Personalist Bioethics : Foundations and Applications

Personalist Bioethics, the English translation of Elio Cardinal Sgreccia's Italian masterwork, advances "ontologically grounded personalism" in bioethics, that is, ethics built through reason upon the objective value and dignity of every human person. This approach goes beyond any specific religious perspective and invokes human reason, calling us to reflect on the intimate meaning of human existence and the environment in which we live. It presupposes a metaphysics that is rationally grounded in philosophy and anthropology and has a broad range of ethical applications. Sgreccia developed this philosophical approach in response to the cultural context in which bioethics arose in the United States. This internationally renowned book is valuable to professors of bioethics and their students, members of ethics committees, connoisseurs of bioethics, and experts in any related area, be it law, philosophy, or health care. These pages provide readers with a discussion of the basic contours of personalist bioethics, comparisons of personalism to other philosophical positions, and investigations of particular ethical topics ranging from genetic engineering to euthanasia.

Elio Cardinal Sgreccia was a key figure in Catholic bioethics during the last decades of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century. In addition to developing the bioethics program at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome beginning in the early 1980s, Sgreccia was the secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family (1992–1996) and the president of the Pontifical Academy for life (2005–2008).