The Limits of Principle: Deciding Who Lives and What Dies

by Tom Koch and Tom Koch

As a society, we are faced with a series of dilemmas--abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, organ transplant allocation, support or non-support of the elderly and fragile--that seem to offer no resolution. How do we choose between the needy and the ailing? Choices must be made in both the world of law and the realm of medical ethics. What we need is what we do not have--a perspective in the larger sense of the word--a view that makes apparent...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0275964078
• ISBN13: 9780275964078
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Praeger
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

superb book for people facing tough medical ethics issues

This is a superb book for nurses, doctors, social workers and family members wrestling with difficult medical ethical questions. Who should go first in the lineup to receive a heart transplant: a young child or a father of three? Should a person with Down's Syndrome be equal to others? How about a convicted criminal? Or someone age 75? Tom Koch explores these difficult questions and then offers a framework for health care workers and others to help work through their own answers. He examines what it means to be human and the sanctity of human life -- and how a better historical understanding of these concepts and a reasoned methodology can help guide us as we make difficult life and death choices today. Koch does an excellent job of weaving the practical and human with the technical and philosophical. This is a must for those who are forced to make the choice of who lives, and who dies.