Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus

This collection of essays, Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus, deals with the issue of the repeated failure of attempts to derive a universal set of standards in bioethics. The predicament of contemporary morality, the post-modern condition, is such that we find ourselves in the position of numerous competing moralities that not only reach conflicting judgments about particular issues, but also reflect radically divergent world-views. Consensus, therefore, is impossible to achieve.

The essays analyze and diagnose both the causes and results of the diversity of moral world-views in both philosophy and the practices in the world. Furthermore, some of the essays in this volume argue that the post-modern condition is actually the direct and inevitable result of the attempted philosophical-theological synthesis of the Western Christian Middle Ages.

The essays of this volume attempt to resolve the difficulties, both procedural and contentful, that have arisen from the failure of various attempts to arrive at a global secular bioethics by means of rational-discursive philosophy.

H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., holds degrees in both medicine and philosophy. He is professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University, professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, and a member of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. In addition to having authored over 250 articles and chapters of books, as well as having co-edited more than 25 volumes, his books include ‘The Foundations of Bioethics’ (2nd ed., 1996), which has appeared in Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, ‘Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality’, which has also appeared in Chinese, and ‘The Foundations of Christian Bioethics’. He is the editor of "The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy" as well as the founding editor of "Christian Bioethics".