Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die Book

Margaret Pabst Battin has established a reputation as one of the top philosophers working in bioethics today. This work is a sequel to Battin's 1994 volume The Least Worst Death. The last ten years have seen fast-moving developments in the bioethical arena of end-of-life issues, from the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands, to the trial and conviction of Jack Kevorkian, to recent debates about NuTech methods of assistance in dying, suicide bombing, and extra-long life. Battin presents an entirely new collection of work, covering a wide range of topics but again centering on issues of withdrawing or withholding treatment, suicide, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia in both international and American contexts. As with the earlier volume, these new essays are theoretical but draw heavily on factual material; new in this volume are attention to suicide in old age as well as terminal illness, and the use of fictional techniques to illuminate particularly sensitive issues.