In his latest book, renowned ethicist James F. Childress uses various metaphors and analogies to highlight the role of imagination in practical reasoning. Childress shows how principles, metaphors, and analogies illuminate moral problems and issues in science, medicine, and health care. The issues he considers include screening and testing for HIV infection, informed consent to and refusal of life-sustaining treatment, allocating scarce health care resources, providing access to and controlling the costs of health care, and obtaining organs and tissues for transplantation.
James F. Childress is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia, where he also co-directs the Virginia Health Policy Center. He is the author of over a hundred articles, many of them in biomedical ethics; his several books include Principles of Biomedical Ethics (with Tom L. Beauchamp), Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care, and Priorities in Biomedical Ethics.