Community As Healing

Pragmatist Ethics in Medical Encounters

By (author) Micah D. Hester

Hardback - £81.00

Publication date:

03 July 2001

Length of book:

120 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780742512184

The brief history of 20th century bioethics has been dominated by discussions of principles and appeals to autonomy that both divorce theory from practice and champion a notion of the individual as prior to and isolated from society. Pragmatism, on the other hand, has long sought to reconstruct ethical thought with the belief that distinctions between theory and practice, individual and society are not a priori starting points but purposeful developments of inquiry. Using insights from classic pragmatism, the author proposes reconstructive accounts of physician-patient relationships resulting in an emphasis on aiding the process of meaningful/significant living for all individuals involved in medical encounters.
William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, among others, provide discussions of human relationships which accentuate the situatedness of problems and solutions and stress the need for building shared experience in order to develop both self and community. With an insistence on a recognition of a functional concept of the self (or "self as social product"), the author's pragmatic position illuminates the integration of self with the community and leads to a new practice in the medical encounter, based on an attitude of community as healing.
Micah Hester storms onto the scene with one of the most important books to be published in the thirty-year history of bioethics. It is enough that Hester levels the most devastating critique of the superficial 'principles' of bioethics ever to be published. But he has also given us a better way of solving the problems that perplex families, clinicians, and scholars, a pragmatic theory of bioethics that draws deeply on John Dewey and William James. I cannot imagine a better book to revivify and inspire both bioethics and American philosophy at the turn of the century, and I have yet to read a better book on bioethics for a broad academic audience...