philosophy and Medicine, she has been organizing as well as presenting at international conferences. As editor of the Journal Christian Bioethics - non-ecumenical studies in medical morality, and member of the editorial board of both the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and the book series Aus orthodoxer Sicht of the Hagia Sophia Edition publishing house (Germany), she continued her work in bioethics, adding a focus on both political philosophy and Orthodox Christian theology. Her essays, written either in German or (mostly) English, have been translated into Portuguese, Greek, Romanian, Chinese, Russian. In 2016, she received the Engelhardt Award of the Bioethics Center at the Ohio State University.