Albert R. Jonsen

Paul Ramsey

William F. May

As physicians are faced with new and wonderful options for saving lives, transplanting organs, and furthering research, they also must wrestle with new and troubling choices--who should receive scarce and vital treatment, how we determine when life ends, what limits should be placed on care for the dying, and more. This book by renowned theologian Paul Ramsey, first published thirty years ago, anticipated these moral and ethical issues and addressed them with cogency and power, providing the intellectual foundations for the field of bioethics. This second edition of Ramsey's classic work includes a new foreword by Margaret Farley and essays by Albert R. Jonsen and William F. May that help to locate and interpret Ramsey historically and intellectually. Praise for the earlier edition: "For its strong, well-argued positions, its documentation and references, and its assistance in bringing confused strands of thought into focus, The Patient as Person willbe used for many years."--Michael Novak, New York Times "Amid the plethora of books on medical ethics that merely skim the surface, this one solidly examines most aspects of the question--from the definition of death to organ transplantation."--Christianity Today "Notable for its clear moral reasoning and its thorough examination of all morally relevant issues."--Journal of Religion " Ramsey's] study is a masterpiece of thoroughness in evaluating conflicting moral claims which become explicit in crucial medical situations."--Dolores Dooley-Clarke, Philosophical Studies

Explorations in Medical Ethics

The Patient as Person

"an excellent contribution to medical ethics" -- Ethics "wide-ranging, compassionate, and insightful" -- Publishers Weekly "a sensitive and provocative approach to the study of ethical decision making" -- Choice "[This] sensitive and moving book... compels and merits the grateful, concentrated, and critical attention of all who know, who live with, and who seek to help those human beings to whom terrible things have happened." -- BioLaw "The human contact embodied in The Patient's Ordeal puts the book light-years ahead of others in the field of medical ethics.... Once the dust from the academic reviews has settled, this book will be one of the few in the field of medical ethics that is thought of as a seminal work, one that has broken new ground. A remarkable, well-written, significant work, it cannot be commended too highly." -- Second Opinion

The Patient's Ordeal

Social critic May asks professionals--whom he calls the leaders of culture in contemporary Western society--to abandon their self-interested pursuits and contribute to the common good.

The Public Obligation of the Professional

Beleaguered Rulers

Since the end of World War II, runaway fears of Soviet imperialism, global terrorism, and anarchy have tended to drive American foreign policy toward an imperial agenda. At the same time, uncurbed appetites have wasted the environment and driven the country’s market economy into the ditch. How can we best sustain our identity as a people and resist the distortions of our current anxieties and appetites? Ethicist William F. May draws on America’s religious and political history and examines two concepts at play in the founding of the country—contractual and covenantal. He contends that the biblical idea of a covenant offers a more promising way than the language of contract, grounded in self-interest alone, to contain our runaway anxieties and appetites. A covenantal sensibility affirms, “We the people (not simply, We the individuals, or We the interest groups) of the United States.” It presupposes a history of mutual giving and receiving and of bearing with one another that undergirds all the traffic in buying and selling, arguing and negotiating, that obtain in the rough terrain of politics. May closes with an account of the covenantal agenda ahead, and concludes with the vexing issue of immigrants and undocumented workers that has singularly tested the covenant of this immigrant nation.

William F. May

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