Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine examines parental and professional responsibilities toward patients who are young and ill. Drawing on the liberal philosophy of John Rawls, I define basic norms that should shape family and professional responsibility in pediatric care. I then deepen our understanding of those norms by connecting them to important cases in American law or to moral cases that materialized in my hospital fieldwork, which included six months of daily medical rounds in a pediatric intensive care unit. The book takes up questions of paternalism, proxy consent, and a (thin) theory of the good in the treatment of children. It sharpens these ideas in relation to cases that involve a number of religious, ethical, and cultural tensions. Those cases examine parental decisions to prolong treatment, refuse treatment, or demand unconventional treatment for their children. I also address institutional obligations in a pediatric hospital and ethical issues in pediatric research. The book concludes by identifying a basis for liberal social criticism of the family.

Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning is about the use of cases in moral inquiry and public philosophy. The book begins by identifying several methodological challenges to casuistry, such as its potential for legalism, conservatism, extrinsicism, and the like. These challenges set the agenda for the ensuing chapters. I then turn to several “cases of conscience” in public life: war, liberalism and its discontents, gender ideology in sexual ethics, fetal tissue transplantation, violent pornography, and methodological debates in the study of religion. I address these disputes and, along the way, show the need for practical reasoning to coordinate diverse interdisciplinary tools – including those from law, cultural studies, literature, and political theory – to enrich the moral imagination. I sharpen these ideas by contrasting casuistry with applied ethics and narrative ethics. The result is to re-conceive casuistry as a poetics of practical reasoning, in which both vision and judgment are essential features of moral inquiry.

Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition addresses aspects of cultural pluralism as they are played out in debates between pacifists and just-war theorists. To launch that discussion, I stipulate the priority of nonviolence to violence as a point of convergence between pacifism and just-war doctrine. One aim is to provide a forum to refine pacifist and nonpacifist ideas by orchestrating a dialectical exchange over a set of important ethical topics: the presumption against harm, the relation of justice and order, the ethics of civil disobedience, the problem of self-righteousness in moral discourse about war, nuclear deterrence, and the need for practical reasoning about the morality of war. I pay critical attention to thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as well as to modern thinkers like H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Douglass, the Berrigans, William O'Brien, Michael Walzer, and James Childress.

War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics is an anthology of primary sources that includes arguments by Christian ethicists and statements by ecclesial groups on the ethics of war. Included are writings by Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr, the Calhoun Commission, John Ford, G.E.M. Anscombe, Karl Barth, Paul Ramsey, the and U.S. Catholic bishops, and Jim Wallis, among others. These materials provide ethical commentary on the Manchurian Crisis, World War II, the Vietnam War, nuclear deterrence, political realism, and the Gulf War.