Greg Pence

This new edition retains in-depth discussion of famous cases, while providing updated, detailed analysis of the issues those cases raise. Each chapter also focuses on a key question that could be debated in class. Unique to this text is a single, authorial voice integrating description of the cases and their issues with historical overviews. The text is the only one that follows cases over decades to tell readers what did and, often, what did not, happen. Written by a professor who helped found bioethics and who has published in the field for 40 years, the text gives students a sense of mastery over this exciting, complex field. After they have read the book, I hope that students will feel that they have learned something important and that time studying the material has been well spent. New research was added to each chapter, and a new list of topics to debate was included on the inside cover of the book. Every chapter has been rewritten, tightened, and augmented; issues have been clarified.

Is it virtuous for someone to try to live to 100? Casting aside questions of intergenerational justice and internal obligations in families, what about the basic desire itself? Discussions of longevity and aging in bioethics are skewed to controversial end‐of‐life decisions, largely avoiding questions of how to age well before such decisions arise. Respected writers such as Atul Gawande, Daniel Callahan, and Ezekiel Emanuel champion accepting a natural life span and not trying to live beyond it. The Stoic Seneca says a desire to live to 100 is foolish because, however long people live, they waste most of their lives, so if they lived a thousand years, they would still waste most of it. Against Seneca and Emanuel, we argue that a functional, not a chronological, view of aging should guide us and that for some seniors, hoping to be centenarians may be neither foolish nor misguided. Using Cicero, we argue that the pleasures of seniors are not necessarily inferior to those of youth and may even surpass them. Finally, we agree with Emanuel that the “symptom burden” of some lives makes living to 100 unpalatable and with Seneca that, given life’s vicissitudes, we should not plan on living to 100, but heeding his wisdom, try to make the most of the time given to us.

Food makes philosophers of us all. Death does the same... but death comes only once... and choices about food come many times each day. In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human history. Will genetically modified food feed the poor or destroy the environment? Is it a threat to our health? Is the assumed healthfulness of organic food a myth or a reality? The answers to these and other questions are engagingly pursued in this substantive collection, the first of its kind to address the broad range of philosophical, sociological, political, scientific, and technological issues surrounding the ethics of food.