Biomedical Ethics Reviews * 1984

This is the second volume of Biomedical Ethics Reviews, a series of texts designed to review and update the literature on issues of central importance in bioethics today. Five topics are dis cussed in the present volume. Section I, Public Policy andRe search with Human Subjects, reviews the history of the moral issues involved in the history of research with human subjects, and confronts most of the major legal and moral problems involving research on human subjects. Questions addressed in this section range from those concerning informed and proxy consent to those dealing with the adequacy of monitoring hu man research via institutional review boards (IRBs). Section II deals with a second broad topic in bioethics, The Right to Health Care in a Democratic Society. Here the concern not merely that of determining whether there is a right to is health care, but also, if there is such a right, how it ought best be understood and implemented. To answer questions such as these, we learn that one must distinguish legal from moral rights, assess the merits of various theories of rights, clarify the relationship between rights and duties, and attempt to deter mine a just method for the distribution of health care. Advances in medical technology often pose new legal and moral problems for legislators and health care practitioners.