Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Ethical Judgments: Re-Writing Medical Law by Edited by Dr Stephen W. Smith Edited by John Coggon Edited by Clark Hobson Edited by Dr Richard Huxtable Edited by Dr Sheelagh McGuinness Edited by Dr Jose Miola Edited by Dr Mary Neal
This edited collection is designed to explore the ethical nature of judicial decision-making particularly relating to cases in the health/medical sphere where judges are often called upon to issue rulings on questions containing an explicit ethical component. However judges do not receive any specific training in ethical decision-making and often disown any place for ethics in their decision-making. Consequently decisions made by judges do not present consistent or robust ethical theory even when cases appear to rely on moral claims. The project explores this dichotomy by imagining a world in which decisions by judges have to be ethically as well as legally valid. Nine specific cases are reinterpreted in light of that requirement by leading academics in the fields of medical law and bioethics. Two judgments are written in each case allowing for different views to be presented. Two commentaries - one ethical and one legal - then explore the ramifications of the ethical judgments and provide an opportunity to explore the two judgments from additional ethical and legal perspectives. These four different approaches to each judgment allow for a rich and varied critique of the decisions and ethical theories and issues at play in each case.