To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body

CHOICE 1998 Outstanding Academic Book

Argues that standard forms of bioethics support the technological utopianism of medicine. Puts forth an alternative agenda arguing that the task of bioethics is to explore the moral significance of the body as it is expressed in the discourse and practice of moral and religious traditions.

This book argues that standard forms of bioethics support the technological utopian quest of medicine: to eliminate suffering and bring the body under the rule of our choices and desires. This quest raises urgent ethical questions rarely addressed in the dominant approaches to bioethics. McKenny puts forth an alternative agenda, arguing that the task of bioethics is to explore the moral significance of the body as it is expressed in the discourse and practice of moral and religious traditions.

"Combines acute analysis of significant contemporary thinkers' work on bioethics while putting those analyses to use to develop a quite extraordinary constructive thesis." -- Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke University

"An outstanding work. The author's interpretive, critical, and constructive scholarship is engaging and provocative." -- Courtney S. Campbell, Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University

"To my knowledge, the best exploration of bioethics from the perspective of religious studies." -- H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Professor, Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University Department of Philosophy