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Our response to Sara Fry's paper focuses on the difficulty of understanding her insistence on the fundamental character of caring in a theory of nursing ethics. We discuss a number of problems her text throws in the way of making sense of this idea, and outline our own proposal for how caring's role may be reasonably understood: not as an alternative object of value, competing with autonomy or patient good, but rather as an alternative way of responding toward that which is of value.

Surrogate motherhood—at least if carefully structured to protect the interests of the women involved—seems defensible along standard liberal lines which place great stress on free agreements as moral bedrocks. But feminist theories have tended to be suspicious about the importance assigned to this notion by mainstream ethics, and in this paper, we develop implications of those suspicions for surrogacy. We argue that the practice is inconsistent with duties parents owe to children and that it compromises the freedom of surrogates to perform their share of those duties. Standard liberal perspectives tend to be insensitive to such considerations; we propose a view which takes more seriously the moral importance of the causal relationship between parents and children, and which therefore illuminates rather than obscures the stake that women and children have in surrogacy.

Explores issue of how we should think about postmodern bioethics and suggests that many of the questions that bioethicists pose as problematic in postmodernity are, in fact, reactions to Wittgensteinian thought-- yet bioethicists as a rule are unfamiliar

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction: Treating Bioethics -- 2 Religion, Superstition, and Medicine -- 3 Patient Multiplicity, Medical Rituals, and Good Dying: Some Wittgensteinian Observations -- 4 ''Unlike Calculating Rules''? Clinical Judgment, Formalized Decision Making, andWittgenstein -- 5 Wittgenstein's Startling Claim: Consciousness and the Persistent Vegetative State -- 6 Attitudes, Souls, and Persons: Children with Severe Neurological Impairment -- 7 Why Wittgenstein's Philosophy Should Not Prevent Us from Taking Animals Seriously -- 8 Injustice and Animals -- 9 Bioethics,Wisdom, and Expertise -- 10 Wittgensteinian Lessons on Moral Particularism -- 11 Wittgenstein: Personality, Philosophy, Ethics -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when empha