Book Review: A Primer for Health Care Ethics: Essays for a Pluralistic Society
This book is a clearly written, smoothly edited volume that is practical in the best sense of the term. The reader of this book will find its authors using critical reasoning at the service of answering or at least articulating the most common and urgent medical moral questions. This collection of essays, some new to the second edition and some repeated from the first, is eminently useful in generating class discussions and in giving direction to thought aimed at resolving ethical dilemmas in health care. Drawing upon his years of expertise in teaching at a medical school, Kevin O'Rourke has collected essays of nearly perfect length for the typical medical student to discuss and learn from. In my own experience of teaching medical students, this kind of book works best for their busy schedules and "naturally" pragmatic dispositions. Such a text can get the student right to the heart of the matter so as to leave the skilled teacher plenty of time to unfold the nuances of "real life" in the ensuing discussion. The book is arranged in ten sections with eighty-one individual chapters of two or three pages in length. Typically, the authors of the essays layout the question to be analyzed and then move to a discussion. Moral principles are usually presented first, and then a look at the current status of the question is objectively reviewed. The authors do not, however, simply play the role of observer. In the conclusion of each essay there is usually a judgment made by the author regarding the moral question at hand. In the case of cloning, for example, the author notes, "Cloning of human persons should be banned not just because it is currently unsafe or because it is an extreme form of artificial reproduction, however, but because it denies the dignity of the human person as well as the dignity of human procreation" (160). I have found that such forthright judgments spark better classroom conversation than the more neutral social science "description only" method, which is utilized in some medical ethics textbooks. Characteristic of the O 'Rourke method, he mutes that which is explicitly theological in his