Thinking with Cases: An Introduction to Bioethics

Thinking with Cases is an open, case-based introduction to bioethics designed for undergraduate and pre-professional courses—particularly in nursing and the health sciences, though accessible to any reader coming to the field for the first time. An opening chapter develops the conceptual toolkit such courses require: the four principles of biomedical ethics (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice), the major moral theories that stand behind them, the history of informed consent and human-subjects protection from Nuremberg through the Belmont Report, and the practical skill of reconstructing an argument to locate the single premise in dispute. Twelve true case studies then put those tools to work, ranging across the field's classic and contemporary controversies: Dax Cowart's demand to refuse life-saving burn treatment; the Tuskegee and Guatemala syphilis studies; the He Jiankui CRISPR twins; conscientious refusal and provision in post-Dobbs medicine; racial bias in a widely used medical algorithm; the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Skrmetti; and the first transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into a living human. Each case presents opposing positions in their strongest form, reconstructs the central arguments in standard form, and closes on an open question rather than a verdict—inviting students to reach and defend their own judgments. The book is released as an open educational resource under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license, free to read, adapt, and teach from.