Bioethics and Society

Most dental ethics textbooks teach students to apply a familiar set of principles - autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice - to the cases they meet at the chairside. Bioethics and Society does that work thoroughly, but it also asks where the moral commitments of the healing professions actually come from, and what happens to dental ethics when set in conversation with the great moral traditions.

Grounded in the Judeo-Christian biblical moral tradition and placed in genuine dialogue with Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Māori, and secular humanist thought, the book engages real dilemmas: informed consent, the dentist-patient relationship in the digital age, the structural injustice of oral health disparities, the commercial pressures that distort clinical judgment, the care of vulnerable patients, the ethics of research and emerging technology, and the formation of the dentist as a moral agent.

Each chapter offers learning objectives, chairside case studies, discussion questions, and a Wisdom Tradition Reflection. Written in a graduate-level voice with full scholarly apparatus, it is for the student who wants to become not only a competent dentist but a good one.