This book is a passionate critique of the shallowness of choice rhetoric used to camouflage critical personal and public policy issues in contemporary debates in American medicine. Our public discourse on life and death, from health care to medical research, and from risky behavior to assisted suicide, is dominated by the market model of consumerism augmented by appeals to individual freedom. In fact, however, in most cases there is no real choice left for individuals to make; the important choices have been made by others, ...
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This book is a passionate critique of the shallowness of choice rhetoric used to camouflage critical personal and public policy issues in contemporary debates in American medicine. Our public discourse on life and death, from health care to medical research, and from risky behavior to assisted suicide, is dominated by the market model of consumerism augmented by appeals to individual freedom. In fact, however, in most cases there is no real choice left for individuals to make; the important choices have been made by others, and the illusion of choice fosters complacency. Knee-jerk libertarianism leads to a superficial consumer culture and life choices valued only by their monetary value. Some Choice uses the cases of cloning, drive-through deliveries, emergency medicine, genetic privacy, human experimentation, tobacco control, and physician-assisted suicide, among others, to suggest ways in which we can break through our vapid and superficial public discourse on life and death issues and begin to engage in a public dialogue that enriches our lives and society rather than cheapens them. George Annas is one of the most widely recognized names in current bioethics debates. His goal in this new book is to help open a national and international dialogue that sees the search for universal human rights as valuable, and international cooperation to define, protect, and promote them as central to life.
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