Defining personhood : : toward the ethics of quality in clinical care / / Sarah Bishop Merrill.

• Superior document: Value inquiry book series
• VerfasserIn: Merrill, Sarah Bishop,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam, Netherlands ;, Atlanta, Georgia : : Editions Rodopi B.V.,, [1998]; ©1998
• Year of Publication: 1998
• Language: English
• Series: Value inquiry book series.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Many debates in biomedical ethics today involve inconsistencies in defining the key term, person. Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, beg the question about what constitutes personhood. This book explores the arguments concerning definitions of personhood in the history of modern philosophy, and then constructs a superior model, defined in terms of distinctive features (a theoretical concept borrowed from linguistics). This model is shown to have distinct advantages over the necessary and sufficient condition models of personhood launched by essentialists. Philosophers historically have been correct about what some of the pivotal distinctive features of personhood are, e.q. , rationality, communications and self-consciousness, but they have been wrong about the methods of recognizing and asserting personhood, and about the relative importance of feelings. In clinical care, complaints often surface that care is not personal. This book aims to improve care through providing a method of attending to patients as people. Charts in the Appendices show that where physicians attended to personal features important to their patients, sometimes the patients rated the care even higher than the physician did. The book will be useful to health-care providers whose goals include improving quality of care, listening to patients, and preventing malpractice.

Table of Contents

Editorial Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- ONE Approaches to Personhood -- 1 Defining Person -- 2 Arguments and Methods -- 3 Problems, Puzzles, and Pitfalls in Uses of Person -- 4 The Moral and the Metaphysical Mingled -- 5 Locke on Person -- 6 Rousseau -- 7 Kant -- 8 Historical Summary -- 8 Defining Personhood in Biomedical Ethics -- 10 -- How Is Person Defined? From Vagueness to Clarity in Normative Terminology -- 11 Personhood and Necessary and Sufficient Conditions -- 12 Inventory of the Biomedical Ethics Literature -- TWO Distinctive Features of Person and Quality of Clinical Care -- 1 Introduction: Methodology and Hypotheses -- 2 Definition by Dialogue -- 3 The Questionnaires and the Interviewing Process -- 4 The Adjectival Approach to Terms Related to Personhood -- 5 Subject Response -- 6 The Interviewing Process -- 7 Three Hypotheses and the Fourth: Minimalism and Maximalism -- 8 Consensus on the Variables -- 8 Significance -- 10 -- The Features -- 11 Features Not Included -- THREE A Theoretical Framework for Interpreting the Data -- 1 Distinctive Features: A Conceptual Model from Linguistics -- 2 Findings -- 3 Implications for Quality of Care -- 4 Quality of Care Defined -- FOUR Implications for Clinical Practice and Public Policy -- 1 Person as an Essentially Contested Concept -- 2 Peirce, Gallie, Signs, and Consensus -- 3 Why Is This Theory Practical? 4 Political Abuses of Conditions of Personhood -- 5 Personhood in Medical Education -- 6 Last Thoughts about Sufficient Conditions -- 7 The Final Defense -- 8 Implications for Public Policy -- 8 Implications for Moral Theory -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Appendix I Interview Scripts and Questionnaires -- Appendix II Quality Assessment Charts -- About the Author -- Index.