Personal Identity as a Principle of Biomedical Ethics

Cham: Springer Verlag (2017)
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Abstract

This book brings together the debate concerning personal identity and central topics in biomedical ethics. Based on a metaphysical account of personal identity in the sense of persistence and conditions for human beings, conceptions for beginning of life, and death are developed. Based on a biographical account of personality, normative questions concerning autonomy, euthanasia, living wills and medical paternalism are dealt with. By these means the book shows that “personal identity” has different meanings which have to be distinguished so that human persistence and personality can be used to deal with central questions in biomedical ethics.

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Chapters

Personality and Autonomy

In the first chapter, I differentiated four questions hidden behind the label “personal identity”, including the distinction between the question of persistence and the specific way in which persons know about their own existence over time. This knowledge specific to persons will now also be discuss... see more

Dying Autonomously

There is, as Tom L. Beauchamp observes, no longer-lasting or stronger proscription in medicine than that which says that one must not kill patients. The trend towards the principle of respect for autonomy and medical-technological developments have, however, led increasingly to this ban coming under... see more

The Beginning of Life

The question of when a human life begins is usually posed in ethical contexts. Whoever wants to know if – and when – abortion is ethically permissible links the question of the beginning of life with genuine ethical problems: the question of the ethical status of the human individual in her first st... see more

Extended Autonomy

Modern ethical consciousness tends even in the medical field towards an ever increasing recognition of personal autonomy as its central ethical value. This is reflected above all through medical actions which can be supported by the patient’s autonomy being considered ethically less problematical th... see more

Introduction

If one were to look for the specific property of human beings, the following definition would be a promising candidate: human beings differ from other living creatures through their endeavor to lead a personal life. The aspiration to lead one’s own life and go one’s own way, to give one’s actions a ... see more

The Interlacing of Persistence and Personality

If one dissolves the assumed uniform phenomenon of the identity of human persons over time into the persistence of the human organism and the biographical or narrative ‘identity’, a series of interrelated questions arises. For one thing, these concern the interrelation of observer and participant pe... see more

Medical Paternalism

The previous two chapters were primarily concerned with justifying the demands of persons for autonomy as being ethically respectable in the interplay of personal autonomy and biographical identity. Now the question is whether arguments for a justification of paternalistic medical actions can be dev... see more

Human Persistence

Both the various ways of applying the concept of person and various epistemological-methodological approaches can be found in the context of the issue which has been discussed in an intense philosophical debate ever since Locke added a chapter about the identity of persons in the second edition of h... see more

Death

In Germany, during the run-up to the passing of the transplantation law in the early 1990s and in the context of actual discussions of ethical problems of transplantation medicine in the last years, a fierce dispute was conducted over so-called “brain death”. Johannes Hoff and Jürgen in der Schmitte... see more

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Author's Profile

Michael Quante
University of Münster

Citations of this work

Personal Identity and Ethics.David Shoemaker - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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