10% off all books and free delivery over £40
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics

View All Editions

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

Autonomy, Rationality, and Contemporary Bioethics Synopsis

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Personal autonomy is often lauded as a key value in contemporary Western bioethics. Though the claim that there is an important relationship between autonomy and rationality is often treated as uncontroversial in this sphere, there is also considerable disagreement about how we should cash out the relationship. In particular, it is unclear whether a rationalist view of autonomy can be compatible with legal judgments that enshrine a patient's right to refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether the reasons underpinning the choice are known and rational, or indeed whether they even exist. Jonathan Pugh brings recent philosophical work on the nature of rationality to bear on the question of how we should understand personal autonomy in contemporary bioethics. In doing so, he develops a new framework for thinking about the concept of autonomy, one that is grounded in an understanding of the different roles that rational beliefs and rational desires have to play in it. Pugh's account allows for a deeper understanding of d the relationship between our freedom to act and our capacity to decide autonomously. His rationalist perspective is contrasted with other prominent accounts of autonomy in bioethics, and the revisionary implications it has for practical questions in biomedicine are also outlined.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780198858584
Publication date: 1st April 2020
Author: Jonathan (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philosophy, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philoso Pugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 298 pages
Series: Oxford Philosophical Monographs
Genres: Ethics and moral philosophy
Bioethics
Methods, theory and philosophy of law