Methods in Medical Ethics

An essential overview of the methods of bioethics scholarship and practice―updated, expanded, and revised

The pioneering first edition of Methods in Medical Ethics was the first systematic examination of how the methods of a wide variety of disciplines can inform the analysis and understanding of issues in medical ethics. This new edition has been updated to correspond with bioethics today, covering a broader range of disciplinary perspectives and methods, not only for bioethics research but also for bioethics practice.

Bioethicists and editors Sugarman and Sulmasy have solicited chapter contributions from outstanding scholars around the globe representing a range of major disciplines that contribute to bioethics. These chapters describe important conceptual and empirical methods (e.g., qualitative and quantitative survey techniques, experiments in real-world settings, and digital ethics) used in the field. A new section on practical ethics includes chapters covering clinical ethics, research ethics, public health ethics, and public bioethics. The book emphasizes that what counts as "good" work in bioethics is determined in large part by the proper application of methods to the issues at hand. As such, it will be invaluable for students, established scholars, practitioners, and readers of the bioethics literature.

Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA, is Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Bioethics and Medicine at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Daniel P. Sulmasy, MD, PhD, is director and a research scholar at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. He is the inaugural André Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Department of Philosophy and Department of Medicine at Georgetown. He also holds a faculty appointment at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics.