Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : ending life : the way we do it, the way we could do it -- pt. I. Dilemmas about dying. 1. Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide -- 2. Euthanasia : the way we do it, the way they do it -- 3. Going early, going late : the rationality of decisions about physician-assisted suicide in AIDS -- 4. Is a physician ever obligated to help a patient die? -- 5. Case consultation : Scott Ames, a man giving up on himself -- 6. Robeck -- pt. II. Historical, religious, and cultural concerns. 7. Collecting the primary texts : sources on the ethics of suicide -- 8. July 4, 1826 : explaining the same-day deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (and what could this mean for bioethics?) -- 9. High risk religion : informed consent in faith healing, serpent handling, and refusing medical treatment -- 10. Terminal procedure -- 11. The ethics of self-sacrifice : what's wrong with suicide bombing? -- pt. III. Dilemmas about dying in a global future. 12. Genetic information and knowing when you will die -- 13. Extra long life : ethical aspects of increased life span -- 14. Global life expectancies and international justice : a reemergence of the duty to die? -- 15. New life in the assisted-death debate : scheduled drugs versus NuTech -- 16. Empirical research in bioethics : the method of "oppositional collaboration" -- 17. Safe, legal, rare? : physician-assisted suicide and cultural change in the future.

This work is a sequel to the author's 1994 volume The Least Worst Death. The last ten years have seen fast-moving developments in end-of-life issues, from the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands to furor over proposed restrictions of scheduled drugs used for causing death, and the development of "NuTech" methods of assistance in dying. This new collection covers a remarkably wide range of end-of-life topics, including suicide prevention, AIDS, suicide bombing, serpent-handling and other religious practices that pose a risk of death, genetic prognostication, suicide in old age, global justice and the "duty to die, " and suicide, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia, in both American and international contexts. As with the earlier volume, these new essays are theoretically adroit but draw richly from historical sources, fictional techniques, and factual material.