Social Values

There are a number of ethical, social, and personal implications generated by the potential development and use of technologies that may extend human longevity by intervening in aging. Despite speculations about likely public attitudes toward life extension, to date there have been few attempts to empirically examine the public's perspective of these issues. Using open-ended survey questions via telephone interviews, this study explored the attitudes of 605 members of the Australian public toward the implications of life extension.

Convinced that Catholic organizations might have special strengths for succeeding in price-competitive markets, the Catholic Health Association, with the assistance of a national membership advisory committee and The Lewin Group, Fairfax, VA, studied six healthcare organizations that are successfully meeting the challenges of difficult environments. Based on more than 100 interviews and assessments of the environments in which these progressive mission-driven organizations operate, the researchers identified strategies that can assist other faith-based health organizations.

When challenged to demonstrate their contributions to the community, Catholic and other not-for-profit hospitals have traditionally reported the sum of their charity care, free programs, and unprofitable services. But critics of tax-exempt healthcare now say this is insufficient and ask such hospitals for descriptions of the outcomes of their contributions. There are seven basic measures for gauging outcomes: participation, mind states, behavior, health status, sickness care utilization, sickness care expenditures, and community value.

The principle of double effect is widely used to permit the administration of narcotics and sedatives with the intent to palliate dying patients, even though the administration of these drugs may cause hastening of death. In recent medical literature, this principle's validity has been severely criticized, causing health care providers to fear providing good palliative care. Most of the criticisms levelled at the principle of double effect arise from misconceptions about its purpose and origins.

Religious discussion of human organs and tissues has concentrated largely on donation for therapeutic purposes. The retrieval and use of human tissue samples in diagnostic, research, and education contexts have, by contrast, received very little direct theological attention. Initially undertaken at the behest of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, this essay seeks to explore the theological and religious questions embedded in nontherapeutic use of human tissue.

Disagreement over the legitimacy of direct sterilization continues within Catholic moral debate, with painful and at times confusing ramifications for Catholic healthcare systems. This paper argues that the medical profession should be construed as a key moral authority in this debate, on two grounds. First, the recent revival of neo-Aristotelianism in moral philosophy as applied to medical ethics has brought out the inherently moral dimensions of the history and current practice of medicine.

This article provides an account of how AndrÈ Hellegers, founder and first Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, laid medicine open to bioethics. Helleger's approach to bioethics, as to morality generally and also to medicine and biomedical science, involved taking the "wider view" -- a value-filled vision that integrated and gave meaning to what otherwise was disparate, precarious, and conflicting.

As the twentieth century closes, marked by triumphal strides in medical advances, the American society has yet to ensure that each person has access to affordable health care. To correct this injustice, this article calls on the nation's political and corporate leaders, providers, and faith-based groups to join all Americans in a new national conversation on systemic health care reform.

Government and market forces have fundamentally transformed the religious healthcare sector. Religious healthcare organizations are struggling to define their identities and determine what it is that makes them different and what implications the differences have for the delivery of social services and for public life.