Books by Amy Gutmann
Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die: Bioethics and the Transformation of Health Care in America
by Amy Gutmann, Jonathan D. Moreno
An incisive examination of bioethics and American healthcare, and their profound affects on American culture over the last sixty years, from two eminent scholars. An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with America’s wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having among the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation.
Gutmann and Moreno―“incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers” (Arthur Caplan)―demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants, and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges.
With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease, and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? What’s fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations?
A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price.
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Identity in Democracy
by Amy Gutmann
Written by one of America's leading political thinkers, this is a book about the good, the bad, and the ugly of identity politics.Amy Gutmann rises above the raging polemics that often characterize discussions of identity groups and offers a fair-minded assessment of the role they play in democracies. She addresses fundamental questions of timeless urgency while keeping in focus their relevance to contemporary debates: Do some identity groups undermine the greater democratic good and thus their own legitimacy in a democratic society? Even if so, how is a democracy to fairly distinguish between groups such as the KKK on the one hand and the NAACP on the other? Should democracies exempt members of some minorities from certain legitimate or widely accepted rules, such as Canada's allowing Sikh members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to wear turbans instead of Stetsons? Do voluntary groups like the Boy Scouts have a right to discriminate on grounds of sexual preference, gender, or race?
Identity-group politics, Gutmann shows, is not aberrant but inescapable in democracies because identity groups represent who people are, not only what they want--and who people are shapes what they demand from democratic politics. Rather than trying to abolish identity politics, Gutmann calls upon us to distinguish between those demands of identity groups that aid and those that impede justice. Her book does justice to identity groups, while recognizing that they cannot be counted upon to do likewise to others.
Clear, engaging, and forcefully argued, Amy Gutmann's Identity in Democracy provides the fractious world of multicultural and identity-group scholarship with a unifying work that will sustain it for years to come.
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Democracy and Disagreement
by Amy Gutmann, Dennis F. Thompson
The din and deadlock of public life in America―where insults are traded, slogans proclaimed, and self-serving deals made and unmade―reveal the deep disagreement that pervades our democracy. The disagreement is not only political but also moral, as citizens and their representatives increasingly take extreme and intransigent positions. A better kind of public discussion is needed, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson provide an eloquent argument for “deliberative democracy” today. They develop a principled framework for opponents to come together on moral and political issues.
Gutmann and Thompson show how a deliberative democracy can address some of our most difficult controversies―from abortion and affirmative action to health care and welfare―and can allow diverse groups separated by class, race, religion, and gender to reason together. Their work goes beyond that of most political theorists and social scientists by exploring both the principles for reasonable argument and their application to actual cases. Not only do the authors suggest how deliberative democracy can work, they also show why improving our collective capacity for moral argument is better than referring all disagreements to procedural politics or judicial institutions. Democracy and Disagreement presents a compelling approach to how we might resolve some of our most trying moral disagreements and live with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all of us can respect.
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Freedom of Association
by Amy Gutmann
Americans are joiners. They are members of churches, fraternal and sororal orders, sports leagues, community centers, parent-teacher associations, professional associations, residential associations, literary societies, national and international charities, and service organizations of seemingly all sorts. Social scientists are engaged in a lively argument about whether decreasing proportions of Americans over the past several decades have been joining secondary associations, but no one disputes that freedom of association remains a fundamental personal and political value in the United States. "Nothing," Alexis de Tocqueville argued, "deserves more attention." Yet the value and limits of free association in the United States have not received the attention they deserve. Why is freedom of association valuable for the lives of individuals? What does it contribute to the life of a liberal democracy? This volume explores the individual and civic values of associational freedom in a liberal democracy, as well as the moral and constitutional limits of claims to associational freedom.
Beginning with an introductory essay on freedom of association by Amy Gutmann, the first part of this timely volume includes essays on individual rights of association by George Kateb, Michael Walzer, Kent Greenawalt, and Nancy Rosenblum, and the second part includes essays on civic values of association by Will Kymlicka, Yael Tamir, Daniel A. Bell, Sam Fleischacker, Alan Ryan, and Stuart White.
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The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It - Updated Edition
by Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson
Why compromise is essential for effective government and why it is missing in politics today
To govern in a democracy, political leaders have to compromise. When they do not, the result is political paralysis―dramatically demonstrated by the gridlock in Congress in recent years. In The Spirit of Compromise, eminent political thinkers Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson show why compromise is so important, what stands in the way of achieving it, and how citizens can make defensible compromises more likely. They urge politicians to focus less on campaigning and more on governing. In a new preface, the authors reflect on the state of compromise in Congress since the book's initial publication.
Calling for greater cooperation in contemporary politics, The Spirit of Compromise will interest everyone who cares about making government work better for the good of all.
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Color Conscious
by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amy Gutmann
In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most vexing problem.
Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of color may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life.
Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being color blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be color-conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions, corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy.
Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many-faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every color principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race.
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